![]() ![]() ![]() One night, I spotted the same block of concrete in the lower left corner of my Hughes painting, only it was topped by the elegant circular wood lattice that, back in 1962, meant “rock submerged at high tide.” Those four bolts - yes, they would have held the lattice in place nicely. Four long bolts stuck out of the top surface, like blown-out birthday candles, limiting the available space to a couple of cormorants and the occasional nervous-looking seagull. The big black diving birds were perched on a refrigerator-sized block of concrete emerging from the water between the seaplane terminal and the sewage pump-out station. My Hughes Moment was triggered by cormorants. Nanaimo Harbour, 1962 Detail of Hughes, Nanaimo Harbour, 1962 We settled into the new experience of commuting back and forth to Nanaimo by small boat, a distance of about half a nautical mile. ![]() In our new place on Protection Island, the painting found a natural home on a wall that received light from three sides. ![]() The brilliant white of their superstructure pops out against the aching, late-afternoon blue of the harbour and is echoed in the snow on the Coast Range mountains across the Salish Sea. I owned the print simply because the painting was a knockout, featuring not one but two of the grand old Canadian Pacific steamships serving the Victoria-Vancouver-Nanaimo triangle. Notice the hiatus between sketch and painting, a characteristic I’ll return to. I brought with me a framed print of Nanaimo Harbour, which Hughes painted in 1962 from sketches he’d made from the window of the Malaspina Hotel in 1948. Hughes Moment.” Mine came eight years ago, when I moved from Victoria to Nanaimo. If you live in British Columbia, especially on the coast, there’s a good chance you’ve had what I’m going to call an “E.J. Hughes Paints British Columbia (TouchWood Editions, 2019). His life and works have been celebrated in a number of books, most recently by Robert Amos in E.J. Hughes wasn’t the only famous Canadian artist to include boats in his canvases - we’ll come to Alex Colville later - but he is probably the one who made the most of boats as subjects, not settings. Hughes, who died in Duncan in 2007, the sea was never far away. Winners will be announced on Saturday, September 18th, 2021 - Richard Mackieįor the British Columbia painter E.J. Hughes Book of Boats, by Robert Amos, has been shortlisted for the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award in the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes. Editor’s note: The West Coast Book Prize Society announced on April 8, 2021, that The E.J. ![]()
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