Lincoln Townley has gone from a seedy life of drugs and strippers to doing portraits of Jody Foster and schmoozing with Michael Caine.
Celebrity paintings by Townley – besides Foster and Caine, he’s captured the likes of Brad Pitt, Samuel L. Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Lady Gaga, Matt Damon and others – sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Caine once called him “the next Andy Warhol.”
His work will be shown Thursday night at the Fairmont Hotel in Los Angeles, but his life was once far from glamorous.
After a job in the transport business went bust, Townley got offered a gig working for London strip club magnate Peter Stringfellow in 2007. Charged with bringing in horny high-rollers, he took to the life all too well. Like his clients, many in banking, he developed a serious taste for booze and cocaine.
“It had a lot to do with trying to stay up,” the 51-year-old Townley told The Post from his hotel room at the tony Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood. “I was 35 or 36 and knocking around with 20-year-old girls in the club. After work, I went to nightclubs galore and lock-ins” – so named because they stayed open after hours and locked the front door to keep authorities at bay. “I was surrounded by cocaine, and I really liked it.”
Sex came with the drugs and he was not above slipping off to lavatories for quickies. “One night I was in a disabled bathroom, going at it on the sink,” he remembered. “I put too much pressure on the sink and the whole thing came loose.”
When he wasn’t screwing, he was often fighting. “I would get into a lot of scraps and was well-known by the local police. I would have ended up dead or killed someone if I continued that way.”
He was also painting in his spare time, doing unsettling pieces that depicted hellish faces with deep layers of oils, inspired by Francis Bacon and his strip club customers: “I was fascinated by them and their ability to stay out all night and go right in to work.”
He turned to more and more cocaine to do the same.
One night, while carousing around a joint called Jet Black – “It opened at 5 a.m.,” Townley recalled – he met the British TV star Denise Welch. “Denise came back to mine; booty calls followed,” Townley said, adding that he and the “Coronation” regular eventually became an item. “We went public. Denise was famous and her friends were horrified.”
Townley was out of control. Stringfellow fired him and offered a bit of advice: “Think what you could achieve in life if you were sober.”
Not yet ready to listen, Townley recalled, “I had no money and did not have a flat. I slept in Green Park, in London, for two nights. It was the lowest point.”
In 2011, Welch gave him an ultimatum: get clean or she’d move on.
He chose the former. Two years later, he and Welch married, Simon & Schuster published his memoir about what he calls his “mad years,” and he got serious about his art.
His first celebrity portrait, of Russell Brand, was auctioned off for charity in 2013 for $20,000.
He wound up the artist in residence for the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA), doing portraits of actors such as Caine, Kenneth Branagh and Claire Foy, that get sold for charity through the organization.
Caine and Ricky Gervais both purchased their own portraits, Towney said. “It is at his house in Hampstead. I delivered it there myself,” he said of Gervais.
The self-taught artist has eschewed galleries – “I don’t want to give someone 50 percent of my money,” he said – and claims to have made made millions from his work, selling directly to a coterie of wealthy collectors and via Sotheby’s. Based in the UK and still married to Welch, he tools around in a Lamborghini.
Looking back at all he’s been through and how things have shaken out, the strip-club wrangler turned in-demand artist marvels at it all. He’s currently working on a portrait of Tom Cruise after chatting up the star at Caine’s 90th birthday party. He will soon be jetting to Brussels to meet with collectors, then going to Zurich and hitting the Venice Biennale where his work will be displayed later this year.
“My life is a bit like ‘Survivor,’” he said. “How I’m still here is incredible.”
