Work samples

  • Finding the Mountain Path
    Finding the Mountain Path

    Finding the Mountain Path, Oil and resin, acrylic on wood, 48 X 48”, 2024

Share:

Facebook Twitter Share

About Farida

Baltimore City  

 

Farida Hughes (b. New York) explores sociological themes through vibrant color and translucency. Her paintings and interdisciplinary works are an abstract language of the layering and bridging of worlds that formalistically reflect her lived experiences and the merging of cultural and environmental effects. 

Hughes grew up in a mixed South-Asian Indian and German-American household in New Jersey, under the dual family influences of Indian city life, and New York state… more

View Farida's Resume
Jump to a project:

Infinite Movement

The artworks in “Infinite Movement” represent a metaphoric storytelling of human to human interactions in nature. As each layered color shape is an intentional mark, they allude to the activity of painting as much as the activity that is being depicted. Isolated forms are remnants of bodies that have occupied space. Intertwined layers depicting forms moving together are metaphors for relationships and experiences, punctuated with memories that come in and out of awareness as we are involved in a moment. In considering landscape, I contemplate our human role in a shared responsibility to the earth’s ecosystems that are connected through the endless movement of air, water, minerals, and living things.

My paintings and interdisciplinary artworks are luminous expressions of interconnectedness. Abstraction is my pathway to reflect on sociological themes. In this body of work I am focusing on finding joy with others in the simple interactions we have with nature. Bird watching, hiking on trails, and scattering and planting seeds are repeated or seasonal activities that influence my recent compositions. 

This work lies within the canon of color rich organic abstraction combined with my own interest in contemporary light art and time-based practices. Collected narratives and actual observation of human interactions influence spherical and stacked curvilinear shapes, streamlines, and a flowing composition. By mixing oil paint into epoxy resin I generate a slow build of lush, glossy surfaces, developing into moments of hiding, revealing, and merging as the underlying layers leisurely expose themselves. The artworks encourage emotional connection and participation through their vibrant palettes and glossy surfaces that change as the viewing angle changes. I utilizes the fluidity, transparency, and color harmonies of my medium to guide a metaphorical subject matter of interconnectedness which is felt before it is known.

Read more about this project

  • Finding the Mountain Path
    Finding the Mountain Path

    Oil, resin, acrylic on wood, 48 X 48”, 2024

    •

    • Inter-disciplinary Pieces

    The Breathe Box and resin screen pieces are natural extensions of the translucent properties of my painting practice. The Breathe Box is designed to simulate the arc of human breathing. When the viewer spends long enough with the piece their breathing will naturally sync with the artwork’s “breathing”. This is meant as a visual interpretation of what it is like to connect with another, and a manifestation of interconnectedness.

    In my resin screen piece, Delhi Light, I am investigating the jali screen in islamic architecture in all of its metaphorical implications: the emotional effect of the light it allows, the duality of the screen as barrier/passageway, protection and privacy, nature vs. artifice, the enduring yet fleeting passage of the sun, playing with metaphors of skins and perforations/holes. My artistic vocabulary mingled with gallery lighting creates an encompassing installation that exists at the intersection of nature and artifice, chance and control, interior and exterior worlds, climate change and comfort. 

    • Breathe Box, Green
      Breathe Box, Green

      Oil and resin on acrylic panel, custom light-box, LED lights, microprocessor, 12.5 x 12.5 x 4", 2024

    •

    • Below the Surface

    In this project are works on paper that were made in partnership with the landscape, and subsequently turned into a backlit light performance piece. The Below the Surface set of works began with direct rubbings using volcanic rock on lave fields, the results being drawings of perforations that let light pass through illuminating the directional flow of molten lava. The drawings are incorporated into boxes that are lit with LEDs and programmed with choreographed sequence designed by the artist. This body of work was created as a public art project held in 2023 in collaboration with a new musical composition written by a local percussionist in response to one of the drawings. 

    The immersive, hour-long performance of percussion music and responsive light-box art that is Below the Surface combines the creativity of Farida Hughes and Matt Keown. Their signature project represents the true spirit of collaboration as the two artists bring their respective disciplines together to create a dialogue between art and music. Sixteen perforated paper drawings made by Hughes on a lava field in Hawai’i show visible tracings of the paths of arrested volcanic activity. Situated in two long rows of custom-crafted light-boxes, the drawings pulse and fade between black and white and underlit vibrant colors as the performance proceeds. Keown’s music is scored for three specific instrumental arrangements consisting of found objects and various scrapers, marimba, and graduated drums. As the light-boxes dance, Keown’s intricate playing teases, echoes, and explodes, telling a story of creation, erosion and new possibility. Together, the artists create a live experience greater than the sum of the parts, suggesting that the boldness to act on creative impulse is necessary and reinvigorating in our post-pandemic world. Inspired by the unknowable power of creative volcanic activity, Hughes’ abstract art, animated by illumination, and Keown’s multi-movement percussion solo together present a multimedia experience reflecting on the ideas of nature, artistic invention, and collaboration.

