Glyn Hughes 1931 - 2014

85 On a slow journey by boat to Cyprus in 1956, the first revelation was the light. Glyn Hughes still remembers “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 single-lane road from Limassol to Nicosia. He lived, worked and painted there ever since. Earth colours were bought then by weight (in brown paper bags), then mixed with linseed oil, and much of Glyn’s abstract work at that time was in browns, often with the addition of sand. He attributes his use of enamel (which has endured well) to the influence of Gillian Ayre’s work, but it was some time before he experimented with acrylic. He used white too, which was the colour of the terrain he first saw in Cyprus, and mainly oil paints, which were imported from the United Kingdom. He started by painting the landscape and mud-brick houses, travelling to the villages of the island by bus and staying in them when he could. Glyn believes he learned the local colour at this time and what he calls “full” colour by working with children. He lived in a house facing the moat surrounding the Venetian walls of Nicosia. But it was a difficult and disruptive time, when Cyprus was struggling for its independence from Great Britain, the colonial power, and there were frequent curfews. In 1959, he met the Cypriot painter, Christoforos Savva, who had studied under André Lhote (1885–1962) in Paris, when they were both exhibiting at the Ledra Palace Hotel (there were no galleries at the time). Glyn was showing village scenes and total abstracts and describes how he looked at them all and decided not to paint a view again. The following year, he and Savva opened the first gallery and cultural centre of its kind, the Apophasis, with the aim of launching contemporary art in Cyprus. Meanwhile, as the British were leaving, he acquired a colonial bungalow for the first half of 1960, in a part of Nicosia that is now a buffer zone. In Cyprus under British Rule [1956–1960]