Hughes studied Fine Art from 1953 to 1957 at Newport College of Art, from 1957 to 1958 at Leicester College of Art and from 1958 to 1961 at the Royal College of Art. From 1962 he taught at Cheltenham College of Art, until retiring from teaching in 1991 to concentrate on painting.
Together with painting, during the 1970s and 1980s Hughes was also active in creating experimental film & photographic work, producing commissioned films under the title Taliesin taken from an ancient Welsh poet,. He founded the Welsh Modern Art e-newsletter ‘WalesModern’ in 2003.
Hughes has exhibited widely. His work was first shown at the 1958 National Eisteddfod of Wales, where he was awarded the Welsh Arts Council Purchase Prize. He also exhibited from 1960 to 1961 with the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Welsh Arts Council, the Contemporary Arts Society, Grosvenor Gallery London and Young Contemporaries.
From 1962 onwards he has exhibited in Wales and internationally with both solo and mixed shows, including exhibitions as a member of the Watercolour Society of Wales, The Welsh Group and the 56 Group Wales.
His work is in numerous public collections including: Arts Council of Great Britain, Arts Council of Wales, Contemporary Arts Society of Great Britain, Contemporary Arts Society of Wales, Royal College of Art, National Museum of Wales, University of South Wales, Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery, and Newport Museum & Art Gallery, Cambria Airways, P&O Shipping Lines, Gloucestershire Education Authority, Leicestershire Education Authority, Brecknock Museum & Art Gallery, Westminster Hospital.
Member Since 2005My work refers to my past, being heavily influenced by the landscape of Dowlais Top and the Heads of the Valleys…from early work to the emergence of my signature style since 1958. The work overall addresses a sequence of overlaying researches and displays my development as an unfolding of various compositional formats, attempting to define the serious complicated, and profoundly analytical sets of subjects and themes. The recurrence of certain formats and motifs reflect the ‘multi layered’ (and bilingual) performances within the themes of the later works.
** The following aptly sums up my philosophy on my approach to my work:
” His old man said that the nouns “artist and poseur” were synonyms. Both paradoxically concerned with removing the self in the very act of observation only to show how self-consciously it had been done.
For him the vantage and the viewed were inseparable.
His riff was that all life was a memory even as it was experienced, there and instantly gone, so that we forever lived in the past, even as it left us. We lived on by imagining that past which was the future we yearned to remember.
The dream of life was aspiration.
It’s nightmare was memorialisation. We trapped ourselves in the techno-present by the
cloying memento mori that was the falsification that photography bought. Memory which was History, was a jumble of relationships to be savoured not a grid of relatives to be connected.”
‘Dream On’ Dai Smith ( Parthian )
http://robertalwynhughes-art.co.uk/