E.J. Hughes, a realist in an abstract world
E.J. Hughes was out of step with the art world. When abstract art was all the rage, he painted idiosyncratic scenes of B.C., colourful works filled with ferries and tugboats, mountains and trees, rocky beaches and lush greenery.
Life wasn’t easy. Hughes was a meticulous painter, and never very prolific. Money was so scarce that he didn’t have a car until the late 1950s.
But eventually the world caught on to the charms of his work. Last year the 1949 Hughes painting, The Post Office at Courtenay B.C., sold for $1.593 million at a Heffel auction.
Today Hughes is B.C.’s secondmost famous painter, behind only Emily Carr. Only eight Canadian painters have sold art for more than Hughes’ top-selling work.
Edward John Hughes was born Feb. 17, 1913, in North Vancouver and grew up in Nanaimo. He attended the Vancouver School of Art, and after graduation formed a mural company with his friends, Orville Fisher and Paul Goranson.
The high point of the trio’s collaboration was a mural of B.C. scenes they painted for the B.C. pavilion at the San Francisco World’s Fair in 1939. But when the Second World War broke out, they all became war artists, painting the Canadian Forces.
Hughes got out of the army in 1946, bought a cottage at Shawnigan Lake near Victoria, and decided to try his hand at being a full-time artist. He worked with paint and canvases he was able to keep from his years as a war artist.
In 1947, he was given the first $1,000 Emily Carr Scholarship on the recommendation of Lawren Harris. His big break came in 1951, when Montreal dealer Max Stern came across a Hughes painting at the University of B.C.
With the help of the RCMP, Stern tracked down the reclusive Hughes and visited his studio. Stern bought a dozen Hughes paintings for $500 and agreed to represent him at his Dominion Gallery.
Hughes later told Janet Martinez of the E.J. Hughes Gallery in Duncan that Stern arrived in the nick of time.
“I was thinking of either going back into the Armed Forces or becoming a postman,” he said. “That money paid my rent for a couple of months and let me keep painting.”
Stern’s support meant Hughes no longer had to worry about finances, and he was able to paint away on Vancouver Island, initially in Shawnigan Lake, later in Duncan.
His muse was the province, from the receding tide at Departure Bay to the Columbia River at Revelstoke, the waterfront store at Alison Harbour to the old Courtenay post office. He died on Jan. 5, 2007, a month shy of his 94th birthday.