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Lot Essay
A fantastical landscape of vibrant hues, theatrical forms and freewheeling imagination, Shara Hughes’ At Full Tilt (2018) is a thrilling spectacle. A thunderous sky of crashing blues, purples and yellows bursts with electric energy: jagged brushstrokes zig-zag down from the heavens, and a fork of lightning carves through a torrential downpour of paint at the upper right. At the opposite corner, a purple cloud hovers amid a sparkling, Pointillist haze of rainbow hues. Below, a landscape unfolds between two steep mountains overlaid with translucent, staccato strokes of umber, apricot and cobalt blue. A line of bright green trees plummets towards a faraway horizon of lake or sea, its plunging perspective in tune with the work’s vertiginous title. While her painting invokes the intense palettes of Fauvism and German Expressionism, Hughes does not share her forebears’ concerns with capturing sensual or psychological experiences of real places: instead, she conjures every aspect of her landscapes from her own mind, voyaging into mental topographies of feeling and fantasy. With its dynamic contrasts, dramatic weather and vast sense of space, At Full Tilt glows with the joy of exploration.
As befits her interest in inward states, Hughes’ earliest paintings depicted interiors. She filled imaginary rooms with symbolic objects, creating a playful vocabulary of personal emotion and biography within enclosed, dreamlike settings. Feeling restricted by these paintings’ sense of narrative, in recent years she has moved onto landscapes, which she says ‘opened a whole new world for me, one that was awesome and exciting’ (S. Hughes, quoted in K. White, ‘“Landscapes Opened a Whole New World for Me”: Artist Shara Hughes on How She Subverts the Tradition of Flower Painting’, Artnet News, 17 August 2020). Beyond offering an expansion of pictorial space, the flux of the natural world—its changing seasons and colours, its cycles of decay, death and rebirth—complemented the fluidity inherent to Hughes’ use of paint. From the sky’s stormy strokes of clashing colour to the stained-glass mountains and the soft, distant sheen of the water, At Full Tilt’s shifting textures push oil and acrylic in myriad material directions, with each passage of pigment carrying its own emotive gravity.
As a time-honoured subject, the landscape also allows Hughes to engage with the painting of the past, building layers of rich art-historical dialogue into her work. ‘I wondered how I could take something that is seemingly so known and make it mine,’ she says, ‘while still getting all the satisfaction of painting, and the history of painting, in one’ (S. Hughes, quoted in ibid.). In At Full Tilt, snatches and samples of different approaches to the genre combine in kaleidoscopic chorus. Fragments of Georges Seurat’s Pointillism, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s existential mountain views and David Hockney’s vibrant post-Cubist landscapes jostle with echoes of the abstracted visions of Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, which translated the earth’s scenery into powerful, energetic vistas of emotion, colour and movement. Taking her own headlong leap into unknown territory, At Full Tilt sees Hughes infusing the landscape tradition with a breath of fresh air.
As befits her interest in inward states, Hughes’ earliest paintings depicted interiors. She filled imaginary rooms with symbolic objects, creating a playful vocabulary of personal emotion and biography within enclosed, dreamlike settings. Feeling restricted by these paintings’ sense of narrative, in recent years she has moved onto landscapes, which she says ‘opened a whole new world for me, one that was awesome and exciting’ (S. Hughes, quoted in K. White, ‘“Landscapes Opened a Whole New World for Me”: Artist Shara Hughes on How She Subverts the Tradition of Flower Painting’, Artnet News, 17 August 2020). Beyond offering an expansion of pictorial space, the flux of the natural world—its changing seasons and colours, its cycles of decay, death and rebirth—complemented the fluidity inherent to Hughes’ use of paint. From the sky’s stormy strokes of clashing colour to the stained-glass mountains and the soft, distant sheen of the water, At Full Tilt’s shifting textures push oil and acrylic in myriad material directions, with each passage of pigment carrying its own emotive gravity.
As a time-honoured subject, the landscape also allows Hughes to engage with the painting of the past, building layers of rich art-historical dialogue into her work. ‘I wondered how I could take something that is seemingly so known and make it mine,’ she says, ‘while still getting all the satisfaction of painting, and the history of painting, in one’ (S. Hughes, quoted in ibid.). In At Full Tilt, snatches and samples of different approaches to the genre combine in kaleidoscopic chorus. Fragments of Georges Seurat’s Pointillism, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s existential mountain views and David Hockney’s vibrant post-Cubist landscapes jostle with echoes of the abstracted visions of Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, which translated the earth’s scenery into powerful, energetic vistas of emotion, colour and movement. Taking her own headlong leap into unknown territory, At Full Tilt sees Hughes infusing the landscape tradition with a breath of fresh air.