Glyn Hughes 1931 - 2014

31 Glyn Hughes: The Cypriot foreigner Glyn Hughes (1931–2014) was born in the village of Hawarden in Flintshire, Wales, near the border with England. After taking lessons at Canterbury College of Art and getting involved in amateur dramatics during his military service in the RAF, Hughes applied to Bretton Hall College of Education in Yorkshire for a training course in teaching art and drama in junior schools between 1951 and 1953. 26 According to Hughes, it was at Bretton Hall that he found the right environment and stimulus to generate and develop his enthusiasm for arts. Although placed in a painting group of mature students straight from art school with the appropriate diplomas, he was not discouraged. Hughes used to say: “Looking back, I think my lack of provincial art training shoved me straight into modernism.” 27 Hughes subsequently taught in Castleford, the mining hometown of the famous English sculptor Henry Moore, and in the small provincial town of Holmfirth. It was at this time that he recalls first experiencing intense colour in paint – notably at a gallery in Wakefield, where “he saw a painting by Patrick Heron and an abstract in blues by an artist whose name he could not recollect.” 28 Teaching art and drama at Cobourg School in the Old Kent Road in London’s East End in the early 1950s, Hughes spent his free time meeting other artists, including Gillian Ayres, Harry (Henry) Mundy, Bernard Farmer and MalcolmMorley, and visiting exhibitions at major galleries (Barbara Hepworth, Piet Mondrian) and the smaller commercial ones, where he would catch up with the continental modernists. Hughes had friends from Bretton Hall in Cyprus, but he was also associated with the region in other ways: his uncle had died in Turkey in the First World War and his brother had served in Cyprus in the Second World War. Thus, in 1956, he accepted a post at the Junior School in Nicosia. Because of his family’sworking-class background, Hugheswas liberal and progressive, nurtured with socialist ideals. Furthermore, although he was an artist who never hid his preference for men, with the male nude forming the basis for many of his abstract works, he was never marginalized in the then introverted and conservative Cyprus; on the contrary, he was always accepted socially. In an interview he gave in 2008, he said: “My works are more political than erotic. But not political in the sense of Left or Right, although I lean towards the Left. I don’t know; on the one hand, I am politicised but, on the other, I’m not. I’m just an artist.” 29 Hughes’ eventual shift towards abstraction also had to do with his sexual orientation. In the same interview, he says: “I had realised my difficult role –that perhaps I was a homosexual– and this thought led to abstraction right away.” 30 One could imagine that Hughes’ abstract –and volatile– universe harmoniously embodied his homoerotic aspirations. On a slow voyage by ship to Cyprus in that same year, the first revelation was the light. Glyn Hughes always remembered “the acute angles of pinks and oranges in the late afternoon of an unpolluted era in Athens”, and reaching Cyprus at dusk, where olive trees seemed to reach right down to the road from Limassol to Nicosia. From then on, he lived, worked and painted in Cyprus. The island was not his second home; it became his home.