Birds and buoys
Laura Gascoigne
Nigel Hughes: Maritime Still Life Paintings St Barbe Art Gallery, Lymington, until 10 June Curassows, Guans and Chachalacas The Fine Art Society, from 7 to 22 June You learn something every day, so the saying goes, though these days it rarely happens in a gallery. But at the Fine Art Society next week, ignorant visitors will learn that curassows, guans and chachalacas are not — as Jade Goodie and I would have supposed — Latin American liqueurs, percussion instruments or dances, but genera of the large forestdwelling bird family Cracidae, the most endangered bird family in the Americas. They will also learn, from the life-sized oils of Nigel Hughes, what 40 species in the family look like.
Hughes is justly proud of being the first artist to have drawn all 50 species of these neotropical birds — colourful cousins of our domestic turkey — from life. Over the past 12 years, he has undertaken 14 field trips to South America to study living specimens in the wild, or to track down rare survivors in captivity to local zoos and rural chicken runs. But, although his botany is as accurate as his birds, Hughes’s art is closer to theatre than natural history. His subjects are posed dramatically in pairs against breathtaking backdrops of distant mountains, rivers and lakes, their forest habitats alternately lit by the blue misty light of early morning or the warm green glow of late afternoon. There’s something of the scene-painter and lighting man about Hughes; there is also something of the props man about him, as a very different show at St Barbe Art Gallery, Lymington, reveals.
Hughes’s Maritime Still Life Paintings are an historical record of another, manmade species in decline: the solid items of nautical engineering that have defined the character of our docksides for generations. For years Hughes has collected drawings in sketchbooks of buoys, anchors, sinkers, shackles, snatch-blocks, capstans and propellers, and recently he began to assemble them on quayside ‘shelves’ into slightly surreal jumbo still-lifes. The results are shipshape, but most definitely not Bristol fashion. Uniquely for marine paintings, there is almost no sea; but there is plenty of weather, coastal light and salty breezes to bleach the paint and rust the rivets of these sculptural forms. In terms of subject matter, Hughes’s two shows could not be more different, but both are meant as memorials to what he sees as ‘splendidly overdesigned’ creations about to be washed up on the tide of history.
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