Gutenberg Galaxy: E. J. Hughes
E. J. HUGHES, Ian M. Thom, Douglas & McIntyre and the Vancouver Art Gallery, 226 pp, $75.00.
An apt title for this beautifully designed and produced book might have been The Elusive Mr. Hughes. The creator of highly detailed and utterly individual landscape paintings, E. J. Hughes has lived and workedvery privately and for more than half a centuryin Vancouver Islands Cowichan Valley. With great determination, the 90-year-old artist has pursued a distinctive way of expressing his vision of rural British Columbia. (His style, which critics often have difficulty identifying, seems to fall somewhere between Henri Rousseaus The Toll House and Jan Vermeers View of Delft.) With equal determination, Hughes has avoided the complications of urban life, art politics, media exposure, academe and even companionship with fellow artists.
During the course of researching and writing what is the definitive book on Hughes (and organizing a parallel retrospective exhibition), Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Ian M. Thom was denied direct access to the artist. (Although Hughes declined to meet with Thom in person for this project, he did answer questions by mail.) Instead of predicating his study upon a series of artist interviews, as is common in a monograph, Thom turned toward the archival record, combing through letters, documents, catalogue essays, reviews, rare magazine and newspaper articles and, more rare still, a 1961 CBC television documentary. He also availed himself of parts of an unpublished biography of Hughes written by the artists long-time friend and confidant, Patricia Salmon, and an interview Salmon conducted with Hughes in 1979.
Thom is an outstanding scholar and his book is clear and informative, if lacking in the personal remembrances and observations by Hughes that might have nuanced interpretations of his work. Or perhaps not. Hughes eschews social or political readings of his art. His interestsat least those he has been willing to articulateare in the composition of the picture and in truth to what he sees in nature. A goodly portion of the text is given over to Thoms close formal readings of the paintings, drawings, murals and prints, through which Hughess evolution as an artist is quietly revealed.
The book takes us briskly from Hughess 1913 birth in North Vancouver and his boyhood in Nanaimo to his education at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, his emergence as a printmaker of considerable subtlety and accomplishment, his commercial partnership with Paul Goranson and Orville Fisher and their (mostly unpaid) venture into mural painting during the latter years of the Great Depression. Thom focuses at length on Hughess service as an Official War Artist during the Second World War, a significant period in which the artist developed habits of seeing and working that would serve his entire career.
During the 1930s and 40s, Hughess influences included the Mexican muralists, the Group of Seven, Paul Cézanne and Le Douanier Rousseau, but by the mid-1950s, he had turned away from these various strains of modernist and primitive art towards a greater realism. This realism, nonetheless, is subtly inflected by a notion of the primitive, with peculiarities of scale, perspective, light, form and pattern. In 1951, Hughes also turned away from city life with all its expenses and distractions. As Thom describes, Hughes settled with his wife, Fern, in the small Vancouver Island community of Shawnigan Lake, and endured protracted financial hardship in order to commit himself fully to painting. With the exception of a 1956 journey across Canada, sketching expeditions within British Columbia and a late trip to Europe, Hughes hasnt travelled much in the course of his career. Part of his stay-at-home-ness may have been the result of penury (although his canvases now command up to $100,000 at auction, he was paid very little for his labour-intensive art in the early years of his career), but part must have been temperament.
Because many of Hughess sketching trips were made close to his home, he is most strongly identified with maritime scenes of southeastern Vancouver Island. He evinces a particular attraction to driftwood-strewn beaches, tree-clad mountains and choppy coastal waters, but his eye lights equally fondly upon farmhouses and cottages, docks and marinas, sawmills, logbooms, industrial wharfs, and every variety of marine vessel. For Hughes, the subject is almost always the human presence within the landscape rather than nature itself, Thom writes. He also writes of the timeless quality of Hughess work, alluding not only to its standing outside of trend or fashion, but also to the sense of a moment, long past, caught forever in the amber of the painters art. Hughess scenes, Thom says, have a specificity of time and place yet communicate a quality of light and life that transcends both.
A significant reference point for the book is Hughess correspondence with the late Dr. Max Stern of Montreal. From his first encounter with Hughes in 1951 until his death in 1987, Stern was Hughess exclusive dealer and agent. He was also, as Thom points out, the artists friend, advocate and public face, tirelessly promoting his work to the world and cultivating an appreciative and loyal clientele for it. (One of the most devoted collectors of Hughess work, Jacques Barbeau, is a major lender to the exhibition and the paintings, prints and drawings he owns are well represented in the book.)
Thom quotes extensively from the letters that passed back and forth between Stern and Hughes, understandingas the reader comes tothat something of Hughess philosophy of art is revealed through them. (Another revelation of the correspondence is how actively Stern advised Hughes on subject matter and composition.) Again, Hughes professes an interest in the formal qualities of his work and a devotion to nature. Thom, however, while grappling with the problem of where to position Hughes, speaks of his arts subtlety, its complexity, its ambiguityand the preternatural qualities that stimulate readings of his paintings far beyond their composition and ostensible subject matter.
Spring 2003
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