    Read more about this project

    • Below the Surface, detail with hand
      Below the Surface, detail with hand

      Live image of person interacting with light-box, from "Below the Surface", Paper, mixed media, custom lightboxes, LEDs, microprocessor, 13 feet by 14 inches, 2023

    •

    • Blends, 2019–present

    “Hughes’s paintings are ravishing merely as color-blending exercises, but their layered depths have poignant human significance.” – Mark Jenkins in the Washington Post, exhibition review July 23, 2021.

    My Blends paintings celebrate diversity in humanity through the sensitive appreciation of multiplicities in identity. This project is ongoing, with 55 paintings completed to date, as a way to explore and celebrate multiculturalism. An abstract endgame begins with content as the paintings develop from solicited lists and stories of real peoples’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds and experiences. Anecdotes of blended histories offered allow me to respond in a painterly manner to memories, facts, and experiences that the abstract “portraits” explore through formal investigation: colors are distinct, but layered together they become new forms, and the paintings develop as I join parts into harmony. The pieces are constructed composite “portraits” composed of colors and shapes that combine visually to create a new and complex identity. Paintings are exhibited with the corresponding stories. (Note–In some cases the stories presented here may appear only in part due to the paragraph allotted space.)

     

    Read more about this project

    • Installation of nine Blends paintings
      Installation of nine "Blends" paintings
      Each of my "Blends" paintings display a composite portrait of the layers of an individual’s cultural and ethnic background, based on stories that I solicit and collect from friends and acquaintances. I respond to the anecdotes collected as I create each of the abstract paintings. This series began as a way to unwrap my own multicultural (South-Asian Indian and German-American) background, and subsequently grew to celebrate the unique blended-ness of each person contributing a story, and the effects of historical moments that the narratives inevitably present. Beginning the project in 2017, I continue to collect stories from new people, and grow this community of Blends. Using my abstract visual language in this way I aim to celebrate and value human difference. My artwork involves ideas of crossing boundaries, blending experiences, and celebrating a universal wholeness even through difference.
    •

    • Couples

    The diptych format intrigues me, both as a way to acknowledge and explore the two sides of my own ethnicity, and evolving to think about dualities within ourselves and bridges of connection between two people. I am also exploring the use of my medium by painting gestures that look immediate, yet are made of layered isolated pools of color with each mark carefully considered. In my diptych paintings I approach the idea of human connection and the intimacy between the movement of forms. 

    Considering concepts of identity in our current state of things, I had previously been exploring compositions in diptych format using abstract head-like forms paired as a couple but with gazes that do not include the other. The paintings are loosely informed by paintings of couples by David Hockney, which show a pair of individuals in a space together, but not necessarily including the other in their portrait. This type of image, to me, reflects on our current moment of isolation and inter-dependency. Are we as humans becoming more isolated, even as we become more intertwined?

    "Farida Hughes’ series of resin and oil paintings on wood panels feature eye-appealing blobs of overlapping colors — bright and fruity blues, yellows, reds and greens. From a distance, you might think the paintings are standard examples of corporate art, color and polish just for the sake of color and polish. Up close, however, the fluid shapes reveal themselves to be human head-like forms. She means these works to be “portraits” of a sort, though without eyes, ears and noses. Instead, they’re all emotion, thought, introspection. Layers and layers of those things. They’re lively, but also difficult." - Ray Mark Rinaldi, Special to The Denver Post,  Nov 23, 2019, on "Layers of Existence" at Walker Fine Art

    Read more about this project

    • Dancing in Light, Diptych
      Dancing in Light, Diptych

      DANCING IN LIGHT (Diptych, two panels), Oil, resin, acrylic polymer on wood, 60 x 72 x 1.5”, 2023

      Available for Purchase
    •

    • Auras

    • Terrace Party Conversations
      Terrace Party Conversations

      TERRACE PARTY CONVERSATIONS, India ink, oil paint and resin on wood, 36 x 36″, 2022

