8

June
2003

6:54 PM

EJ Hughes Exhibit

Okay, we finally drug our butts to the gallery this afternoon, about two and a half hours before they packed it all up. I was encultured. Turns out Hughes is not a Group o' 7 princeling after all, he's still alive, but a fellow traveller fer shure.

Some really nice pieces, and overall an amazingly diverse body of work. Oils, drypoint, lino, watercolour & pencil, pencil, that thing where you glue bits from one painting onto another (I'm sure it has a name, probably bits-gluing in Italian or French), and some others. In a lot of the landscapes, he has these major elements, like a big boat or group of trees or building, and in some odd corner or other he'll add a human figure almost as though it was on a list of things he mustn't forget to do before he shipped the canvas off.

And the colours! There was one room mostly of seascapes, shorelines, where the greens and blues fairly glowed, they were so deep and rich.

We liked the watercolours best, though. Nola's all fired up to try watercolours with pencil and see if she can get a similar delicate effect.

Part of another room covered the War Years, where Hughes was in the army as an official artist. These were soldiers whose job was to record scenes of army life, with the expectation that they would later be used to create murals, according to the directive they were given. So the army was particularly concerned that weaponry, uniforms, insignia, etc., be reproduced faithfully. Other than that, it seemed to be paint what you like.

We ran into one woman we know and chatted with her off and on, and another woman, a stranger, was so enchanted with a 'madonna and child' drawing that she had to share. Nice lady. She also explained that one large painting, which had two big industrial grey squares offset, was intended for the side of a bus or train car. The grey was where the windows would be.

Afterward we stopped for ice cream. Ice cream is good after art.

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