‘Landscapes Opened a Whole New World for Me’: Artist Shara Hughes on How She Subverts the Tradition of Flower Painting

Kaleidoscopic landscapes and
riotous bursts of flowers are the signatures of Brooklyn-based
artist Shara Hughes—scenes she creates entirely from her
imagination.

The artist’s third solo show with
Zurich’s Galerie Eva
Presenhuber, “Day By Day By Day,”
opened in June, but she
will not have seen it in person by the time it closes in
September.

“It’s very strange,” said
Hughes. “I travel quite a bit, but I haven’t really gone anywhere.
Not even to see family.”

Instead, the artist has spent
the past months making only the two-block journey between her
Brooklyn studio and her apartment where she lives with her
boyfriend, the artist Austin Eddy. She spends her mornings drawing at home, then heads
to her studio to exercise (a temporary improvisation), before a
long day of studio activity. 

That ritual has already proved
fruitful. Hughes just opened an exhibition at Parts & Labor gallery in Beacon,
New York, which places her new works alongside landscapes by Lois
Dodd from the 1960s to the
1980s. In September, Sabine
Knust in Munich will open a show of Hughes’s new prints—made mostly in
quarantine. 

We caught up with Hughes to talk
about her favorite studio supplies, living life with another
artist, and the one work of art she most wishes she
owned. 

Let’s start with the good news that museums are
scheduled to reopen at the end of the month. What’s the first
museum show you want to see? 

The Agnes Pelton show at the Whitney—if it will
still be there. I’d been to the Phoenix Museum of Art where the
show originated and—while the show wasn’t open at the time—the
curators let me come in and see a few works in the back. I didn’t
know who Agnes Pelton was and it was a real, “Oh my god, I love it”
moment. I’ve been looking forward to the show
since. 

Unlike say, Vincent Van Gogh or Georgia O’Keeffe, who both
made careers painting real-life flowers and landscapes, your
imagery comes entirely from your imagination. Why do you find
yourself drawn to botanical imagery? What does it offer
you? 

It just happened. I was tired of
making heavily symbolic work and decided I wanted to take the
narrative out. The only thing I could think of making, in that
case, were some landscapes—ones I thought no one was ever going to
see. Instead, landscapes opened a whole new world for me, one that
was awesome and exciting.

There’s something very
open-ended about the idea of a landscape that appeals to me too.
All landscapes are constantly changing, whether it’s the time of
day or the temperature or the weather patterns and things growing
and dying. The constant state of change created so much
possibility. 

In another sense, the landscape
is so seemingly simple. Everyone knows what a landscape looks
like—there is an entire tradition of painting that informs our
expectations. I wondered how I could take something that is
seemingly so known and make it mine, while still getting all the
satisfaction of painting, and the history of painting, in
one. 

Rather than being pretty or decorative, your flowers can
sometimes seem quite menacing and almost alien. Do you have any
thoughts about that? 

The symbol of the flower is
traditionally assumed to be soft and pretty and beautiful—and can
be a stand-in for these outdated virtues of womanhood. Typically in
painting, you see flowers arranged in a still life in this
beautiful way that can be very perfected. I think being able to
imagine flowers in a powerful way or a scary way or an ugly way or
even a vulnerable way is stretching that kind of one-sided
definition into something way more complex, which I
like.

Do you have a favorite flower?

No, not really. There was a time
when I was interested in poisonous flowers and what they looked
like—it turns out they’re beautiful just like most other flowers,
so in my work that led me to more thinking of these flowers as the
expression of a feeling rather than a real thing. As for real
flowers, I wouldn’t even say I know that much about
them!  

How do you know when a work is finished? And what do you
think makes a painting good? 

I have a painting on my wall
right now that I believe I finished six days ago. It stays on the
wall until I feel like I can live with it and my eye doesn’t keep
getting stuck in one area in a bothersome way. It’s intuition and a
sense of not going overboard or not giving away too much and being
just enough and still great. I have to trust myself about when to
stop. 

What makes a painting good is
tough. This painting I’m looking at right now is fine, but I think
that maybe a painting I made two weeks ago might be better. I don’t
necessarily know why. Maybe it’s the color, or maybe the
composition is too easy, or too complicated.

When you do something every
single day, like exercising, you become more attuned. With
painting, your sense of color gets heightened and the sense of
composition gets really specific. It turns into something that’s so
natural that it’s hard to explain, but you just know. That said,
sometimes other people see things I don’t—there are paintings that
I don’t think are that special and my boyfriend will be like, “Oh
that one’s really great.” So with all things, we can be our best
and worst critic. 

Your boyfriend is also an artist. Do you think that
affects your practice if at all?

I never really wanted to date an
artist because I think we can be kind of complicated. But Austin
and I are the exact same person in so many ways. We’re both crazy
workaholics and that works out well for both of us. Even when we
are traveling we have to bring our supplies and are drawing every
day. I feel like with somebody else it could be an annoyance, like
why are you always at the studio? And it’s fun to have somebody to
go with you to all the things you love.

Do you have a favorite object in your
studio?

I have so many supplies and
there’s nothing I couldn’t do without but there are certain
paintbrushes that I have that are so bent and the hair is all
furry. I use these for specific kinds of areas. You can’t buy a
brush like that because it’s basically trash—but sometimes I know
how to use those trash tools to my advantage. So you could say I
have a collection of really nice brushes to really not so nice ones
and that’s good because I can play all those notes—that range is
probably my most prized studio possession. 

Let’s end on my favorite question: If you could own any
work of art, no limitations, what would it be and
why? 

I think about this a lot
actually and had a big discussion with some of my other painter
friends about this. For me, it’s Matisse’s Red Studio. It might be predictable, but I can’t stop
thinking about that one—then there’s none other. There are a
million amazing paintings that I would live with, too, but that’s
my number one.

The post ‘Landscapes Opened a Whole New World for Me’:
Artist Shara Hughes on How She Subverts the Tradition of Flower
Painting appeared first on artnet News.