CHAPTER 1

My story starts with a photograph.

A man stares full-face into the camera: unflinching, optimistic, luminescent; and yet for all this, pensive. It’s an image made all the more moving by a cloud shadowing this angelic countenance; something amiss.

I’ll tell you more but first let’s look around.

The sky is cerulean blue. The street is a tree-lined boulevard, its cobbles steaming under a tide of city workers, day-trippers and students. Click, clack, stomp, stamp. Click, clack, stomp, stamp.

On this early winter morning, Baku’s showboating architecture is doing its very best to catch my eye: in abundance is crumbing Mediaeval, frivolous Gothic Revival; palatial villas; thundering museums and railway stations courtesy of the munificence of oil boom millionaires and an ambitious Soviet regime.

It would be easy to idle here. We could stop off at the terrace of the Mozart café. We could order a cup of Darchin tea steaming with ginger and cinnamon or a strong black chai with the merest slither of lemon. Do you smoke? We could light West cigarettes and pass an hour or two locked in the click clack combat of backgammon. I could do with a fired up, feisty opponent on this freezing morning.

But we’re not idling here.

Before we go though, let’s take another look at this photograph. I’ve been carrying it around for months so it’s a bit dog-eared. Striking isn’t he, this man with the piercing eyes and mop of coal black hair?

Handsome; hardly a line on his face. Intriguing you could say.

Zakir Huseinov, photo by Sanan Aleskerov

His name is Zakir Huseinov. He’s an artist. He lives in Baku and I’ve wanted to meet him and find out more about his work ever since I saw this picture. So I’m taking you north; away from this noise and wealth and buzz to a suburb where poverty penetrates every seam and every pore. Come on – it’s only ten minutes’ drive on the expressway.

Our destination is the kind of place foreigners like you probably have in their mind when picturing Azerbaijan. The tarmacadam is a broken crust, rutted and pitted as a farm track. There are two cars rusting on the roadside: Ladas (inevitably), held together by gaffer tape and hope. Two crows peck disconsolately at an invisible speck of grain on the pavement. A dog barks but is unseen. A cat lumbers arthritically across the road, chasing a memory of corpulent mice fed on days of plenty. We drive past a metronome tick of Soviet-era apartments blocks; past washing lines fluttering with cheap T-shirts and yellowed bed sheets; past satellite dishes and tangles of telephone wire.

“Home” by Zakir Huseinov

We arrive. It’s a crumbling whale of an apartment just like all the others: the paint peeling; a stack of thread-bear tyres out front; its graffitied façade bleached by the wind. We ring the doorbell and we hear a figure shuffle to the door. The latch turns and a man appears; a being burdened, a face hollowed and lined, a frame bent.

It’s Zakir Huseinov, but bereft of the vitality and luminosity of the man in photograph. The man before us looks at least 60 years old. (I know he’s barely 45). Zakir walks us around his studio: a cramped, unkempt space littered with half-finished canvases and spent tubes of paint. He is trailed by two solemn young sons with deep brown pools for eyes.

Eager and humble the artist elaborates on his passion: naïve, folksy, colour-filled landscapes; land billowing like sails; villas on the shoreline, Quixotic riders on donkeys, angels dressed in bucolic fronds trumpeting to the heavens. It is not high art; it is life-affirming art.

Zakir explains that he graduated from the art school in Baku and was a student of my grandfather’s. We make a connection.

I love all the works. After just 20 minutes I choose 30 canvases, take the cash out my wallet and make to hand it over. Zakir thanks me profusely, explaining that he has been working as a waiter in a local café to make ends meet. He has accrued debts. This windfall will enable him to pay off his creditors and finally focus on his work.

“Melons” by Zakir Huseinov

As I leave, Zakir’s eyes glint: a distant spark; a forgotten ember from a fire that once burned bright.

Walking back to my car I make a promise to myself. How could the lot and life of this artist be improved? And why should Zakir’s life, the quality and quantity of the very bread on his table, be determined by a chance encounter with an acolyte with funds?

Is it possible to change the way the art world works so that Zakir and millions like him can sustain themselves properly through their work? I resolve to find out.

This chapter in the complete edition of the book is followed by an interview with Sara Fitzmaurice, which you can read here