The Evening Standard

The Old Master Of Mad Valley

The locals call the valley where Anthony Christian lives Mad Valley. It has spectacular vistas and is close to one of the hill-stations in southern India, five hours from the nearest small airport. It's also home to a curious collection of eccentrics - a litigious Italian aristocrat who is the guru of an offshoot of the famous ashram at Auroville, a female jockey who has won most of the biggest races in India, and a visionary ex-hippie who is developing a new form of bio-dynamic agriculture. Then there's Anthony Christian himself - extraordinary artist and self-proclaimed genius, who is this week having his first London exhibition for 28 years.

Back in the Seventies he was a celebrated portrait painter and something of a Brit Art star, with glowing write ups in Vogue. Then he dropped off the map, going first to Bali and then to India, where he became a virtual recluse with his art materials and a succession of wives for company. (His last wife left him last year when he disappeared unexpectedly for four months to draw trees.)

Mad Valley is known for its lush profusion of strange flora and fauna, such as the kurinji, a flower which blossoms only every 12 years (the next time is 2004), rare bats, scorpions and the odd panther. You have to avoid running over monkeys on the way to Anthony Christian's Estate, which he shares with his current paramour, Marian ("finally, I have found my soul mate"), who is also a fine artist. When I meet him he is deep in contemplation of a bougainvillea. "The way the colours variegate is amazing. Most people don't really see things, they are too lazy to look, don't you find?" Before I could answer he launches into a monologue, saying that he is a split personality. He tells me he has six personalities and runs through them, with appropriate voices, including Jacques, a Frenchman, a laid-back American and an amazingly well informed art historian.

"This is how I know, without a trace of ego, entirely objectively, that I am one of the greatest artists alive," he says. He also tells me that when he paints he is often possessed by the spirit of one of the Old Masters, acting as a "channel" for them.

You might suppose that here is a sad individual with delusions of grandeur. But sad he isn't. There's humour in his painting and he laughs alot and it's difficult to figure out how serious he is. Yet, simultaneously he is utterly dedicated to his work. He has numerous champions, such as The Time's art critic John Russell Taylor, who says Christian "draws like an angel". No one has ever dared to deny he is a master draughtsman. I've certainly never come across anyone who could match him for, say, the incredible detail and folds of the drapes he paints in his version of Vermeer's artist's studio. He isn't part of any artistic current and Russell Taylor points out that the strangeness of his work springs from his mixture of Renaissance techniques and a post-modern sensibility.

By his late teens, he realised he could use his amazing technical facility to make a living as a portrait painter and was a figure in both hip and aristocratic circles, painting everyone from Julie Christie and Gore Vidal to Terence Stamp and Lord Mountbatten. But portraits and a glitzy social scene weren't enough for him, and in the Seventies he disappeared to Bali, and obscurity, selling the odd painting to survive.

He told me one incident among many that put him off portraits was when Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard asked him to "paint me in a way that people can worship me". He's now decided to end his self-imposed exile and said I was the first journalist who had ever been to his South India retreat. Apart from anything else, he wants to build a fantastic tower on his property. And to fund that he has to stick his head above the parapet.

He still does versions of the Old Masters, but adds his own twists - Van Eyck's Arnolfini's Marriage now has little additions, such as an erotic scene in the mirror. Indeed he has plans to do 21 old Masters in a more erotic style. Although pitched by his agent as a classicist, he's really a surrealist (some of his paintings are genuinely outrageous - such as a painting of a lion pleasuring a ballerina). He showed me his "play room" - a four posterbed, mirrored ceiling and walls covered with erotic drawings. "All those pictures I studied at the National Gallery," he said. "There's really too much violence and torture in them. I'm going to transform them, update them into something much sexier." Anthony Christian's collision of the Renaissance, Surrealism and the cyber-age will be fascinating to watch.