This is the house of a collector, a man who finds it unusual to leave a room empty. The way he has arranged his living room is as much his handwriting as is ‘the kind of stuff I surround myself with.’
This is the house of a collector, a man who finds it unusual to leave a room empty. The way he has arranged his living room is as much his handwriting as is ‘the kind of stuff I surround myself with.’
Hylton Nel, holds aloft a child-size chamber pot covered in roses in the Chinese style. ‘I found this 18th-century vomiting pot in Observatory,’ he says. And thereby hangs a tale. The Calitzdorp house he shares with partner Bernard Wilke is a cabinet de curiosité, filled with displays of unimaginable treasures ranging from a Strandloper’s skull to a 100BC Han dynasty clasp, every item with its own unique story attached, told by Nel, master potter, collector and one-time antique dealer. The vomiting pot is one of his many lucky finds. It was once the subject of a gentlemanly dispute with a famous international auction house, which had elected to send it to its sale in Monaco only to decide on its arrival in Monte Carlo that it wasn’t the real thing after all and sent it back.
Nel, artist, potter and Living National Treasure, is gifted with the ‘talent not just to control clay but to bring it to life,’ says Dr Melanie Hillebrand. A member of the Oriental Ceramics Society in London, Nel knows his Chinese porcelain. He can prove them wrong, he says, holding up the famille rose pot by its little round handle, identifying legions of pointers to its authenticity as if he was an archaeologist. He’s probably right – and leaps up to go and fetch books and texts to prove it. Anyhow, there it sits on its shelf alongside an antique Egyptian depiction of Serapis from Sakkara, hundreds and hundreds of years old, some 16th-century Persian ceramics of earth-shattering beauty, found in Port Elizabeth, ancient Chinese jade drinking vessels, and a white 16th-century Jia Jing wine pot with a blue dragon wound around it, also from China. ‘Late Ming,’ he says, ‘a step up from peasant-ware.’
A huge library at the heart of his house substantiates his research into everything he owns. ‘My library contains information on everything that interests me. I find books more accessible than technology. Bernard has a computer-type thing that he sometimes finds frustrating, but he does manage to do things with it. But on occasions when I’ve used it – like the time I wanted to find out about Xing porcelain which is the first porcelain ever made – I found it very difficult to negotiate between all the rubbish that keeps popping up and distracting me and trying to intrude. I find it revolting. Whereas if I go to a book, it just stands on the shelf until you want it, and you can pull it out and in a flash you have the very thing you were looking for.’
Hylton Nel loves ‘stuff, wherever it comes from, or whoever used it’. It could be a rare museum piece. Equally ‘it could be a cheap, modern thing – like that Chinese bird from Rockey Street’. The interior of his house is not about decorating so much as the accumulation and display of objects acquired for their intrinsic worth as expressions of artistry and human endeavour, or simply for their rarity value. With the eyes of artists, he and Bernard, a painter, have laid out their rooms with artists’ delight in surface treatment. The interiors of their house resonate with deep, saturated colours. The gloom that keeps the intense Karoo heat at bay comes alive as the eye gradually adjusts to the startling, unexpected eclecticism and richness of the displays everywhere you look.
As the provenance of objects is revealed, the real wonder of all this is that here in this hot, dusty little Karoo town is a self-contained universe that’s fuelling the art of a man whose own style of work is rich in references to the decorative arts and literary and art historical sources. The imagery on his plates and bowls ranges from penises to Madonnas, and from cats to angels, and his quotes are drawn from poetry and the radio as well as his observations of the world around him. ‘I find it nice to listen to the radio while I’m working. I don’t have to respond to it.’
Nel has an almost spiritual connection with his world and the objects with which it’s populated. It seems almost banal to learn that he loves to cook oxtail or lamb stew or Spanish omelette. Or that one of his peacocks has a gammy leg because the naughty boy next door threw a stone at it. And yet it’s the very ordinariness in the detail that fuels his shrewd observations on life, making his home, its collections, the garden and the studio in the barn across the road, his laboratory. It’s as though he’s having a constant private dialogue with everything around him, then he retells it as it is on his ceramics.
‘My library contains information on subjects that interest me. I find books more accessible than technology.’
‘Bernard goes to bed quite early, and I go to bed late. I read when I go to bed. I’ve just been reading an interesting account by a South African who did a turn teaching in China. China interests me. Maybe I’ll read a novel. Daytime reading is newspapers, sometimes on Fridays it’s the Mail & Guardian, and then on Sunday, The Sunday Times with all those horrors and other stuff in it. I read sitting at a desk or table.’
The items on the studio shelves show a predominance of greens and blues. Nel’s personal collection includes objects and handpainted works rich in references to the decorative arts and literary and art historical sources. His plates, bowls, vases, plaques and figurative pieces are idiosyncratically decorated with witty, and sometimes poignant, line drawings and script. His quotes are drawn from poetry and morning news reports as well as his observations of the countryside around him.
Hylton and Bernard have lived in this 1850s house for about 11 years. ‘It’s a darkish house, but with the very bright, sharp light you get here, I enjoy the deep shadows it makes’.
On the edge of Calitzdorp in the Klein Karoo, Nel’s house faces his studio on the other side of the road. ‘I live here because of its beauty.’
A kitchen dresser is madly overlayered with blue-and-white chinoiserie plates and platters, ad hoc pottery and ceramic vases.
‘The day begins with coffee in the kitchen. Then the maid comes at nine and she makes oatmeal porridge and takes care of all the other things in the house. Bernard has his porridge fresh. I like mine cold. So I have mine between 10:30 and 11. But well before that I go down to the studio, and I’m there until about 12:30.’
‘Why do people collect? It gives them status. But for me, it’s a living source of inspiration. I have lots of books with pictures of things but to actually touch something, turn it over and look at it more closely gives you greater contact with it.’
The style of the brightly coloured bathroom drops a hint that possibly a hammam might have been more welcome here.
‘It’s been said that, ideally, the front door should face the rising sun and the back door the setting sun. And the kitchen should be on the north side because, say, on a cold morning, when you go to the kitchen, it’s warm and bright. Modern people put their bedrooms on the north side, giving rise to an expression in Afrikaans, “ballas bak”. Are you getting up or what? So I love the bedrooms on the cold, south side and the kitchen in the north.’
‘My worst are interiors in perfect taste. I think it’s brilliant if someone decorates a room, makes it into something out of nothing. I love that. I love looking at other people’s visions.’