|
Nigel Hughes has been a soldier, cattleman in Argentina and chartered land agent in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (latterly for the National
Trust). In 1977 he attended the Royal Academy Schools in London during the keepership of Peter Greenham.
Since then he has painted, sculpted and designed (mainly buildings and other structures) and has been involved in the layout of spaces associated with his buildings. There have been designs for murals and for metalwork such as gates. Over the years, he has visited the best traditional ironwork in Britain, France, Spain and Italy, and this has informed much of his own work. His recent sculptures are silhouette statues in steel, in the manner of the 18th century trompe l'oeil pieces which pretended to be lead statues, which themselves were pretending to be white marble. They are a relatively inexpensive way of achieving a strong effect. See virtual gallery.
Interested in the area long before he became a painter, he revisited Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize in 1982, to embark on a series of watercolours on Maya Monuments. That series concluded, he began to record as oil paintings all 50 species of the neotropical bird family cracidae (which contains curassows, guans and chachalacas). The range of this family, the most threatened in the Americas, is from northern Argentina to Texas, although the northernmost curassows and guans are not found above south-east Mexico. On the strength of this work** he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London in 2003, and in 2006 a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He is a trustee of ProAves, an NGO working for conservation in South America.
The other main lines of his painting work are large watercolours of designed landscapes, romantic landscapes with figures (oil paintings) and, most recently, large maritime assemblages*** [see virtual gallery].
His one-man showings have been mainly in London (most recently, twice at the Fine Art Society Ltd.) but also in Ireland, Scotland, Mexico and New York. He also participates in group exhibitions.
Publications
Maya Monuments. Text & illustrations by Nigel Hughes (Antique Collectors' Club 2000); in partnership with José Vicente Rodriguez and others, Paujiles, Pavones, Pavas & Guacharacas (Conservation International, Bogotá 1995).
In progress : Catching Curassows ; The Triumph of Love
Illustrations in : The Art of Mesoamerica by Mary Millar (Thames & Hudson); The Greater Perfection and Un Jardin Extraordinaire by Francis H. Cabot; Gallimard editions of Robinson Crusoe and Conrad's Fortune; Alan Fluckey's trans. of Los Bandidos de Rio Frio; Cultura y Ciudades Mayas de Campeche by Román Piña Chan (State of Campeche)
- - -
* exhibited at National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico in 1988 and by the Mexican Embassy at Canning House, London in 2000.
** exhibited in part 2003/4 at Copenhagen University Museum of Nat History and Oxford University Museum of Natural History. All of them shown at Missouri Botanical Gardens and Houston Museum of Natural Science 2005/6 and June 2006 at the Fine Art Society plc in London.
*** shown May/June 2006 at St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Lymington, Hampshire
Back to Main Page