Swimming in the Clouds

Boulevard

Passage

Bog Midnight

Resplendent

Highway

Turtle Island 

Venus

Emperor

Hybrid Myth

Empress

Maritime

Verenda`

Lagoonis

Roller Coaster

Oceanus

- installation

Blue Tango

Park View

Harmony 

Tuttle Island

Motu Park

Bellevue 

Coral Cove

& Ramon Robertson - installation

Festival 

Truley (2023)

Artery 

Resplendent  

Palm Beach

Roller Coaster 

Promenade 

Happy Hour (2023) 

Eden

Dad's Orchid

Potted Colour

Belonging 

Playground

Night Patrol

Green Way

Community Garden

Propagate 

 Rush Hour

Street Appeal (2024)

Neighbourhood Watch 

Blue Moon (2024)

Honeycomb (2023) 

Aitutaki

The Reunion (2023)

Taveuni (2023) 

Michael McHugh has been painting for more than thirty years. His practice has consistently explored colour, composition and textural, abstract form with a strong connection to the natural world. McHugh collects a range of different photographs and drawings during research trips visiting museums, libraries and gardens around the world, returning to his studio to draw and create a series of collages, which lead to large format paintings.

With the use of gestural acrylic mark making, McHugh creates a layered abstraction moving between the paintings’ surface and botanical shapes. Works are sometimes sombre and brooding, and at other times energetic and vibrant, with textural layers echoing moments in time. McHugh believes constant drawing and collaging to be fundamental to his painting process. This foundation enables him to fully explore composition and vigorously push boundaries with colour and technique.

Graduating from Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design in New Zealand, he has attended masterclasses in painting at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia. He currently works in the creative media industry and also exhibits his work in Sydney, Australia. McHugh’s work is held in a number of private collections in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom.  

Michael McHugh

McHugh’s paintings reflect an instantly familiar vision of exotic forms and nature’s exuberance, as well as a highly personal perception of subject matter. His playfulness is complemented by an abstract rationale, which breaks forms down into layered and lively compositions of geometry, pattern, texture and colour. Works are sometimes sombre and brooding, and other times energetic, vibrant and emotive, with textural layers echoing moments in time.}

McHugh maintains an active drawing practice in the planning stages which aids the compositions and techniques utilised in his large-scale paintings. His distinctive botanical language, juxtaposes hard graphic forms, against fluid painterly gesture, both of which hang together in what has been described as a ‘riot of colour’. His process involves collage-based colour studies, in which he works with drawings, texture and pattern – breaking images apart and reforming them. McHugh pushes at the boundary between the familiar and the un-familiar, confounding expectations of scale and perspective, while merging memories and experience of the world he encounters.

McHugh inspiration for this series of works came from a recent trip to the cook islands, as well as more local observations from his own back yard in Sydney.

While walking along the beach during low tide, I photographed seaweed dumped on the beach and rocks from the storm the night before. These natural forms were quite strange: some were long and stringy, while others were torn and appeared desperate to hang onto the rock or sandy surface they had been washed up on. Although ripped from their underwater environment, they still looked quite beautiful and serene, just lying in the sand waiting for the tide to rise and to be taken back out into their watery world. All of this was perfect material for drawings and ultimately, painting

“As detailed as these new shapes became, it wasn’t until Michael visited the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and the LuEsther T. Mertz Library – one of the largest botanical research libraries in the world – that he could really see the scope for this imagined world of plant and sea life forms. The Library is the very same one that Thomas Jefferson worked from – Jefferson was apparently obsessed with books, archaeology and architecture. Its collection focuses mainly on botany and McHugh was drawn to the scientific cellular structures it contained. The botanical gardens were beautiful, well-kept and manicured, but it was the library, with its many books from around the globe showcasing different worlds of botany and botanical forms, that were so inspiring to McHugh.

Returning to the studio with notebooks filled with drawings and colour studies, McHugh eventually got to work painting.

My idea was a simple one.” said McHugh, “With hotter temperatures, rising sea levels and plant forms disappearing into the sea due to salt intrusion, what would this new plant form DNA look like once mixed with marine life?

