Shara Hughes – Inside the Unstable Worlds of Her Paintings
Shara Hughes paints landscapes that cannot be located on a map. Trees twist into bodily shapes, flowers expand beyond ordinary scale, and rivers, cliffs, moons, and skies emerge through an intuitive process that keeps representation and abstraction in constant motion. Her paintings are less concerned with documenting nature than with using landscape as a structure for color, memory, physical experimentation, and psychological experience. What appears to be a view into another world is also a record of decisions made directly on the canvas.
Key Takeaways
- Shara Hughes was born in Atlanta in 1981 and lives and works in Brooklyn.
- She initially painted constructed interiors before turning toward landscape around the time she moved to New York in 2014.
- Her landscapes are not based on photographs, sketches of specific places, or fully imagined scenes prepared in advance.
- She frequently combines oil, acrylic, dye, gesso, caulk, spray paint, and exposed canvas to create different spatial effects.
- Trees, flowers, water, moons, and framed openings recur, but their forms develop through the painting process rather than a fixed symbolic system.
- Her practice has expanded to include drawings, prints, murals, and ceramics.
Who Is Shara Hughes?
Hughes was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1981. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. After working in several locations, she moved to New York in 2014 and established her studio in Brooklyn.
Her early institutional exhibitions included Guess You Had to Be There at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in 2014. Her inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial brought her invented landscapes to a wider audience. The Whitney acquired In the Clear, one of the paintings featured in the exhibition, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired How Do You Sleep At Night? from the same year.
Subsequent museum presentations have included On Edge at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Time Lapsed at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Right This Way at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, and Inside Outside at the Norton Museum of Art.
From Constructed Interiors to Open Landscapes
The Early Interior Paintings
Before concentrating on landscape, Hughes painted elaborate interiors. These rooms contained architecture, furniture, figures, windows, pictures within pictures, and objects carrying personal associations. Their compressed spaces allowed several kinds of painting to coexist inside one image. A window could contain a small landscape. A wall could support another painting. A figure might share the room with highly patterned surfaces or objects whose scale felt deliberately uncertain.
Interior architecture provided a framework that could contain narrative, still life, portraiture, and abstraction at once. The 2011 painting I Don’t Even Know You Anymore, later included in the Norton Museum’s mid-career survey, belongs to this earlier period. Its inclusion alongside recent landscapes and ceramics helped demonstrate that her later work did not simply reject the interior. Questions of enclosure, theatrical space, and looking through openings continued after the rooms themselves disappeared.
Why the Move Outside Changed Her Process
After moving to New York in 2014, Hughes began producing the landscapes for which she is now best known. The shift was not merely a change of subject. It altered how she initiated and developed a painting. The interiors required her to organize many recognizable elements within a constructed room. Landscape offered a less restrictive framework. A mark could become a branch, shoreline, reflection, mountain, or entirely abstract passage depending on what happened next.
This openness allowed the painting to evolve without a predetermined destination. Hughes could begin with color or a change to the canvas surface and discover the image through a sequence of responses.
How Does Shara Hughes Make a Painting?
Beginning Without a Finished Image
Hughes rarely relies on reference photographs. She does not begin with a complete landscape already visualized in her mind. Instead, she makes an initial move and allows it to create a problem or possibility for the next one.
A canvas might begin with dye, sprayed pigment, a poured area, or an irregular surface treatment. Once that condition exists, she has to react to it. Forms gradually become recognizable, but the painting can change direction repeatedly as color, texture, and space develop. “They are all completely made up. I’ve never been to these places, I don’t dream about these places.” — Shara Hughes
The statement distinguishes her method from both observational painting and conventional fantasy illustration. She is not copying an external location, but neither is she depicting a fictional place designed beforehand. The landscape emerges during the act of painting.
Dye, Raw Canvas, Gesso, and Caulk
Hughes uses the absorbency of canvas to manipulate apparent depth. Dye applied to raw fabric sinks into the weave and can appear spatially distant. Other sections may be coated with gesso, a preparatory material that creates a less absorbent surface on which paint sits more visibly.
She has also used caulk to build opaque areas. The contrast between stained fabric and a thickly prepared section can produce spatial separation without conventional perspective. One passage seems to recede into the canvas while another appears to rest on top of it.
