■ Terry Hughes offers the tactile — and the unique — as Plein Air Gallery artist of the month

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

We all wish that we could do what we love. That we could follow — like Terry Hughes, this month’s featured artist at the Benicia Plein Air Gallery — our passion.

“Painting is my passion,” said Hughes, a longtime Benicia resident. “Over a 30-year time frame, I’ve developed a lot of clients and a lot of friends. So, basically, it’s not work.”

Hughes is well known in Benicia, especially for his series of large animal paintings. But as artists change over time, even those familiar paintings have evolved, he said, becoming more abstract as the artist has embraced impressionism.

Hughes got his start doing figure drawing — of humans, not animals — with a group in Crockett. “From there, ten years ago, after about a year of sketching, I said, ‘You know, I’d like to take a painting course,’ because I didn’t do that in college … although I was always sketching and doing watercolors in my travels.”

He took a weekend painting class from Benicia’s Nikki Basch-Davis, propelling him into the world of plein air. “Which was kinda neat,” he said. “I’m an outdoors kind of guy and there’s a lot of historical things in Benicia which I was always intrigued with anyway. After living here for 40 years, you can’t help but learn a little bit about the history of Benicia.”

His work in the plein air style eventually led him to take a class with another fixture in the Benicia art scene, Jerrold Turner. “Jerry Turner introduced me to the palette knife,” Hughes said. “That propelled me further into developing a style of mainly using the palette knife with broad strokes of color.”

With the palette knife, Hughes lays on thick strokes of paint that take at least a month to dry properly before the work can be hung at a show.

And once the paintings are up, that thick layer of paint draws not only the eye, but the hands. “I don’t mind people coming up and touching the paintings,” Hughes said. “I think that’s cool, to be able to touch the painting, especially with the thickness of the paint.”

The paintings are more suggestive than realistic — Hughes calls himself “impressionistic.” His style “allows the onlooker to determine in their own mind what (a painting) is,” he said, an effect he enjoys so much that “as a result, probably in the last year or so I have gotten a lot more abstract.

He explained his method. “You start with a blank canvas with some kind of color on it, and without knowing what you are going to do you apply color until you find something that intrigues you, and then you follow it.

“Probably that’s the hardest type of media to deal with, is nothing. How do you make something out of nothing? And when you’re through, it’s still nothing — but it’s pleasing to the eye.”

He also enjoys the satisfaction of a piece reaching someone in a way the artist did not expect. And while each reaction is singular, so too is each work of art.

“That’s the feeling I get, the satisfaction I get when somebody looks at something I’ve done and says, ‘I see that in there,’ and it’s something that I never even imagined.

“That’s the fun part about painting — you never know, really, what you’re going to get. It’s the first time anybody’s done that just like you’ve done it. Nobody’s done it the way you’ve done it, each time you do it. That’s part of the artist’s mystique, is to know you’ve done what no one else has ever done.”

The artist Hughes could go anywhere from here. “I have a lot of ideas for painting,” he said. “I want to venture out. What I’d like to do is be in a gallery in Santa Fe, or have a one-man show in New York. It’s a matter of time and being lucky.”

IF YOU GO:
The public is invited to view the work of Terry Hughes at an evening reception at the Benicia Plein Air Gallery, 307 First St., on Saturday from 5-7 p.m.