Leaving the portrait of Hunter Davies on a table at the gallery, with no frame, turned out to be a really good idea. I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing it earlier.
That’s the artist’s proof, with its tissue peeled back. You can see the paper doing what paper does – curling, holding a bend, catching the light unevenly along the edge. The inscription runs along the bottom in pencil. Behind it on the wall, the same kind of picture, under glass, going flat.
Why not put it on the wall? I had no more frames. I had cleared the art shop out of that standard A2 size, and I didn’t want to bring a different frame into the gallery when all the others matched.
So I had to make choices: show some things, keep back others. I was disappointed about the Hunter picture, of course. But Hunter had said he wouldn’t be able to make it, so I thought, all right, I’ll sadly leave him out.
Here’s the full picture:
As you see, Hunter is in there twice, at the desk and in the armchair – the working half of the room and the resting half. I’ve written more about Hunter, and the room he’s been in since 1963 elsewhere.
After three days in the gallery, I realised I could just lay the picture on a table.
It would do no harm for people to see the texture. On the contrary: it looks so much nicer when it isn’t covered by glass – especially the cheapish, shiny glass I wish I hadn’t used, and couldn’t afford to replace across every picture.
Someone at the show wanted to buy it. I said no, or rather not yet – because Hunter hadn’t even seen the portrait, and it seemed to me he should have first refusal on his own picture before a stranger got it.
A lot of people came up to look at it. That photograph is from where I was sitting, and it is the thing I kept seeing: people standing over a table in exactly the posture they use at a wall. Hands clasped behind the back. Head down. Not glancing – looking.
I suppose his name is a part of that. They stopped, were hooked, and had comments about Hunter. Some said they knew him, or of him. He is obviously a Hampstead person – he lives here, and has written about the place.
And his picture drew out other stories about other people who have been here a long time. One of them concerned a very long-standing library belonging to a very famous writer, and I am not going to tell you about it – it’s not my story to tell. But that is the sort of thing that gets said over a table, and might not have been said over a frame. Who knows.
Point is: the pictures worked as a kind of conversation piece. And the unframed one of Hunter worked hardest.
One more thing, which I didn’t expect at all. When the show came down I wrote to Hunter and told him what his picture had been up to. I sent a jpeg.
He loves it, says it’s “fab”, and asked me to bring over the print to look at. So the picture is going to the room it was made in.