SCENE 20
Painting in the Fourth Dimension

‘The day that people seriously turn their attention to my work, they will see that my painting is like an iceberg where only a tenth of its volume is visible.’

—Salvador Dali, 1967

Gretel had once commented of Picasso, ‘I know he was channelling spirit. But he wasn’t very spiritually clear and I don’t think of him too much. I think he was terrific but the only thing I have in common with him is that surety when I paint.’ Salvador Dali was the only painter Gretel felt she might be compared with.

She continued to work away at her Marquess of Bath painting, using vivid, psychedelic colours. Then in mid 1996, on the weekend of her fifty-first birthday, she had an epiphany and began painting over the entire portrait. ‘I covered it in purple blurs,’ she would later admit. Her focus intensified and she began painting day and night. Dieter and Ziggy were at Florida House at the time, worried she might be going mad.

Gretel’s friends have often discussed exactly what might have triggered the switch to what she has come to refer as ‘4D painting’. One friend, Marque Coban, recalls Gretel taking acid that weekend; not simply a drop infused onto a cardboard tab, but four drops ingested in liquid form—a far stronger dose than most humans would ever ingest.

In the years ahead, what particularly horrified every one of her old friends and artistic admirers was Gretel’s obsessive painting over, not just the Marquess painting but much of her earlier work. Give that she seldom parted with her portraits, this put almost her entire oeuvre at risk of obliteration.

One friend recalls visiting Gretel in the Kirk. She had just painted over much of her Poppy King portrait. ‘I was just horrified. I was in tears because that was such an amazing painting.’ Lilith Rocha also watched Gretel in action: ‘She used to … lay out all these splendid colours on a palette and she’d … mush them all together so they were all grey and looked like a melted elephant … She was ruining a lot of splendid colours and expensive paints that were so joyful [it] was just kind of distressing. She wasn’t making any sense. Everyone was thinking the same thought-bubble without saying it. “Has she finally lost her mind?”’

Rachel St James watched her friend’s obsession grow, and she too became worried. ‘I think there was a frustration and an anger that she was trying to rub out—a hurt—that came out by painting over every [work].’

For Gretel, painting had always been part performance art, part escapism. She was happiest painting for an audience—whether friends, journalists or photographers. Now, she said, she was not erasing her paintings but in a way enlarging them. She was painting holograms in oils over works to create a ‘virtual reality’. Doing it was ‘like being plugged into a current’. She spoke of her painting arm being guided ‘with a force beyond my conscious volition’. Her new/old works became so thick with paint that many were almost sculptures. This new approach, Gretel said, would ‘revolutionise art’.

Listening to Gretel explain 4D painting gave some of her audience a headache. ‘The paint is following the path of the light ray, round the surfaces of my subjects … and as substantial paint follows the path of insubstantial light rays over a dimensional surface, a hologrammatic representation of the subject is occurring by extra-dimensional channelled means to which I am a willing servant …’

Lilith Rocha recalls Gretel ‘could see amazing things in [the new work and insisted] this was the painting of the future. We were all very dubious. She was so excited.’

Gretel would layer acrylics over oils. Glitter paint provided ‘fractals’—rough little lozenges of colour and texture. At times she simply scratched over the canvas with her long red-lacquered fingernails or scraped with the edge of a spray can. Purchasing cans of spray paint by the box-load, she misted some canvases in great swirls of fresh colour—vibrant until deadened by its overlaid successor.

While painting, she now grasped her brush at its end, as if brandishing a riding crop. Her hand traced forceful wide arcs, interspersed with jerky downward thrusts. As the days became months, the huge canvases flapped and billowed as if begging her to stop. Concentrating intently, Gretel narrowed her eyes to slits—as if she were in a trance or reciting a prayer. Her tongue sometimes darted furiously in and out of her mouth. To close friends, it was profoundly disturbing.

Fiona Wrobel had long been an avid admirer of Gretel’s creative talent. To her, Gretel’s 4D art was powerful and beautiful, a step beyond even the innovations of a Picasso or a Jackson Pollock. The new approach, in her view, transformed the old canvases ‘into objects of desire, objects of lust and objects of obsession’. ‘One day they’ll be seen as iconic,’ she says. But she also concedes that 4D represents an artistic black hole, consuming the vast bulk of Gretel’s enormous output. Fiona says: ‘It’s really quite terrifying. It’s like the emperor’s clothes. No one can really see it.’ Some people, including Fiona’s own husband, ‘freak out and back out of the room when they see the 4D works’.

At one stage Fiona confronted her friend: ‘Gretel, I understand where you’re going with this. It’s very iconic but it’s also very destructive. You are putting your heart and soul into this, and it’s going to destroy you … I really think you’re dancing with the devil.’

