Exclusive Q&A by Brad Balfour
Coming to this year’s Volta Art Fair in NYC’s Chelsea art district, painter Paul Hughes made a big mark with his presence there. Situated in the Dublin-based Stone Step Gallery’s booth, Hughes was warmly welcoming since he has so much going with his work, especially in connection with the Irish community.
On October 3rd, 2024, Hughes will have an opening night of his “Green is a Myriad” series of paintings in support of UNICEF, at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) on Ely Place, Dublin.
His most recent series –– “Green is a Myriad” –– hangs at the Embassy of Ireland in Washington, D.C. Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason personally welcomed Hughes, underscoring the importance of his work in the cultural dialogue between Ireland and the United States. Said the ambassador, “I am delighted to have such an inspirational work displayed at the Embassy by one of Ireland’s most talented artists. Paul Hughes’ work and imagination reflect the diverse and modern Ireland that we continue to showcase here in the United States.”
Born in Dublin in 1966, Hughes’ parents emigrated to Ireland from Manchester in 1963. They both had Irish roots going back a couple of generations, but their real desire was to create a new life away from the “industrial” cities of Northern England. They always described themselves as the only people on the “Mail Boat” going from England to Ireland, versus the hundreds of Irish traveling the other way.
The world in the fabric and textile industries was in Manchester, but they wanted to seek out a country village life close to Dublin. They settled in the Blackrock area which was sort of a village that was way out on the outskirts of Dublin back then. Clean air, friendly people and roots from previous generations.
The artist grew up in Blackrock. He spent a lot of time around the Ringsend area as a kid playing football and he lived there into his early 20s. Then, after a few years abroad, he resettled in Blackrock with an instinctive need to be always close to the sea. Kenmare and that area has always been a very important place for him and his wife.
As Hughes said, “I loved the place, the greenness, the wildness, the beauty. I have working studios in Dublin and Templenoe just outside Kenmare. I have been painting forever. My work is definitely influenced by my relationships with the land, sea and sky and the meeting point of them. I’m obsessed by the Irish light, the darkness, the “ever-changingness,” the movement and the motion.“
The following email discussion emerged after meeting Paul during his stint at Volta. He looks forward to his return to NYC.
Q: How was the fair for you?
Paul Hughes: The Fair has been amazing. I rarely do fairs and if my work is in them with galleries I rarely, if ever, attend. I’m hugely shy. I’m obsessed about working and being in my studio working or out studying and staring. Volta in New York felt like it was important to attend, to be surrounded for a week by other artists and works from all over the world. It felt it was right to show New York that my debut there in early 2023 wasn’t a one-off.
I suppose if I want my art –– and what I have to say in my art –– to be seen by the world, then I have to be in the world. To feel the visceral reaction, engagement and involvement was fascinating. I was showing the very early first pieces of a new series called “Screaming for Joy.” I wasn’t sure if I was just being selfish and insular. Was I just talking to myself with them? So Volta was the perfect place to unleash it and suffer whatever consequences might happen. Volta was about ‘learning’ — learning about me and giving myself an experience that will make me better. On every level, it had been great. But now back to work.
Q: How is NYC different from the art world in Dublin?
Paul Hughes: Quite simply, all cities and places in the world are different. That is what makes the world wonderful. New York and New Yorkers are different from Dublin and Dubliners. I don’t ever purport to be or want to be “in the art world” in Dublin or Kenmare or New York. I’m just an artist, a painter, who works in this world. It will gain different reactions from people in different parts of the world. NY City is bigger, louder, straightforward, uncompromising and can be unsympathetic, but it’s very “human.”
Art is much more a part of everyday life. Massive works scream out of towering block. Streets are taken up with incredible galleries. Public art fills the streets. At every turn, there’s museums and galleries and institutions. In New York, I think I don’t see art as a private, intimate, delicate, minority sport. But it’s in and around there. It lives all the time. New York isn’t afraid of scale; when it speaks it speaks. People in New York find time extremely precious. So if they think your art is wasting their time, doesn’t impact or make a dent on them, or doesn’t bring them something new, they will be uncompromising in their dismissal.
