The indelible novelist and short story writer Clarice Lispector once observed of art that, “what is called abstract so often seems…the figurative of a more delicate and difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye.” The paintings in Skylar Hughes’ Walking Poem shimmer, dissolve, congeal, and alight before the viewer, revealing, however briefly, this richer meaning just beneath the surface of the physical world.

While the twelve oil paintings on view can be loosely considered landscapes, there are arboreal allusions, hues evocative of earth and sky, an elemental atmosphere, there are no horizon lines, and no concrete indications of place. Instead, shapes unmoored from definition transfigure across the canvas, colors mix and merge in sweeping gestures, dappled patterns, patches of texture, and translucent washes. Poised between abstraction and impressionism, they subvert familiar hierarchies privileging intuition over analysis, the metaphorical over the literal, and the elusive to the definitive.

Resisting both narrative and categorization, the polychromatic images present an alternative way of seeing that is multifarious and dynamic. The world here is in flux, gracefully advancing toward knowability before again retreating, receding like the tide back to the sea. Inspired by the liminal periods of dusk and dawn, the muted palette emphasizes fluidity and ambiguity, illuminating the infinite possibilities for variance and nuance.

Straddling day and night, sensations fleeting and full, empirical reality and the invisible realm of the spiritual, the works enable an experience of meaning where the whole transcends the sum of its parts and opposing ideas are integrated and enriched. The environment stirs and shifts, and so does the viewer’s understanding, perspective, feeling, and perhaps even the viewer herself in response.

That Hughes’ practice is intuitive and immersive is unsurprising given the instinctual way the compositions collapse the exterior world of things and the interior world of consciousness. Emotions as delicate as melancholy, reverence, longing, and hope emerge in physical forms as echoes of natural textures and motifs. Coming to the blank canvas with only the lingering impression of a place in mind, he relinquishes control to the demands of his materials, enabling possibilities for chance and spontaneity and allowing the work to generate its own energy and light. “They become life-like,” explains the artist, “unfolding and unfurling of their own volition.”

Swirling miasmas of lilac, ochre, sage, blush, and cornflower blue slip easily between states of matter; land liquifies, water evaporates, and stone erodes into air. Vertical smears, dots, and leaps evoke the movements of light, sparking across rippling streams, filtering through the fluttering leaves of trees, and refracting from the mica on the granite mountain face. In Walking, the image itself appears to be melting or disintegrating, the solid shapes at the top of the canvas giving way to broad, blurry strokes and soft flurries of color and light. The lower portion appears submerged in water, a sunny pond, or perhaps, in memory, reverie, or a waking dream.

 Interspersed between the abstractions, paintings with clear referents, the copse in Goodbye Old Paint, for example, serve dual purposes: to offer the audience a grounded point of entry and to illustrate the origin from which the other meditations sprang, deviated, or slowly unfurled. If Open Field and Walking Poem invite you into the forest, then paintings like Clipping Lilies 2 and Noon encourage you to lose yourself in it, to see what there is to see when you look, or even more, what you feel beneath the canopy. –Tara Anne Dalbow