Jonathan Huxley was born in Woking, Surrey in 1965. After completing a fine art degree at Nottingham, he gained a place at The Royal Academy Schools, London to study painting (1989-1992). He won the Royal Academy Young Masters Prize on graduation and exhibited with Crane Kalman for the first time in 1992.
Whilst at the RA schools, Huxley spent long hours in the life-room practicing academic, observational drawing. He discovered the work of Bruegel and Bosch, learning how to compose complex, multifigure compositions, characteristics in his work still present today.
In the mid 90s, Huxley went to New York to create large-scale, ultraviolet light paintings for nightclub dance events, most notably for Grace Jones’ birthday party at the notorious Tunnel Club.
Throughout his career Huxley has maintained a keen interest in the human figure, particularly in motion and his work sold consistently.
He writes; ‘’The work goes in many directions, meditative, repetition of figures in rhythm and motion, feeding more non-specific narratives. Small frozen moments, where the flow of either charcoal or watercolour suggests threads of stories. The accidental and the subconscious is fundamental in finding images.’’
Huxley has won awards for drawing in both the ING Discerning Eye Competition and the Jerwood Drawing Prize. His watercolours gained him the Sunday Times Singer-Friedlander Watercolour Award (1994), The Penguin Cover Prize (2009) and in 2017 Huxley was elected into the Royal Watercolour Society. His large scale ‘figurescapes’ hang in major London buildings in the collections of Barclays PLC, Goldman-Sachs and UBS to name a few.
Huxley’s work has featured in Beaux-Arts Magazine, The Guardian, The London Evening Standard and other publications.