SALLY HUGHES SMITH ART OPENING
Friday from 5 to 7 p.m. at Shea Design, 6225 Old Poplar Pike, between Ridgeway and Massey. For more information, call 901- 682-2000. ies. She was commissioned to do the Charleston visitors guide cover, and she is the author and illustrator of a successful children’s book, “Rosebud Roams Charleston,” as well as the author of
“The Circle, A Walk with Dementia,” about her family’s efforts to cope with their late mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.
Her brother, Dr. Allen Hughes, a Memphis plastic surgeon and outdoorsman, is a wildlife artist and carver with a national reputation. Twice he has been named best in show in both painting and carving at the National Wildlife Show in Kansas City, the only artist to have done so. In 2006, his duck decoys were part of a Dixon Gallery and Gardens exhibit on the sporting art.
Jane Hughes Coble, dubbed “artist to the socials” by Nashville Arts Magazine, founded the Harding Academy Art Show, which has been held for 38 years and is a premier Middle Tennessee art event. She has had a number of one-woman shows and lives on a 300acre farm in Nashville with a view of the Cumberland River. She cites it as a major influence on her impressionist paintings.
Anne Hughes Sayle, of Lake Cormorant, Miss., is a painter, potter and mixed-media artist whose work includes fabric wall hangings for Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital and Hutchison School. She teaches art at Victory University in Memphis, and her work is offered at Harrington Brown Gallery.
The siblings have held art shows together in Nashville at Stanford Fine Art gallery and at Memphis Botanic Garden. (An October show also featured portrait artist Anne Trainer, daughter of Jane Coble.) The siblings trace their creativity to their encouraging and stimulating early home life.
Their father, the late Dr. James G. Hughes, helped found Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center as well as the Memphis Speech and Hearing Center and traveled the world as a consultant for the World Health Organization. Described as a man of boundless energy and enthusiasm, he was a decorated brigadier general, a writer and musician and spoke several languages.
Their mother, Jane Barker Hughes, also helped the hospital thrive through her work as president of Le Bonheur Club. She also served as president of Les Passees and The Woman’s Exchange and headed the drive for Shelby United Neighbors (later named United Way).
An accomplished painter herself, Jane Hughes had a show or two, but Smith said she didn’t teach her children to paint. “She helped us learn how to see,” she said. “She was aware of the world around us and helped engender an appreciation for beauty.”
“We were exposed to the creative life from birth by our father’s wonderfully imaginative storytelling and his poems and other writing,” Sayle added. “His sense of adventure and zest for life were great gifts.”
The siblings described a happy childhood growing up in Chickasaw Gardens where they spent a lot of time outdoors and were not “over-scheduled.”
Every night they had a sit-down dinner with their parents. “We talked about things, and they were interesting,” Smith said.
Smith said she was a typical insecure preteen, “not sure I was fit for such a fine family. ... But they believed we were great, and we were going to turn out great.”
The nature their mother helped them see seems to have planted seeds everywhere.
“I knew what a duck in flight looked like at sunrise,” said Dr. Hughes, an avid hunter. Not many get up in black dark and watch the world unfold unless they are a hunter or fisherman, he said. They see things others never do. “It gives you a huge emotional charge and excitement to come home and create in paint what you felt out there. It’s very fulfilling.”
Dr. Hughes now mostly carves decoys of wrens, goldfinches and hawks. “If it flies, I’m interested,” he said.
Carving is extraordinarily difficult he said. More difficult than plastic surgery. “But you can do what you want to with it and work when you want to,” he said.”
He said fiddled with art throughout his childhood. As a student at East High School, he designed the flag the school uses today.
Their mother encouraged them all to do whatever they liked, whether it was painting or football, he said. “But we never got the idea we were being encouraged. She was slick enough to make us think it was our idea.”
Smith studied fine art at Duke University and later took classes at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, but she said she did not become a committed painter until she was diagnosed in 1988 with ocular histoplasmosis, a serious eye condition that threatened her vision. The knowledge that she had better paint while she still could was hugely motivating to her.
“I am a disciplined painter. I don’t wait for the muse to come,” she said. She paints nearly every weekday, her scenes having come from Chickasaw Gardens, Charleston, the Blue Ridge Mountains and Europe.
When the weather is bad, she paints in her studio, “a big, yummy old room in a fine old Charleston house where there is no heat or air-conditioning or running water,” she said. The house is the Confederate Home and College, which now serves as an event site and provides artist studios.
But it has towering ceilings, heart pine f loors, a defunct fireplace, and her clock is the steeple of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church (built in 1761). “I love it,” she said.
Smith has hung a sign that says: “We’re walking in a sea of miracles.” She said her drive to paint comes from her desire to open the eyes of others so that they may see those miracles.