At times, Hughes sprays paint onto the back of untreated canvas. Pigment travels through the fabric and appears unpredictably on the front. Instead of correcting the resulting mark, she incorporates it into the composition.
Oil, Acrylic, Dye, and Spray Paint
Her paintings can contain oil, acrylic, dye, enamel, and spray paint in different combinations. Each behaves differently. Dye creates broad, absorbed fields; acrylic can dry rapidly into flat or translucent passages; oil supports denser blending and more sustained reworking.
Brushes are only part of the process. Hughes also pours, drips, sprays, scrapes, and moves paint with tools such as palette knives or spatulas. Thin washes may sit beside raised deposits, dots, streaks, and dry, dragged marks. This variety prevents the landscape from becoming spatially uniform. A pool of liquid color might suggest distant water, while a thick line becomes a branch in the foreground. Elsewhere, the same techniques remain visibly abstract.
Color as Structure
Hughes does not use naturalistic color consistently. Water may be red, earth may turn violet, and foliage can shift between acidic green, blue, orange, and pink. Complementary and clashing colors establish temperature, rhythm, and separation between forms. Museums have connected her palette to Fauvism and German Expressionism, traditions in which color was released from the obligation to reproduce observed appearances. Other institutional interpretations have noted affinities with Post-Impressionism and Color Field painting.
These comparisons provide historical context, but her paintings do not simply revive one earlier style. A single canvas can combine illusionistic depth, flat pattern, stained color, gestural abstraction, and cartoon-like contour.
Why Hughes Calls Them Invented Landscapes
The term invented landscape describes a method more accurately than a destination. Hughes’s forests, rivers, and cliffs are invented because they arise on the canvas, not because they represent a coherent imaginary world with established geography. Landscape gives her enough recognizable structure to keep the painting legible. A horizon, tree, body of water, or moon allows the viewer to organize otherwise unstable marks. At the same time, these motifs can dissolve back into paint.
A branch may function as a branch from one viewing distance and as an arc of pigment from another. Reflections can reverse the direction of space. Foreground and background may exchange places when saturated patterns interrupt atmospheric depth. The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis emphasized this tension in On Edge, noting that Hughes’s paintings are often called landscapes even though, from her perspective, they are not really about landscape. Natural imagery provides a means of giving form to subjective experiences that are difficult to represent directly.
Recurring Motifs in Shara Hughes’s Art
Trees as Structures and Figures
Trees are among the most persistent forms in Hughes’s work. Their trunks divide compositions, while branches create networks through which patches of sky, water, and ground remain visible. Curving limbs can resemble gestures or bodies without becoming literal figures.
Trees also provide a useful bridge between representation and abstraction. A cluster of marks can be read as leaves, yet each dab remains an independent application of color. A trunk can organize depth while also functioning as a flat line running through the picture.
The 2024 exhibition Tree Farm concentrated this vocabulary into a serial format: one prominent tree occupied each vertical canvas. The title referred to her family’s pine-tree farm in western Georgia, where she spent time as a child. The connection introduced memory into the series without turning the paintings into records of a specific location.
Flowers at Monumental Scale
Flowers became increasingly prominent around the end of the 2010s. Hughes magnifies them until stems, petals, and seed heads behave like figures or architectural structures. Their enlarged scale makes them visually commanding but also exposes wilting, bending, and decay. For her 2021 exhibition at London’s Garden Museum, she created four large paintings centered on specific types of flowers, including poppies and an umbrella orchid.
The museum described these works as intimate forms of portraiture as well as reinventions of the flower-painting tradition. Hughes has compared a single flower to a self-portrait and a full landscape to a more distant view of personal or emotional experience. The comparison helps explain why her flowers often feel individualized without illustrating particular people.
Water, Reflections, and Unstable Ground
Rivers, ponds, swamps, waves, and waterfalls provide another way of disturbing pictorial certainty. Water can reflect a recognizable form, stretch it into color, or divide the canvas into incompatible spatial zones. Reflections do not always obey optical logic. They may introduce another palette or a competing direction of movement.
The result is less a convincing mirror of nature than a second painting nested inside the first.
Cliffs and shorelines perform a related role. Their edges separate spaces while producing opportunities for drips, stains, and abrupt changes in texture. Hughes uses these natural boundaries as compositional devices rather than stable geographic information.
