Glyn Hughes 1931 - 2014

69 Glyn Hughes was born in Hawarden, Flintshire, in 1931 and the family moved to Flint in 1935, where he went to the local primary school and later attended Grammar School at Holywell. After taking lessons at Canterbury College of Art and getting involved in amateur dramatics while doing his national service in the RAF, Glyn applied to Bretton Hall College of Education in Yorkshire for a training course in teaching art and drama in junior schools (1951–1953). According to Glyn, it was at Bretton that he found the right environment and stimulus to generate and develop his enthusiasm for the arts. Although placed in a painting group of mature students straight from art school with the appropriate diplomas, he was not discouraged. Glyn used to say: “Looking back, I think my lack of provincial art training shoved me straight into modernism.” At Bretton, he had “a wonderful and fruitful time painting, moving and acting”. The foundation lecture at Bretton Hall was given by Herbert Read (1893–1968), a significant art critic and one of the founders of ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), which was established in London in 1946. Glyn’s father had given him Read’s Icon and Idea , published in 1955, and Glyn met Read at the ICA later in London, when it was in Dover Street. He kept in touch with the Institute for years and remembers having the means to go to its Picasso show at the Tate in the early 1960s after managing to sell one of his abstract paintings at the Apophasis Gallery in Nicosia for £30. He subsequently taught in Castleford, the mining hometown of the famous English sculptor Henry Moore, and in Holmfirth in the countryside. His earlier interest in collecting natural objects was revived, and as he used to say: “Little did I know that a decade later I would be collecting stones for mosaics and in 1971 filling the house with wax figures, paper shapes, piano lids, rope for an umbilical cord and a huge pair of scissors before art installations became fashionable.” It was also at this time that Glyn recalls first experiencing intense colour in paint – notably at a gallery in Wakefield, where, as he used to say, “he saw a painting by Patrick Heron (1920–1999) and an abstract in blues by an artist whose name he could not recollect.” As a child in Wales, Glyn Hughes remembers his tiler grandfather teaching him how to use a trowel, to which he attributes the wrist movements he later found useful when laying paint on canvas with a palette knife, or carrying hot wax to fabric when working in batik. He also traces his interest in fabric to his childhood, when he played with skeins of artificial silk and scraps of rayon brought home by his father from the The Early Years – United Kingdom [1931–1956]