JOSEPH HUGHES
Recent Paintings
From the mid 1970s through much of the 1980s, I was painting in close dialogue with a circle of artists exploring the range of experience available through the material structuring of color. Joseph Hughes was at the center of that circle from the beginning. His work, along with our many discussions, left a profound impression on me.
In the intervening years, the Color Painting genre has grown to include dozens of practitioners all over the world, and many of the painters from that original circle have gone on to gain international reputations. While the Color movement now enjoys multi-national attention, it can claim substantial roots in the Bay Area, stemming perhaps from the time Still and Rothko spent teaching here. Joseph Marioni and Phil Sims attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Anne Appleby studied at UC Berkeley. John Meyer worked here. David Simpson and John Zurier continue to do so. Comparatively under-appreciated, Color Painting belongs as much to our regional heritage as the figuration of Park, Bischoff and Diebenkorn.
Working quietly and steadily in his San Francisco studio, Joseph has exerted an influence on the Color Painters of his generation comparable to John Graham’s on DeKooning, Gorky, and their circle. He has set an example, gracefully navigating the complex flow between the immaterial aura of color, the physical fact of the painted image, and the fluid nature of the painting process. I'm honored to be able to present a selection of his recent work in the room for painting.
George Lawson, Director
room for painting room for paper
The Paintings of Joseph Hughes: Icons of Color
It is remarkable to observe that during the fifth decade of his career Joseph Hughes, whose work has often been seen in the context of Radical Color Painting, is still experimenting and innovating. Yet, while assuming Color Painting’s primary concern for the integration of support, surface, medium, pigment, and mark, Hughes’ pursuit of a profoundly visual experience of color, light, and space remains uniquely open. Notably, his recent focus on emphatic gesture has resulted in particularly vibrant and sensitive, beautiful and intelligent paintings. It has also taken him into a new and exciting area of discovery.
Hughes’ palette is consistently intense and diverse, often even unusual. Thalo, Dioxazine, and Acra are powerful and luminous, yet these staining colors are so difficult to work with that most artists simply avoid them. But even when Hughes uses the more common Ultramarine or Siena—and he has a special way with white and gray—his color remains clear and brilliant because his command of acrylic medium, used in alternating glazed and opaque areas, lets him achieve the jewel-like, lapidary qualities found, for example, in Rembrandt, whom Hughes greatly admires.
Drawing is now more obviously important to Hughes in ways rarely found in Color Painting, where instead it is usually located at the edges of fields, shapes, and the canvas’ periphery. Against Hughes’ downward-flowing colored grounds, lines of paint are literally flung at the canvas; the presence of the painter’s body in making these paintings is clearly evident. The pressure of thrown paint forces these lines to subtly fray and splatter out and upward at their edges. Across the painting’s surface, arcs of color gracefully run parallel, touch, or crisscross, forming variously sparse or dense fields of interwoven lines.
On the vertical plane of “2008/III (THALO GREEN),” for example, a few thin dark green lines sketch a basic scaffolding on a medium green background, over which thicker skeins of turquoise accumulate as a grove of tangled trunks. The opposing directions of the downward-flowing background and the foreground figures reaching up suggest movement and tension, like the body’s struggle to remain upright means resisting gravity’s pull. In this Hughes risks the associations that the figure-ground dichotomy introduces and that Color Painting usually sidesteps, which leads to confirming, wrestling with, and wrangling painting’s eternal dualities: abstraction and realism; window and plane; illusion and surface; picture and object; reference and thing.
Historically, as pictures, symbols, and objects, painted icons encapsulate these dualities, and are vehicles of emotion, belief, and beauty. Joseph Hughes’ paintings are personal icons for believers in the transcendent experience of color and its role in exploring the reaches of our psychological and spiritual nature. They call for and support our discovery of self via observation, conjecture, intuition, and reason. In experiencing these paintings we find an ideal, an archetype for a way to look, think, and feel.
Chris Ashley
Oakland, California