“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.

The Blends paintings celebrate diversity in humanity through the sensitive appreciation of muliplicities in identity. This project is ongoing, with 45 paintings completed to date. The series began as a way to explore the artist's own multi-culturalism as a uniquely blended individual, along with the intention to collect and portray narratives from friends and acquaintances. An abstract endgame begins with content as the paintings develop from solicited lists and stories of real peoples’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds and experiences. The blended histories of people allow consideration of 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 in joining these parts into harmony. In this way, the pieces are constructed composite “portraits” comprised of colors and shapes that combine visually to create a new and complex identity. Paintings are exhibited with the corresponding stories. (In some cases the stories presented here may show only in part due to the paragraph allotted space.)

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.

In this series I am building illumination through the use of material form, responding to observations of glowing of light from different worldy and environmental sources. I utilize collected imagery and memory of events to create compositions that develop a real sense of light through the use of paint. Some of these images, however abstracted, look at the gathering of people assembled in candlelight vigils, holding flames for healing, memorializing, and celebrating life. As an artist I most often work in isolation, but am affected by contemporary events and my place within them. Themes I regularly work with include the movement of peoples, immigration, and migration; the assembling of groups for protest, vigil, performance, and demonstration, corresponding to major events that move us to action; and environmental movements and changes that encourage us to think about our human impact. I am working to find a connection to others through the rendering of light in these compositions.
It is a slow process to make these works, layering color on top of color, anticipating the movement of the paint under my hand, balancing control and chaos, allowing discoveries as the shapes overlap and come into being. I shut the studio door each night to let the shapes cure and at every next session the paintings reveal to me a confrontation of new choices. Painting as an activity is both beautiful and hard, but gives connection of the artist to everything in the world at large. 

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.

The paintings in this grouping are informed by the expansive experience of a place as one is engaged with the marking of time through the witness of subtle changes in light, shape, and color. Broadening on processes in other portfolios, this work explores the limits of all four edges of the painting, expanding the fields of vision as opposed to drawing inward toward a collection of bodies. This imagery is influenced by interactions with nature, creating paintings with no horizon lines, and the only spatial orientation being the movement within the composition and the interplay between forms and forces. These are painted on a flat surface with a liquid medium, and so the painting is an immersive act where the artist disrupts the plane with an assortment of thoughts and then begins to coax out references by relying on memory of color, shape, and light.

Typical of this artist's work in watercolor, but unique in her ouevre for scale and execution, the 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.
Also in this project are works on paper that were made in partnership with the landscape. 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. This body of work is in development for a public project to be held in 2023 in collaboration with a new musical composition written by a local percussionist in response to one of the drawings.

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.)

Considering concepts of identity in our current state of things, I have 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

We often find ourselves faced with addressing the differences between people, via identity, politics, economic stature, family origin, and more. Considering these topics, real entwined thread, or pulled lengths of wool, in the Common Threads paintings are a metaphor for commonly shared experiences bridging these different identity issues. Shared experiences bind people and their histories together in intimately interesting ways. I am working to use these links and metaphoric threads as a means to find common ground and harmony.