In Dublin, the art world is much more hidden –– maybe even sort of reclusive –– struggling to find its place in the city. There are brilliant public art institutions and spaces but not nearly enough. The private galleries are low profile and I don’t think an ‘open relationship’ has been cultivated between private galleries and everyday people. So the art scene tends to be smaller and somewhat confined. There’s an “unknowing” — a fear — amongst everyday people, a fear of simply engaging. I think artists in Dublin are also more reserved and thus have a really hard time getting on to any walls, never mind big walls.
There is incredible talent in Dublin and Ireland, but not enough ‘stages’ and platforms. Big spaces are what is needed so that work can create big impacts every day of every week. But as I said, I don’t view myself as being in the “art world” or “art scene” in New York or Dublin. I just see myself as being the world and not a subset of it.
Q: Your work is not what most expect from an Irish artist; how did you happen in this direction?
Paul Hughes: Expectations, assumptions and presumptions are things I have huge issues with. These things hold us back. When we have them, it puts people in ‘boxes’ and categories and we go in with pre-set beliefs. And when the actuality is different, we feel uncomfortable. Expectations, assumptions, and presumptions for me serve no positive purpose. They are just limiters. They hold us back and undermine possibilities.
I am Irish. I am totally influenced by the natural world I surround myself with here, but I’m not trying to be an “Irish” painter. I’m just trying to express how my world makes me feel. If I set out to paint as an Irish painter somehow paints — or is expected to paint like other Irish painters — I would be coming from a place of limitation, of replication. The emotions I express, the feelings and reactions I seek to engender, are simply human and universal. I express them in this universal way. I am not trying to represent a place. I’m trying to capture the sense of what those places do to me, how they make me feel. And these are unbounded and uncared for by “place.” I just happen to be Irish working in Dublin and Kenmare.
Q: Talk about your art education. Did you ever do representational work?
Paul Hughes: In reality, I am self-taught. I studied art in school under John Coyle. I did a few NCAD night courses after finishing University where I studied English and Economics. My real creative education in some ways was playing football, learning to be driven, learning to constantly push myself. I was always painting from a young age, sharing work with friends. My work became more anti-physical and expressive as my football career ended. I founded a creative company with some great people which became hugely successful in time. These good people always gave me the freedom and space to continually push my work further and further.
I would say I am a living embodiment of the Malcolm Gladwell theory of the “10,000 hour rule.” My art development came through just continuously: relentlessly working and pushing and with an inability to settle and compromise. Nothing can ever be good enough for me. No painting or series of paintings has ever been my best or is my best because the next has to be that, and then the next after that. I am driven in my work practice by needing to enjoy and I derive enormous pleasure from the physical act of painting. You cannot bypass work you’re not happy with. You cannot stop when it’s going wrong. I have to paint through those periods because that is when I learn most. In many ways, all my works are some form of “self portraiture” as they are in essence “me.”
They are not visual representations of me. But rather a sense of what it would be like if you turned me inside out and could bare my soul, my inner being. Representational art is amazing. It doesn’t give me huge joy though and I desire joy in what I do. I don’t have the patience nor temperament for specific detail and locking my viewers into a set place. Rather, people tend to create their own sense of places from their own worlds. And my paintings are felt through their own experiences and emotions.
I suppose I’m well known for painting specific places like the Poolbeg Chimneys in Dublin. Or at times, the Kenmare bay area. But these are more like my own disciplinary practices to keep myself challenged.
Q: How do you decide how the colors should flow per piece, and how they’re arranged in a room?
Paul Hughes: The way I work is hugely instinctive and can be impulsive and in the moment. My process hasn’t changed ever really but the levels of intensity and physicality can vary. I’m driven by who I am and how I’m feeling at any given moment, and I have learnt over time to trust in my process. And key to that is being not in my head. Not being logical or prescriptive. Not what may make sense.
My studios and working spaces are set up in a way which can feel chaotic and unstructured to many, but to me all the chaos has a unique order. I may be surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of tubes of paints. But I get so involved in what I am doing and so truly intimate with the canvas that I instinctively and unknowingly grab color around me. Logic and questioning depart and trust and belief take over.
