June Hughes sees art as a complex fusion of intellect, intuition and empathy. She studied Fine Art in Florence after university, where she fed her mind with the glories of the Italian Renaissance and felt inspired by the power of colour in the hands of an artist. Since then, she has been instinctively drawn to cool palettes with soft dreamy tones, spiked by touches of vibrant colour, acting as a counterpoint, pulling the viewer into the painting.
Her still lifes depict domestic interiors absent of people, yet seemingly imbued with their presence. Clues about their lives are everywhere but looking deeper we discover another world inhabited by their possessions. The ceramics in her paintings are decorated with polka dots and trefoils, which turn out to be small faces floating in cloud-like halos. These domestic settings are alive with objects which seem to have a life of their own.
“Imperfection in art pleases me. An intriguing imbalance in composition, to my mind, adds to the mystery of the still-life genre. It’s a personal approach – difficult to unpack, or put into words exactly, but summed up with a feeling that things are ‘just so’.”
June credits the slow pace of lockdown; the silence, after years marked by the delightful, noisy chaos inseparable from raising six children, as the catalyst that led her to pick up a paintbrush and “give it a go” for the first time.
“The results have taught me so much, bringing new challenges and great joy."