      Available for Purchase
    •

    • Seeing Through Masks

    The ceiling installation Seeing Through Masks was exhibited at the University of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota in the group show  “Between the Stripes, Under the Stars”, November–December 2022. The installation is composed of 30 hanging mask-like forms made of resin, paint, and found objects. The forms are positioned to be at, above, and below eye-level, and are configured in a circular pattern strung from a metal rack that is suspended from the ceiling. There are 3 entry points within the circular configuration, and visitors are able to walk inside the piece and participate in a “group” experience of inclusion, avoidance, covering, allowing, and many other actions or descriptions that it conjures up. Of the St. Paul installation and its invitation to the viewer to duck under and experience it from inside, poet and artist Hawona Sullivan Janzen said it is “…such a gorgeous metaphor of what it means to be a new person in a community and a culture.” These are experiences I aim to explore and replicate with a goal of eliciting introspection and empathy.
    • Seeing Through Masks
      Seeing Through Masks
      Resin, found objects, oil paint, dye, 30 pieces suspended from wound rack, ceiling installation, 60 x 60 x 40", installed at eye level with three entry points for viewer to experience from within, 2022
    •

    • Kindred Systems

    These works are composed with the notion that each individual is their own unique blend, but all are part of, and reliant upon, a larger system. All works in this project are made with oil paint and resin on panel with additional mixed media.

    • Little Discoveries
      Little Discoveries

      LITTLE DISCOVERIES, Oil paint and resin, acrylic, on wood, 40 x 40″, 2023

      Available for Purchase
    •

    • Blends, 2015–2019

    My Blends painting project began as a way to explore my multi-culturalism as a uniquely blended individual, along with the intention to collect and portray narratives from friends and acquaintances. Abstraction begins with content as the paintings develop from solicited lists and stories of real peoples’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds and experiences. The blended-ness of people creates interesting identity issues that the abstract “portraits” explore through formal investigation: colors are distinct, but layered together they become new forms, and the paintings develop as I join these parts into harmony. I explore edges where intentions slip and overlap, forming areas of rejection or incorporation, all with shimmering, saturated color and a glass-like surface that leans toward reflection. In this way, I am constructing composite “portraits” made up of colors and shapes that combine visually to create a new and complex identity. As the project progresses and I collect more stories I am seeing connection to a vast modern world history unfolding across a collection of intimate personal anecdotes. I acknowledge the voice of each individual story donor by presenting the story with the painting, only edited for grammatical consistency.

    Identity in our current state of things is becoming more complex, and so I believe it is increasingly urgent to consider. To me, identity is not one- or two-dimensional, but multi-layered. Our edges are not as defined as they were even decades ago. The need to allow for openness and empathy in our relationships with others is clear when we witness closed boundaries as a root of adversity. Using my abstract visual language I aim to celebrate and value human difference, in the hope that the more we appreciate and see each other’s uniqueness, the more effectively we can relate with one another to build a better world.

    The paintings in the Blends series are exhibited with the corresponding stories. (In some cases the stories presented here may show only in part due to the paragraph allotted space.)

    Read more about this project

    • Blend 23
      Blend 23
      Oil, resin, graphite on panel, 20 x 20", 2019 | "I'm half-Mexican and half-Irish… I lived in Mexico as a kid and moved [to the US] for first grade. I was back in Mexico [recently] and I ran into a woman who had not seen me since I was five years old. She watched me speaking with [my daughter and wife] in English, and blinked at me in amazement, saying, "the last time I saw you, you didn't even know *how* to speak English." It was a powerful reminder of how my life changed moving here. [My daughter] is a quarter Mexican, a quarter Polish, a quarter Irish and a quarter Scottish. When we landed in MN after being away, she saw her breath from the cold and said: "This is what home should look like." We are having very different childhoods."
    •

    • All Terrain

    The over-sized watercolor painting All Terrain took 3 years to complete. The 48 x 96" watercolor on canvas painting began on the ground on the bank of the Wisconsin River in 2016, using river water to dilute the colors, and the undulations of the sand underneath the canvas to pool and direct the color. It was continued in the studio in Minneapolis and Baltimore and completed in 2019. The piece was made to be oriented in any direction. The painting portrays an aerial view of an invented world but based on familiar land and water elements, with colors and imagery suggesting a movement of people through various terrains. In keeping with the artist's  ongoing interest in human relationships, collective movement, and migration, the piece alludes to a movement of people across a varying landscape.

    • All Terrain
      All Terrain

      Watercolor on watercolor canvas, 48 x 96″, 2016-19

      Available for Purchase
    •