Elinor Hughes with scenes from Akitio and the Ruahines at the 2014 Dannevirke Art Exhibition.
Elinor Hughes with scenes from Akitio and the Ruahines at the 2014 Dannevirke Art Exhibition.
“I’ve always ended up painting the thing I see every day – I don’t go around looking for fancy scenery. What you paint is what becomes exciting when you’ve looked at it a hundred times. That’s the difference between a painting and tourist postcards.”
So reads a discerning quote from Sir Mountford Tosswill (“Toss”) Wollaston, a significant 20th Century New Zealand landscape painter.
And well did this mantra apply to one of Dannevirke’s most noteworthy landscape painters of the past 50 years - Elinor Hughes who died in January.
Elinor Hughes paints at Dannevirke's Art Society Rooms in 2015.
Elinor – while not a painter in the modernist tradition of Woollaston – manifested a talent for celebrating what Dannevirke ;locals might routinely pass as the familiar.
Mundane and familiar? Not so for Elinor Hughes. With her brush strokes, she repeatedly reminded us that what we see as familiar, maybe “ordinary”, is our own special place of land, sea and sky.
Time for Elinor with a brush in hand at the easel was, for many years, a compromise; a balance between meeting the demands of a “day job” and family and indulging her talent and passion.
Invariably the landscape prevailed.
The Tamaki River and the Ruahines.
Time and again Elinor created her distinctive, stylised almost sculptural representations of the Ruahine Ranges and Akitio Beach. These were Elinor’s special painterly places.
She developed a wonderful life-long empathy for those ranges and that beach. She returned to them as key subject matter for her work. Mostly in oils and latterly in acrylic she portrayed the changing light, the character, ambience and mood of these places. Whatever the weather or season, Elinor understood them well, constantly reminding us of the splendour of our Ruahines and our Akitio.
A landscape painter of the older tradition, “Looking a hundred times” was key. Hours spent walking the beach, tramping the foothills – pondering the aspect, the passage of time. Exploring the geomorphology, the “bones” and forces that carve and shape our range and beach.
Carefully observing. Locking in the colours of land, sea and sky. Visualising the palette. All the time considering how composition could be stylised to capture the essence of place. “I always put triangular shapes into the landscape… it draws the eye.”
Elinor would name and memorise the colours: “Cloudy days were good for seeing colour up close.” These were life-long skills, constantly honed, skills that had been drilled in by a tutor when she was beginning her journey as a painter.
The Waterfall Clouds over the Ruahines.
These were also skills that Elinor willingly shared as a long-standing member of the Dannevirke Art Society over the past 50 years. Not only was Elinor Allen - as she signed her work in those earlier times - an award-winning landscape painter in her own right, she was also a particularly skilled, energised and motivating tutor who coached and encouraged many a prospective painter in the rudiments of the craft.
A life member of the Dannevirke Art Society, Elinor was always actively involved organisationally and administratively as well as in the “sleeves rolled up” housekeeping and maintenance work that was a hallmark of the club down through the years.
“You never get to the end of a subject if you paint it all your life,” Toss Woollaston was also recorded as saying. “You get far more out of it the longer you work at it.”
It is to be hoped local people will continue to appreciate that Elinor Hughes so often made our “ordinary” and familiar landscapes the recurring special subject of her work.
