Elaine L Hughes

Elaine L. Hughes holds a Visual Arts Certificate from the University of Alberta, Faculty of Extension, having graduated with distinction in 2018. She now lives in Victoria, BC, where she is an Exhibiting Member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, exhibiting in both local shows and their gallery on Granville Island, Vancouver, BC. She was an Associate Member of the Coast Collective, where she exhibited regularly and taught workshops, until their closure due to Covid-19, then spent three years as an exhibiting Member of the Metchosin Artpod Collective from 2020 through 2022. Hughes works primarily in watercolour, and has participated in many group exhibitions in both Edmonton, AB, and the Victoria area, including both the Sooke Fine Arts Show and the Sidney Fine Art Show. Her paintings are post-impressionistic in style, and are characterized by strong values, intense colours, and variety. Her art is dedicated to showing the forms, moods and beauty of the natural world.

My journey as an artist began in childhood, with a profound love of both crayons and nature. In my world back then, all that was beautiful was of Nature, and in my grandfather’s studio I first learned to draw using brittle sticks of vine charcoal. All that is beautiful in my world is still of Nature, and I use my art to try to express the glory and the spirit of life on this planet, our home. I refer to my landscapes as post-Anthropocene, as I focus on the beauty that will somehow outlast our current destructive era. The pressures of human habitation on our world are now immense and dispiriting, but we resonate with a distant memory of a different and happier world, and can envision its blessed return. “Art is a path on which we honour our world.” - Robert Genn