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.
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.)