I have conversations with other artists in my studio and I’ve always listened and learned and pushed. When I am in “flow” I just feel what to do next. As important, if not more important, is the amount of paint I apply. And the direction and intensity of the brushstrokes and brush marks as I literally create color from color on the canvas. And the directions of the paint and the point at which where they clash and rush into each will mean that the colour will change as light moves across it, like the places we stare at in nature.
Light constantly moves between the land, the sea and the sky. The molecules also constantly shift and land moves into sea, sea into air, air into water and water into land, etc. They never are still, constantly in motion and mingling and I paint like that. It’s natural, it’s instinctive, and it’s like playing an incredibly intense match where you just get lost in it. I suppose over time you become subliminally in tune with where to go next and to believe in the attraction of opposites versus the “rules” of colour.
There are times I have painted to the point of collapse and laid down on the floor amongst my paintings. I’ve stared at my work and felt nothing, felt incomplete, felt useless. And there are times I’ve stared at a piece for hours unbroken wondering, “Why is it missing me?” I have also leapt up, grabbed a color and just created one long, lashing brush mark. Suddenly the incomplete and empty is now complete. I thrive in my space, I thrive in my heart and my gut, I wither in my head.
Q: Do you take approximately the same time to complete each piece?
Paul Hughes: Every painting is a complete individual. Every piece is unique and every piece drives you on in a different way. If it was mathematics, it would be an equation that somehow combined my mood and how I am with myself, how I’m feeling inside, my self-belief. What I have experienced and stared at. What moments are bursting to come back out.
I have often thought after an eight-hour session that “Fuck, yes! I just created that piece.” And then I leave joyously to return the next day, inevitably crushed and crestfallen that it is in reality only the prologue, the beginning.
Most of my pieces are created over a month or more, with time left during the process for settling, sealing parts with retouching varnishes, then going again and reacting to my ever-changing emotional state. The paintings will inevitably have the final say and tell me when they are done. They are the lord and master or mistress of my studio. I merely work for them!!! But time is a massive component without doubt. It takes time me to find the depth, the levels and the places I want people to jump into and get lost in. There is no shortcut. It’s just constant, constant work.
Q: Do you produce a lot in one burst or is the process more gradual?
Paul Hughes: I’m an obsessive painter. I crave the long hours and hard work. I need the intensity. I need the emotional highs and lows. I can be extremely explosive in developing work. And when I’m “in” –– and I mean really in and pursuing something I’m falling in love with –– it can go on continuously. Every day and all day for months. I’m lucky I’m surrounded by amazing people, friends, artists, advisors, and gallerists. But particularly my wife, Jenny. She knows when to step in and pull me out when I’m becoming destructive with my work. She also knows how and when to “push” me back in when I doubt.
I inevitably have to decompress every two or three months for a few days but then get back at it. There are paintings I leave aside for six months to a year if in a cul de sac and “thought” keeps rushing in. And sometimes it’s best to leave and go back to them after long, long breaks. Nature is wild and wondrous and unpredictable and in constant motion. I am that.
I just worked in blue for two years to confront my own issues and to reflect how the beautiful dark Irish light was. In fact, teeming with color. I now own the phrase “Bastard Blue.”
After hanging the first “Green is a Myriad’” in the US Embassy in Washington, D.C. (on permanent display.) I wanted to launch the series first in Ireland rather than outside the country. That’s where I’m from. I wanted the paintings to be seen first as a group in Ireland where they were born. I’m launching the series in the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts in Dublin in early October, in 100% support of UNICEF.
UNICEF identified with the work and the ideas and drive behind it. Again, a whole body of work in basically a single-color palette. It’s to try to create exactly what I feel about this unique place, Ireland, and how we need to understand its actual idea versus its presumed idea. The “Green Is A Myriad” painting is hanging in the Embassy in Washington. Two ‘”Green Is A Myriad’ paintings will be hung in the New Irish consular offices in the MetLife building this month.
For more info go to: www.paulhughes.ie, Instagram: @paulhughesgee