One thing I learned doing a solo show last year is how helpful it can be when people take photographs of an artist with their work. So today I was delighted to do exactly that for Martin Huxter, whose exhibition just opened at Keats House in Hampstead.
I was there because my friend Brendan Barns sits on the culture committee at the City of London Corporation, which helps fund Keats House. Cultural institutions like this one are increasingly under threat as funding dries up, and the Corporation’s continued support for places like Keats House matters more than it might once have done. Without that backing, exhibitions like Martin’s might not happen.
Even keeping the house open to the public at all might become hard, who knows.
Martin’s show is built around nightingales, so Keats House is the perfect setting as this is where Keats wrote his “Ode to a Nightingale.” The relationship between the work and the location is unusually strong: Martin made one of the latest pictures from a view taken from Keats’s own bed in the house.
Before we went upstairs to see the work, Martin spoke about what inspired him.
Martin with a painting of Keats behind him.
He also demonstrated a series of bird calls using specialist whistles1, a lovely way to tune everyone’s ears before tuning their eyes.
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The drawings themselves are extraordinary: graphite and black chalk on paper, immensely delicate and detailed. My photos, alas, don’t do justice to that. One of my favourite pictures shows a figure writing or drawing in a bed, with a large nightingale at his feet – either Keats’s room itself or something that powerfully evokes it.
I had a great conversation with Martin about the work, and he told me he only finished the final picture for the exhibition this week, which somehow made standing in front of it feel more alive.
I wanted to write this as a little reminder – to myself as much as anyone – that even while I’ve been deep in the world of A Speccy Man Has a Breakdown, I’m still going to art shows and thinking about other people’s art. Which, as it turns out, is one of the better ways to think about your own.
1 Bird song. Interestingly, nobody in the room was able to identify the sound of a nightingale.
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