My work explores abstraction, color and movement in lyrical and buoyant expression. Working mainly in oil paint, I build up a background depth with subtle layers of color and create accumulations of marks/forms/objects that collectively show a suggestion of a pathway or of a gathered mass. The acknowledgement and use of negative space is very important to me as an abstract artist. My intuitive working manner is a process of reducing or “emptying” pictures of all but my focused channel of movement particular to a compositional subject. In another manner of working, I build up a suggestion of a route through the absence of marks, or in the places that they disappear. I take as my muse the space and places of passage in our world, the accumulation and dispersal of crowds, randomness and pattern as things fall into place along paths, and the natural movements between points that accumulate over time.

Farida Hughes