Windows, Portals, and Framed Views
The logic of her early interiors persists in landscapes framed by branches, waves, or curtain-like vegetation. These surrounding forms act like a proscenium, the architectural frame around a theater stage.
A distant clearing or sky can therefore resemble a view through a window. The landscape appears expansive, yet the frame reminds the viewer that it is a constructed image. The Norton Museum’s Inside Outside survey used windows and portals to connect Hughes’s early rooms with her later exterior scenes.
Looking Closely at Key Paintings
In the Clear
Created in 2016, In the Clear is an oil-and-acrylic painting measuring approximately 68 by 60 inches. A warm and cool border surrounds a compressed landscape of vegetation, red water, and intensely colored tree-like forms. The painting demonstrates Hughes’s surface-based construction of depth.
Some passages appear absorbed into the canvas, while denser areas sit forward.
The surrounding border does not behave like a neutral frame; it becomes part of the unstable space. Shown in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and subsequently acquired by the museum, In the Clear became a central institutional example of her early invented landscapes.
How Do You Sleep At Night?
How Do You Sleep At Night?, also from 2017, depicts six monumental flowers wilting against a sandy cliff. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that its vertical proportions resemble a smartphone screen rather than the horizontal format traditionally associated with landscape.
That orientation compresses the scene and gives the flowers an almost bodily presence. Hughes’s mixture of oil and acrylic permits sinuous lines, broad color zones, and abrupt textural changes. The image remains recognizable, yet the scale and palette separate it from botanical observation.
My Violet Lullaby
The 2021 painting My Violet Lullaby is dominated by purple in several temperatures and intensities. Violet, lilac, magenta, maroon, and cream build a vertically organized environment rather than coloring a conventionally described landscape. Presented by the FLAG Art Foundation in 2022, the painting shows how Hughes can use one dominant hue without flattening the image into a monochrome.
Differences of saturation, texture, and surrounding color establish movement and spatial contrast.
Growing Pains
Growing Pains from 2022 is a large painting made with oil, acrylic, and dye. Its imagined landscape incorporates the distorted natural imagery, shifting perspective, and movement between recognizable and undefined form that characterize Hughes’s mature work.
The National Gallery of Victoria presented the painting in its 2023 Triennial and later acquired it. The work’s scale, more than seven feet in each direction, makes the viewer confront its marks as both imagery and physical events.
Drawings, Prints, Murals, and Ceramics
Drawing allows Hughes to test the same instability found in her paintings with more immediate materials. Lines can describe a tree, divide space, or thicken into pattern. Her museum exhibitions frequently combine drawings and prints with paintings, showing that these media form part of the same investigation rather than preliminary work alone. In 2018, she created Carving Out Fresh Options, a large public mural for Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway.
Transferring her vocabulary into an outdoor urban setting changed both the scale of the imagery and the conditions under which it was viewed.
Hughes introduced tabletop ceramics in Tree Farm in 2024. These glazed and painted objects transformed tree forms into small sculptures intended to be viewed from multiple directions. Because glaze changes during firing, the process also preserved the element of limited control central to her painting. Her 2025–26 Norton Museum residency produced additional ceramic plants and trees in collaboration with the Armory Art Center. Displayed with paintings spanning approximately two decades, the objects extended her landscapes beyond the rectangular picture plane.
Recent Paintings and Weather Report
The 2025 exhibition Weather Report brought together nine large, vertically oriented paintings. Natural elements remained visible, but brushwork and color assumed an increasingly independent role. In Bigger Person from 2024, foreground and background are compressed until grasses, trees, drips, and expressive strokes form one interwoven field. The painting represents a landscape while simultaneously revealing the actions through which that landscape was assembled.
MaMa from 2025 centers on a forest scene beneath a radiant flower-like form. Red, orange, and yellow descend through the eight-foot composition, producing an atmosphere that can be seen as illumination, heat, or weather without settling into one description.
Rift, also from 2025, continues Hughes’s use of landscape as an elastic container. Geological division, painterly rupture, and psychological separation can coexist without the title determining a fixed reading.