‘Oh I know!’ Gretel replied brightly. ‘But I can’t stop. I’m on to something.’ She continued to spend whole days and nights adding new layers of paint to her bathroom wall mural or one of her canvases. Some friends assumed she was taking speed to keep going.

Prue, the former Game Birds shop assistant, visited Gretel at Florida House soon after she began her 4D phase. Gretel talked about herself for hours, saying her hand was guided by Leonardo da Vinci. Prue concluded that her old boss had ‘gone semi-mad’. Finding it difficult to edge out the door, ultimately she made the excuse that she had to get some cigarettes. She never returned.

Most observers see little more than blobs of brown paint in Gretel’s work. Terry Stanton, an old friend from art-school days who has stayed at Florida House, soon learned that criticising Gretel produced outbursts of anger and petulance. ‘If you tell her 4D is rubbish, she goes into a fury.’

To her one-time lover Scottie Ashton, Gretel’s works looked like finger painting until they came to life during the pair’s regular acid trips. Indeed, many friends consider Gretel’s obsession with images that only she can see as the result of too much acid over many years. Roger Foley says ‘the neurotransmitters have been completely eaten alive as a result of those drugs. They just don’t connect.’

The medical literature records cases of chronic perceptual disorders following LSD use. Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder has as its main symptom prolonged ‘flashbacks’ involving LSD-like visual changes.

Gretel’s longtime creative collaborator and frequent acid-trip partner Roger Foley thinks her ‘fourth dimension’ refers to time. ‘What she’s doing is … collapsing a lifetime of painting into one instant … her paintings now are an infinite number of paintings all on top of each other … much like the frames of a film … she’s collapsing them down onto one canvas. And of course as every child knows when you put all the paints together in a paintbox … what do you end up with? A big dark-brown mess.’

In October 1996, following her 4D epiphany, Gretel decided that to finish her Marquess of Bath portrait she would have to visit Longleat again. She had no invitation, and Thynn was unlikely even to recall who she was. Undeterred, she flew to Britain with her portrait. She found herself a cheap flat in Bristol, about ninety minutes’ drive from Longleat. But she had no car. For three or four months she would wake every morning believing that on that day, ‘I would finish it.’ Having blown her monthly allowance on the airfare and living expenses, she paid a couple her last £50 to transport her and her canvas to Longleat House. ‘I thought I’d be given some castle space to complete it,’ she says. But the Marquess refused to see her. Crestfallen, Gretel returned to London.

Years later, she visited the Marquess again. When she phoned ahead, she found him reluctant to see her. ‘Just a bit desperate’, she made the journey to Longleat regardless. The Marquess insisted that the enormous canvas—by now obliterated by 4D overpainting—would not fit through the door. Instead it was relegated to the cold cellar. ‘He didn’t understand the painting,’ says Gretel. ‘It was one of the most terrible days of my life.’

The Patron was another who failed to comprehend Gretel’s new artistic direction. ‘The more I did it, the more contempt he had. He didn’t understand it. No one understood it.’

George Pinniger could always tell what mood his sister was in by the colours she was using that day. Having company cheered her—out would come the red, yellow and orange paint. When she was feeling low, she would retreat to browns, greys and black. But whichever colours she used, she piled them on. George estimates that some $30,000 of paint—120 kilograms—has gone into just one of his sister’s larger works. Gretel would come away from each visit to her art suppliers with huge boxes of materials. Her ex-husband Dieter says the bills were astronomical.

As the years progress and the layers grow, some of Gretel’s canvases groan under hundreds of layers of paint. Today, thick slabs of hardened paint crack, curl and peel like bark from monstrous and aged trees. Gretel uses each brush until its bristles are stiff and cracked. Boxes of discarded brushes litter her studio.

Gretel had been talking up her artistic talents for years. By 2000, she began to claim 4D was the key to proving the existence of God. By offering her paintings to God, Gretel hoped ‘for an improvement in my own rating’, she declared. ‘I am a survivor of the Dark Night of the Soul. I have braved and endured the tunnel, always seeing the light at the end of it growing closer and brighter and now the end is in sight … [I am] wishing to give people … eyes to see Spirit.’

Gretel continued to speak of how 4D, when fully realised, ‘will be quite miraculous, and will be one of the greatest things to happen in the art world since Giotto picked up his palette. Everyone will take notice around the globe and it will secure my future.’

Though few but she can see more than brown swirls, Gretel describes in convincing detail images within each work: ‘In this part of the painting two faces share the same space. Mine … behind that of a young man.’

Some visitors sit for hours with Gretel in her top-floor studio at Florida House, rolling her joints (‘nointees’, as she calls them) and keeping her engaged in conversation as she paints. Usually, Gretel would be too busy painting to remember to ask for a more than occasional puff. Instead, her friends get high, amusing themselves by asking her to describe her canvases.

Roger Foley says: ‘Nobody’s game to say, Well, actually all I can see is a pile of dog shit.’