“It’s an epic idea of pleasure, a landscape of flowers and bright orange bushes leading you down a long floral hallway to the horizon – almost as if you’re asked to willingly walk down the aisle to heaven.”
— Shara Hughes

 

Featuring American artist Shara Hughes’s signature electric colour palette, dizzying brushwork and shifting perspectives, the passionately cheerful Pleasure House (2017) is a paradisiacal example of Hughes’s internationally celebrated landscape series. The word ‘mindscape’ appropriately describes Hughes’s whimsical, dream-like scenes. Through immersing and detaching herself from the painting ⁱ, the artist concerns herself with bringing to life an imaginary and emotionally charged space that makes each piece an intimate and unique experience for both the viewer and herself.

 

 

 

Heavenly Delight

 

Referencing a myriad of artists that she admires, Hughes juxtaposes these elements are seemingly uncorrelated and mismatched, calling attention to her unique painterly intuition and feminine sensibility. The compositional emphasis of Pleasure House is the over scaled charcoal-coloured tree in the foreground, partially framing the scene. Its trunk becomes the left boarder of our view, while its willowy branch extends from top left to right. Spontaneous, staccato brushstrokes in the foreground suggests an intimate viewpoint that extends up towards the glorious blazing sun. Two rows of golden trees rendered with swirling clouds of butterscotch yellow, honey orange and chestnut brown in free-handed stokes plunge into the depth of the background, leading the viewer’s gaze to into a dynamic, fantastical landscape. In between them lie a green grassland comprised of dense, feathery strokes, and flowers in full bloom, rendered with lively dots of pink and red. The idea of immense pleasure radiates out of the image with life and warmth and is irresistibly inviting to anyone who wishes to immerse into this uplifting space of delight and joy.

 

 

 

For Hughes personally, the colour yellow marks a special phase in her life. She became spellbound with Joan Mitchel’s 1969 Sunflower after first seeing it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ‘That one changed my life for a long time’, the artist recalled during an interview, ‘… It goes in phases, but it was almost my entire life for like three years. Now that I think about it, I’m going to look again into that work.’ ⁱⁱ Ideas that stand the test of time have the capacity of blossoming into various depths of reality when revisited at different stages of one’s life. For Hughes, Joan Mitchell’s characteristic confidence that come through within the swirling explosion of yellow is one of those far-reaching marks that is embedded in her mind.

 

 

A Room with A View

 

Featuring a vertical composition favoured by the artist, the current example acts as a visual indication for the viewer to journey into the depth of the pictorial plane. Interestingly, it makes an evident reference to perspective paintings that are known for rendering a realistic impression of spacial depth, which is rare in Hughes’s oeuvre. The setting of looking from a particular point outward in the composition recalls classic paintings of window scenes that many famous artists across genres had explored over the span of their careers, such as Henri Matisse and David Hockney.

 

 

 

The compositional approach of this work, in which the canvas serves as window frame for the viewer to look ‘out of’, is very comparable to that favoured by David Hockney, as both artists plays with perspectives that draw parallels to theatrical scenes. In his 1965 Painted Landscape (Or Red and Blue Landscape) (Lot 12), Hockney frames the seascape with drawn curtains and raw canvas space around them. He decreased the impression of depth by employing geometric forms as substitute for figurative representations, and thus bringing the background from the pictorial plane to the viewer. The figure in white facing out at the window paves ways for an experience of differentiating between the foreground and background, the real and the abstract, which in and of itself is multidimensional and profound.

 

Both Matisse and Hockney have conducted their masterful explorations with colour and form in their own window scene depictions, the flattened and layered composition of which share conspicuous similarities with Pleasure House. Yet, having another possibility for interaction in mind when creating this piece, Hughes elevated the experience of space through a definite perspective to another level of intimacy and individuality.

 

 

An Intimate Viewing Experience

 

“Looking through a meandering vertical slot in a painted wooden partition, the view takes you through a forest of sculptural layers towards a vision of a paradisiacal garden.”  
— Dodie Kazanjian 

 

Pleasure House was the centre piece of the Rhode Island School of Design graduate’s installation at the Redwood Library Athenaeum on Rhode Island in 2017 (July 1 – September 21) — the same year when the work was executed. The inspiration for the installation, as the artist recalls, is ‘the idea of a church and an altarpiece, of walking up to something and having a special experience with it alone.’ ⁱⁱⁱ Intended for individual viewing, the work can be viewed through a meandering vertical slit in a painted wooden partition installed inside the 18th Century octagonal Athenaeum from the exterior. This playful thinly slot only allows one person to peek into a line of the painting that depicts a heavenly garden, placing emphasis on the deeply personal viewing experience that Hughes aims to deliver with her work.

 

“[My paintings] start from a place of playfulness. It’s usually about the material and color in the beginning, then they kind of evolve into psychedelic type spaces that almost seem to occupy your mind more than a real space.” 
— Shara Hughes

 

The space within and without Hughes’s paintings, in reality, is an arena that the artist prepares for colours, shapes and textures to collide and spark. In the Pleasure House installation, the sculptural elements the resembles design props on a stage, drawing attention to the theatricality of the work itself. The momentum generated by the movement of the golden trees in the work seems to be the stage curtains that are drawing apart, unveiling the story that was hidden prior to this moment and kindling an excitement for the unknown.

 

 

Trusting The Unknown – A Shift in the Creative Process

 

“If I had decided where the painting was gonna go, or how it would end up before I started the painting, it almost felt like, ‘what’s the point of making it?’ So being more of a painter and being active with the painting in it telling me where it’s gonna end up more than I control it, is important for me, and that’s what keeps me going with the work.”
— Shara Hughes

 

Beginning in 2014, Hughes’s move from painting dazzling symbolic interiors to whimsical landscapes marks a shift in her creative approach. The artist begins a landscape painting with no preconceived notion and an open mind, pouring, splashing, or dripping acrylics onto the canvas, leaving spontaneous marks, posing as a visual riddle for Hughes to paint her way out [iv]. What lies at the core of this poetically conversational and free-flowing process is the artist’s sense of security whilst facing the unknown: she releases herself from the constraints of maintaining control, allowing the organic development of colour and form to guide her along and become a co-creator of her work.

 

 

The artist talks about her creative process in her studio 

 

Collector’s Digest

 

In 2022, Shara Hughes’s solo exhibitions include Spotlight: Shara Hughes at FLAG Art Foundation, New York (March 12 – April 16, 2022) and Shara Hughes: Time Lapsed at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (September 17 – November 10, 2022). Her other recent solo exhibitions were held at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2021-2022), Shara Hughes: On Edge at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2021-2022), Shara Hughes, the artist’s first UK museum exhibition at Garden Museum, London (2021), Shara Hughes at Aspen Museum of Art, Colorado (2021), and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2021).

 

Hughes’ work is in the permanent collections of institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum Denver Art Museum High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and X Museum in Beijing.

 

 

ⁱ Shara Hughes, quoted in ‘Shara Hughes Gets Lost in Paint’, In The Studio | ArtDrunk, 20 February 2020, online

ⁱⁱ  Shara Hughes, quoted in Ian Alteveer, ‘Shara Hughes in Conversation’, Shara Hughes/ Landscape, 20 August 2019, p.24

ⁱⁱⁱ  Shara Hughes, quoted in Redwood Library & Athenæum Rhode Island, ‘Shara Hughes – Pleasure House’, 2017, online

^iv  Shara Hughes, quoted in Ian Alteveer, ‘Shara Hughes in Conversation’, Shara Hughes/ Landscape, 20 August 2019, p.9