How to Recognize a Shara Hughes Painting
- Landscapes that do not correspond to identifiable locations
- Highly saturated color that departs from natural appearances
- Snake-like trees, oversized flowers, moons, cliffs, and bodies of water
- Reflections that complicate rather than confirm the surrounding space
- Stained raw canvas placed beside opaque, heavily prepared areas
- Drips, sprayed passages, dots, scraped marks, and dense brushwork within one image
- Vertical formats that bring landscape closer to portraiture
- Branches or waves forming window-like frames around distant views
- Individual marks that alternate between readable natural forms and abstraction
A Common Misconception About the Landscapes
Hughes’s paintings are sometimes described as fantasy views of places she has imagined. That wording suggests she invents a complete scene mentally and then transfers it to canvas. Her documented process is more open and materially driven. She begins without knowing what the finished landscape will contain. A dyed field, sprayed mark, or prepared patch of canvas creates an initial condition.
Subsequent decisions gradually organize the surface into something that can be read as nature. The distinction matters because it changes how the work should be viewed. Instead of searching for a hidden story about an imaginary location, viewers can follow how one mark generates another, how a color becomes space, and where representation begins or breaks down.
Major Exhibitions and Museum Collections
The 2017 Whitney Biennial established a broad museum context for Hughes’s invented landscapes. On Edge, held at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis from 2021 to 2022, was her first major solo museum exhibition in the United States and surveyed more than 30 paintings, drawings, and prints made between 2015 and 2021. Other substantial presentations followed at Yuz Museum in Shanghai, Kunstmuseum Luzern, and Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg.
The latter’s 2023 exhibition Right This Way included paintings and works on paper responding to Nordic landscape and light. The Norton Museum’s Inside Outside, shown from November 2025 to March 2026, was her first mid-career survey.
It connected early interiors, later landscapes, recent paintings, and newly created ceramics through the recurring ideas of containment, expansion, and passage between spaces. Her work is held by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Dallas Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, High Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Phoenix Art Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, and Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Painting as an Unfolding Landscape
Shara Hughes uses landscape because it can absorb almost any kind of painterly event. A stain becomes weather, a line becomes a branch, and a scraped area becomes rock or light. These transformations keep the image readable without allowing representation to become fixed. Her shift from enclosed rooms to outdoor scenes expanded this process rather than erasing her earlier concerns.
Windows became framed clearings, patterned walls became forests, and psychologically charged objects gave way to individualized flowers, trees, and atmospheric spaces. The completed paintings preserve the uncertainty of their construction. They look like worlds, but their depth can collapse into fabric and pigment at any moment. Their subject is therefore not only nature or emotion. It is the process through which paint becomes a place and a place returns to paint.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Shara Hughes Known For?
She is known primarily for vividly colored invented landscapes that combine recognizable trees, flowers, water, and skies with abstract marks and unstable perspective.
Does Hughes Paint Real Places?
Generally, no. Her paintings rarely rely on photographs or direct observation of specific sites. The landscape develops intuitively from marks, colors, and surface conditions created during painting.
What Materials Does She Use?
Her paintings may combine oil, acrylic, dye, enamel, spray paint, gesso, caulk, and exposed canvas. The materials vary between individual works.
Why Does She Use Dye on Canvas?
Dye penetrates untreated fabric rather than resting on its surface. Hughes uses that absorbed color to create passages that can appear more distant than areas covered with opaque gesso or thick paint.
Are the Paintings Abstract or Representational?
They are both. A painting may remain recognizable as a landscape while individual sections function as abstract fields, stains, lines, or gestures. The relationship can change as the viewer moves closer or farther away.
What Artists or Movements Provide Context for Her Work?
Museums and curators have discussed her paintings in relation to Fauvism, Expressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, and Color Field painting. These references clarify her treatment of color and space, but no single movement fully describes her work.
Does Hughes Only Make Paintings?
No. Her practice also includes drawings, prints, public murals, and glazed or painted ceramics. The ceramics extend her recurring plant and tree forms into three dimensions.
Why Are So Many of the Paintings Vertical?
The vertical format can make a landscape behave more like a portrait, increasing the bodily presence of a tree or flower. It also compresses conventional horizontal space and supports the window or portal effect found throughout her work.
Cite this Article
artincontext, , “Shara Hughes – Inside the Unstable Worlds of Her Paintings.” Art in Context. September 30, 2026. URL: https://artincontext.org/shara-hughes/
, a. (2026, 30 September). Shara Hughes – Inside the Unstable Worlds of Her Paintings. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/shara-hughes/
, artincontext. “Shara Hughes – Inside the Unstable Worlds of Her Paintings.” Art in Context, September 30, 2026. https://artincontext.org/shara-hughes/.
