Anne Bellman passed away on 14 March 2005.

I can find no other trace online of a painter who called herself Annie Artemisia for a while. Past-life connection, she said of our rapport when we met at art school in 1984. We became close friends and stayed in touch after she moved interstate. Neither of us made much visual art during our 16-year friendship; she pursued a spiritual path and I explored performance. But at the time of our rift, both of us had begun to write: fiction in my case and a memoir in hers.

Art had drawn us together. Words drove us apart. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her she’d inspired a minor character. Because, despite the fact that one line in an early draft of a novel by an unpublished writer posed no threat to her project, she sought legal advice, then demanded to see my ms. At her request, I cut a reference to the character’s mother that touched on the theme of her memoir. Yet she never forgave me. When next in Sydney, she returned a charcoal drawing I’d given her. She didn’t want to talk, just to hand it back in person, as if to achieve ritual closure. Did she value my self-portrait too much to destroy it? She didn’t flinch from self-destruction. I found out by chance twenty months later, when I ran into an old friend of hers who told me about a joint show featuring Anne’s photographs.

The following week at the opening, I studied her bleak black-and-white photos, searching in vain for the sense of urgency that had made her paintings so potent, and for clues. What led her to suicide? I could only guess. The shots lacked the intensity and inventiveness of her canvases. Her old friends seemed wary except for one who shared the facts of her death.

At art school, Anne had also staged a few performances: ritual enactments that echoed themes in her paintings. The one I saw impressed me as powerful and raw, a far cry from work other students were doing.

What befell those paintings? She gave me photos of two, which I’ve kept for four decades. Even faintly blurred and faded, they pulse with originality. The internet can’t begin to convey their brilliance.

In recent years I’ve come full circle, as my creative focus has shifted from written to visual work via montage and, lately, photography. So I’ve begun to wonder what sort of photos Anne might have taken if she’d kept going. But above all, I wonder if anyone else recalls her stunning paintings?