Leafy Green

Hughes is a New York-based artist known for her use of flamboyant color in semi-abstract paintings, drawings, and prints. She is inspired by late nineteenth-century Symbolist art, which prioritized the imagination above realism, and by early twentieth-century Fauvism, which disassociated color from its descriptive function, freeing it to serve expressive means. The influence of Henri Matisse in particular is apparent in the palette and forms of "Leafy Green," in which Hughes has drawn an ambiguous space resembling an enclosed forest. Hughes creates many drawings, though none are preparatory. All of her work is created through a spontaneous process directly on the page or canvas. She has described her drawings as "a run-on sentence that never ends."