Carving Out Fresh Options - Shara Hughes
Shara Hughes’ imaginary landscapes plunge viewers into boldly colored, hallucinatory spaces. Here, sweeping trails of paint frame views of a dramatic waterfall, carved rock formations, and a winding river. Hughes uses experimental painting techniques to create ecstatic interpretations of the natural world. She hopes that viewers realize it is a purely fictional space once they try to piece together the different ecologies, land formations, and unnatural color combinations.
This was Hughes’ first large-scale mural. She began with a painting on canvas, which was concurrently on view at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. She explored steeply receding perspectives and curvilinear passages in deliberate contrast to the urban geometries of architecture and roadways that surround this façade. Translated onto this wall by professional muralists, the swirling pleasures of her work radiate at a monumental scale. The mural brings to downtown Boston a visionary combination of art and nature, in partnership with deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.
Artist Bio
Shara Hughes (b. 1981, Atlanta) uses dizzying brushwork, vibrant colors, and shifting perspectives to make paintings that defy many of the existing conventions associated with the landscape genre. Natural motifs and patterned elements recur throughout Hughes’s pictures: snake-like trees, floating moons, distorted reflections in bodies of water, and stippled night skies appear in various permutations, synchronized with harder-to-define forms in which abstract and representational impulses co-exist in unorthodox harmony. Hughes’s process rarely involves reference images; instead, she transposes the psychological complexity of her interior world into lush and layered compositions. She often mixes pigment directly atop her surfaces, and in this way creates intuitive, one-of-a-kind color palettes that simultaneously point to art historical movements like color field painting and Post-Impressionism. As she engages with these open-ended experiments in image-making, Hughes depicts kaleidoscopic visions of flora and fauna in processes of constant evolution..
