For his eleventh exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery in a span of some twenty-eight years, Philip Hughes has returned on several working visits to a region he describes as his first love and still favourite subject: the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Most of these visits, involving much drawing en plein air, took place during autumn and winter, the colours of which dominate the paintings, many of these executed in part or wholly in the expressive new medium of aquacryl the artist developed in 2001/2002 to do justice to the conditions of light he found in painting Antarctica.

Five areas have furnished material for the exhibition which centres on themes at the heart of so much of Hughes' work: sites where remains in stone survive from Britain's earliest civilisations and the positioning of these within the land, and, often relating to this, the structure of certain landscapes distinctively shaped by their geology.

Around the village of Kilmartin in Argyle cluster groups of old monuments: stone circles, spirals, alignments of standing stones, laid out like vast maps, alongside rock carvings and tombs associated with the earliest kings of Scotland. These stones, eloquent still of a sense of sacred use and atavistic mystery (William Packer), Hughes has interpreted in characteristically austere paintings, as well as large-scale drawings recalling his memorable work at The Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire now in the Collection of the British Museum.

On the islands of Orkney, some twenty miles north of the Scottish mainland, Hughes worked on the larger island, Mainland, in a landscape distinguished by a curious intermixing of inland loch and sea loch, producing an intense, reflected, low light which rakes the standing stones. Here he returned to Skara Brae, the megalithic village with dwellings which convey still an idea of living conditions five thousand and more years ago. At Stenness he drew beneath stones some as high as the largest at Stonehenge and the Maes Howe complex with its large circular mound and chambered interior passageway. Twenty years on from Hughes' first visit to Orkney, these works echo and develop themes he explored on canvas at that time (now in the Collection of the Bank of England).

The artist's third destination was the dramatic hill country of Assynt in Scotland's furthermost northwest. In this landscape formed from Lewisian gneiss, rock half as old as the earth, belonging in geological terms more properly (and uniquely in Europe) to the coastal landscape of eastern North America, the predominant colours are white, pink, black and a distinctive shade of green . Against this background almost sheer outcrops of Torridonian sandstone shaped by the ferocity of the elements jut out as giant red and yellow protuberances.

In the heart of the highlands, forming a watershed between east and west, lies an extensive plateau of granite, which is Rannoch Moor. This harsh rock base explains the severe vegetation, for the most part a peat bog, with many small pools and burns. Two hills dominate: Buachaille Etive Mor to the west, guarding the entrance to Glen Coe and Schihallion to the east. A series of visits to this region have yielded the largest harvest of paintings in the exhibition, including two major works on canvas, worthy successors in their strength and serenity to the large-scale canvases arising from Hughes' experiences in the southern polar regions.

A fifth group of new paintings come from the island of Jura, with which Hughes first became acquainted when working in the mid 1990s on nearby Islay. On the long coastal walk he undertook at that time, the island's curious configuration of hills known as the Paps were his constant companions. Now Jura's distinctive profile is still seen from some distance, this time from the Mull of Kyntyre, from Knapdale and finally from the mainland, forming by way of a valediction to Philip Hughes' most extensive celebration of Scotland's Islands and Highlands in the west.

Biography

PHILIP HUGHES was born in London in 1936 and studied at Cambridge University. Self-taught as an artist, his vision has been shaped by extensive travel linked to a preoccupation with the structure of landscape and the archaeology of ancient cultures across six continents. In 1975 he spent a year in the Andean countries of South America and in Provence in Southern France. Over the past twenty years he has made working visits to Zanskar in the West Himalayas, and the sites of importance in aboriginal cultures throughout Australia, the pre-Columbian ceremonial from Cholula to Palenque and Monte Alban in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala and a number of Anasazi sites in North America.

Philip Hughes has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1979 and has held eleven one-man exhibitions there, besides participating in the Gallery's group projects from The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (1991) to The Piero Trail (1994). He has also exhibited regularly in France, including an exhibition in Paris devoted to his work in Australia over twelve years and in 1990 was given a retrospective by the Museum and Art Gallery, Inverness. In 1998/9 a major retrospective of his work over some thirty years toured public galleries in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. In 2000 he showed The Tin Route at the Tate Gallery St. Ives, the exhibition subsequently travelling to The Musée du Châtillonais, Châtillon sur Seine and the University of Lecce (Galleria Memmo, Lecce, Apulia). The Elysian Garden: a cycle of lithographs with associated paintings was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2001.

From 1988 until to 1992 Hughes served as a Council Member of the Royal College of Art and from 1990 to 1996 he sat on the Board of The Design Museum. From 1996 until 1999 he served as Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, the first practising artist to hold this position.

Paintings by Philip Hughes feature in The Ridgeway, Europe's Oldest Road: paintings from the Francis Kyle Gallery with an essay by Richard Ingrams, published by Phaidon Press in 1988. In 1997 he created a cycle of lithographs to accompany Carmen Boullosa's epic poem The Elysian Garden, subsequently acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Patterns in the landscape: the notebooks of Philip Hughes with a forward by Glen Murcutt was published by Thames and Hudson in 1998. In 2003 Hughes collaborated again with Carmen Boullosa to produce lithographs for The Jump of the Manta Ray, a limited edition livre d'artiste, acquired by The British Library, The Library of Congress, Washington and other public collections. The British Museum purchased an original work by the artist for its Permanent Collection in 2003. In 2005 he participated in the acclaimed theme exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery; Lair of the Leopard, and in 2006 he participated in a theme exhibition there ; Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and His World by twenty-five painters today.

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Patterns in the Landscape: The notebooks of Philip Hughes
£24.95, Hardback
(128 pages with 76 colour illustrations)

An intimate glimpse at the personal relationship Philip Hughes shares with landscape, this hardback volume presents work from Hughes' notebooks reproduced in full colour, providing a fascinating insight into the practice of this unique painter. This book also features a foreword by Glenn Murcutt.

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