Edward John Hughes CM OBC (February 17, 1913 – January 5, 2007) was a Canadian artist.
The primitive style makes nature look like stage scenery.
My goal is to make all my paintings clear and realistic, even more understandable than a photograph.
I try to do much of the necessary alteration on the black and white [cartoons] rather than leave it to be done on the paintings.
I am trying to get my paintings a bit lighter in tone, as some of my recent oils have been mistaken for night scenes.
I feel that when I am painting, it is a form of worship. I see how wonderful nature is and how wonderful art is. . . and by trying to produce these works of art, I feel that I am just showing my appreciation of these creations.
As you can see, at my age - 48 - Art is still one big experiment.
It feels much better to me to think that an artist is working to show his appreciation of what already has been created than creating things himself.
Although not of the quality of my later work, I feel there is some quality to it [my early work] in an art sense, and probably some additional quality in a biographical sense.
At present I am using a good sized bedroom in the 2 bedroom house here as a studio, and it is large enough to step back from my canvases, and has a good north light. It should serve very well until I can afford to have the storeroom half of the back building lined and insulated and a chimney put in. That may be in about two years.
I felt landscapes would sell more readily, and not being equipped psychologically to be a teacher or commercial artist, that was important.
Worry, about the 'thousand and one' details entailed. My one-track mind has to be relieved of these worries completely or I cannot get started working on my paintings, or even get to sleep at night.
One of the main reasons I paint is because I think nature is so wonderful. I want to try to get my feelings of that down on canvas, if possible.
It takes more time to rework a painting than it takes to fill in the canvas in the first place. I wish I could get them all right with the first coat like many of the old masters could, but seem destined to have to rework to make them even passable.
I don't know just what, but there will have to be some drastic changes made besides cutting down on boating to get my mind more on painting.
It is a matter mostly of having the time to spare from my finished paintings to put in on travelling and sketching out of doors.
I was doing something that the officials or art commission probably didn't consider important. . . I was experimenting with different kinds of realistic art, impressionism and the more decorative compositions of different forms of painting, which took away from the earlier photographic realism that I was doing.
The small figures that appear in my paintings are there only because they were there when I was working from nature on my preliminary sketches with pencil.
I hope my work isn't dismissed by the critics as illustration or photography.
It is definitely mostly due to the invention of the camera that all this design and emphasized paint quality have come into painting.
It is. . . treading on dangerous ground to paint the picturesque as I am at times doing.