Primary Hughes

About

Steven "Primary" Hughes is a freelance illustrator and Associate Professor of Illustration at Northern Michigan University. Hughes' commercial clients include The New York Times, Creative Quarterly, American Greetings, while his fine art work has been exhibited at galleries and museums across the USA.

From the Artist

Plein air painting is less about skill than inquiry. The attentiveness with which I approach the subject is not to get better at painting, but rather to strengthen my thinking. In practice, an artist is in a constant state of testing or disproving visual hypotheses. The critical eye, with which one must engage their artwork, provides the framework for an artist’s message to be honed into its clearest form and communicated. Each session painting from life contributes to the progression of this knowledge. Achieving a good or bad outcome is irrelevant to the transformative experience of the work, one that is recounted across the surface of the canvas with every decision made.

—Primary Hughes