Skip to main content

The Paris Review Print Series: Shara Hughes

Shara Hughes, The Paris Review, 2023, etching with aquatint, spit bit, soft ground, and drypoint on Hannemühle Copperplate bright white paper, plate size 18 x 14″, paper size 27 x 22″. Made in collaboration with Burnet Editions. Photograph courtesy of Jean Vong, © Shara Hughes and Burnet Editions.

Earlier this year, The Paris Review released a new print made by Shara Hughes. Hughes, who was born in Atlanta in 1981 and works in Brooklyn, New York, describes her lush, chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees, and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as invented landscapes. The one she invented for the Review is striking in its rich color and vibrant dreaminess. We spoke to Hughes about her work this summer, touching on poisonous flowers, her unusual color palette, and landscape paintings.

Photograph by Elliot Jerome Brown, Jr. Courtesy of Shara Hughes and Pilar Corrias, London.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you find yourself drawn to botanical imagery and landscape?

HUGHES

Landscapes are accessible to most humans. Nature is something that is familiar but uncontrollable. I like the flexibility that painting landscapes provides—how quickly the mood can change. It feels really exciting and fluid. And the paintings can mimic people in a nonillustrative way. Like, a flower can stand on its own as a figure, or it can become a part of the whole scene. And I don’t have to be responsible for who exactly the figure is and what they look like. I don’t have to make a narrative about what the figure is doing in the landscape. Instead, I can ask the viewer to enter the landscape. Sometimes, they are the only figure there. This keeps the range of feeling and story vast.

Photo by Elliot Jerome Brown, Jr. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have favorite flowers to paint?

HUGHES

I don’t have a favorite flower to paint. And I’m not sure I care too much about what type of flower it turns out to look like. I do like symbolism and the meaning behind certain flowers but by the time I’ve finished the painting, it is not important to me if I’ve succeeded at rendering how that flower looks in real life. I’m more focused on the feel or the role of the flower within the painting. I wanted to paint poisonous flowers, so I researched what they look like. They look completely beautiful and no different than nontoxic flowers. If I want a flower to look toxic, it has to somehow feel that way when looking at the painting.

Photograph by Elliot Jerome Brown, Jr. Courtesy of Shara Hughes and Pilar Corrias, London.

INTERVIEWER

How do you choose the colors you’re going to use in a specific painting?

HUGHES

I don’t choose a specific palette before I start painting. It’s all intuitive and not predetermined. That keeps mystery and surprise in the process.

 

The Paris Review launched its print series in 1964 with original works by over twenty major contemporary artists. The series was underwritten by Drue Heinz, a literary philanthropist and former publisher of the magazine, and was directed by the American painter Jane Wilson, who also contributed a print. The series has since grown to include more than five dozen original works by acclaimed artists such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Marisol Escobar, and Sol LeWitt. MoMA purchased a full set for their permanent collection in 1967, and the series has been exhibited internationally. The print series was revived in 2022 with four prints by Rashid Johnson, Dana Schutz, Julie Mehretu, and Ed Ruscha. Hughes’s print is available for purchase, as are a number of the vintage prints.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/gGkfFqL

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more