Glyn Hughes 1931 - 2014

131 During the period 1960–1970, Glyn continued to use earth colours, but his work progressively became more abstract and more personal. Some of his paintings were shown in the New Vision Centre Gallery in London in 1964. The exhibition was well reviewed but Glyn says “practically all the work ended up in a shed in Wales”. There it stayed (along with some other work that he acquired from friends artists in England – like Roger Hilton whom he met at Newlyn in the early 1960s and kept in contact until the early 1970s) until almost two decades later when it was brought back to Cyprus and successfully exhibited at Diaspro Art Centre in Nicosia. In September 1960, Glyn joined the staff of the English School in Nicosia, where he ran a mixed youth club for discussion –the first of its kind in Cyprus– known as the “63 Club”. Its patron was Glafcos Clerides, later to become President of the Republic of Cyprus. Making use of a large studio at the school, Glyn also started an art activity for adults from all communities, called “Do Something”. Among his other pursuits, Glyn Hughes was writing an arts column for the English-language newspaper Times of Cyprus . In fact, according to the artist, right after the declaration of the independence of Cyprus, he travelled to London and covered a major exhibition at Tate, only to find when he returned that the paper had folded! Glyn did not, in his words, “just stick to painting”. Before he began designing for the professional theatre in the 1970s, he had had long years of experiment and experience of theatre production in and outside his teaching career. He remembers being mistaken for a waiter (wearing his first and only white dinner jacket) at a colonial amateur theatre group in 1957, but was soon asked to join. Having designed their set for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night , he had to have it moved to “Wolseley Barracks” by horse and cart because it was thought unsafe at the first venue. School productions were often ambitious – at the Junior School, he used pupils, parents and friends in Let’s Make an Opera and later, in the 1980s, he impressed the audience by having the actors perform Samson and Delilah on skates! He wrote for adult productions in his studio – Underpant Land and O Englezos , for which he used puppets based on a Cypriot naive wood carving, an image which has reappeared in paintings and much later in his designs for Brecht’s Baal ; he also co-founded “Downstage”, which performed in the town. For the senior students, he wrote Mfanwy (a mime set in Wales) and Lost , about cross-cultures and influenced by Lorca’s Blood Wedding . The first ten years of the Republic of Cyprus [1960–1970]