A Story about an artist that jeff told me today

Jeff, my coworker, is a really chipper oldish man. It's hard to put an age on him because he could either be a sassy 40 or a well-concealed 60. He's still a full time worker though. But maybe he's working while retired from something else, because he's definitely on his second (at least) condo of his lifetime. And condos seem like a thing that only retired people buy into. He also says he has an uncle who is 102 years old.  

Anyway Jeff told me that a while ago, he had an artist friend named Maurice. He met Maurice through another friend who had purchased one of Maurice's paintings for $2600. At the time, Jeff asked Maurice if he could make him a painting for$500 and Maurice scoffed the offer away, claiming he didn't do commissions.
Then, apparently, Maurice fell down on his luck, and took up Jeff’s offer. Later, he made another piece for free for Jeff out of guilt of having overcharged him for the first. After this, jeff brought a lady to Maurice's apartment (where he was making his art during a time when he couldn't afford a studio) so that she could also buy one of Maurice's pieces. When they arrived, they found that the fumes were too strong to breathe, but Maurice had been living with paint and tar fumes in his apartment. He also started talking about how the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary art (to whom he had recently sold pieces) were both trying to have him killed to have the value of his works go up. When Jeff suggested that this was bogus, Maurice stopped speaking to Jeff for a few months, thinking that he too was in cahoots with the evil museums.