The backgrounds of the canvases changed in this collection of work as they became almost water drenched and layered with weed and underwater colours, while others screamed of saturated sunlight skies with new plant forms floating or falling through the atmosphere. Gradually, a version of the drawings of the cellular structures seen in the scientific journals and the Mertz Library in New York became incorporated into the painted works. And so to ask, does this collection of new hybrids actually exist? McHugh replies “Absolutely not. These works come from my imagination, as does the name of the collection. Nothing is real, but everything could be. And perhaps it is for a moment – as the viewers’ eye travels around the canvas and they lose themselves in the world of Hybridology, where colour, form and detail come together, allowing them to experience a moment of joy”

The Island

McHugh’s paintings reflect an instantly familiar vision of exotic forms and nature’s exuberance, as well as a highly personal perception of subject matter. His playfulness is complemented by an abstract logic, which breaks forms down into layered and lively compositions of geometry, pattern, texture and colour. His distinctive botanical language, juxtaposes hard graphic forms, fluid painterly gesture, both of which hang together in what has been described as a ‘riot of colour’.

This exhibition has been some years in the making, and in the spirit of some of the world’s best known, botanists, scientists, artists and researchers, McHugh curates and assembles a range of plantopia from the Pacific Islands, an area he has been traveling too since a child. Since the easement of recent travel restrictions, Michael McHugh has made a concerted efforts to escape to the Pacific Islands, in search of a new plant order; loosing himself among a range of islands and archipelagos. Some trips were well planned while others where more in the vein of ‘let’s just see what happens.’

A seminal trip in this recent project – with his son Henry – saw McHugh visiting the islands of Tahiti, Samoa and Fiji, researching, drawing and photographing local flora, which in many ways was the catalyst to realising there was much to explore around the islands. Further visits to the Cook Islands and Fiji, cemented the direction for this exhibition after spending time observing the filtered sunlight and how this interacts with the brilliance of local plant forms.

It was this extraordinarily combination of colour, form, detail and light, that first struck the artist as he set about capturing this exotic matter with detailed botanical drawings. Sat outside his Bure, McHugh spent most days painting, trying to capture that intense light and the saturated colour. The forms captured in his initial drawings are re-arranged and tweaked, as they are worked into final paintings – in the process – creating a personal take on the botanical forms and DNA.

“When you first look at the different layers of organic plant forms within their environment”, says McHugh, “the saturation of the sun and heat dials up the intense hues of the greens and yellows, and especially so against the backdrop of vivid blues of ocean & sky. It became a perfect living laboratory, experiencing first hand this extraordinary partnership of light, colour and form. The absolute intensity of the blue skies, teal seas, set against the heterogeneity and hues of native flora – feels like a Utopia to me”.

“As the light changes throughout the day, from moments where the light is so intense you can’t help but squint – as with the paintings ‘Happy Hour’ and ‘Coral Cove’ – to just being fully emersed by the apricot and crimson sunsets. ‘Honeycomb’ reflects the butterscotch tones of those wild sunsets, and that moment when the setting sun creates a rippling effects in the water – while in lots of ways ‘Reunion’ is a anthropomorphic line-up of these new forms all coming together, perhaps waiting to witness another sunset, or perhaps just celebrating finally being together”.

McHugh’s new pacific paintings create highly personal organic worlds – full of vivid colour and form – but authentic to time and place and reflection of the artist’s love for the Pacific Islands. He asks us all to join in this celebration and protection of the natural world in all its splendour.

Archipelago

Michael McHugh’s paintings reflect an instantly familiar vision of pacific forms and nature’s exuberance, as well as a highly personal perception of subject matter. The paintings in McHugh’s new series: The Accidental Garden are distinguished by their playfulness, obsessive detail and lush imagery; with every inch of these expansive compositions vital and alive.

The only constant in life is change. We typically regard gardens as personal dominions, where we can create the sort of idealised private retreats we desire. These constructed spaces however are subject to unstable conditions, shifting seasons and pests with their own aims for these spaces. This conflict between nurture and nature, between intention and happenstance are the heart of McHugh’s new series, and a microcosm of human history.

In March of this year, the artist experienced one of lifes high moments, becoming a grandfather for the very first time. Two days later however, he was involved in a serious traffic accident which led to a broken shoulder, surgery and an immediate change of circumstance and mobility. As a result, McHugh leased out his city studio and spent time at home recuperating. A temporary studio was created in his front room, with a view out over his neighbour’s garden – in stark contrast to the urban view from his old studio in the city.

In a spirit of flux, this new series of paintings - brought about in an unexpected way - are very much about chance encounters and the joy of accidental discovery. McHugh’s new environment, and space to contemplate, allowed him room to rehabilitate and experiment. After weeks of simply observing he eventually started drawing again, absorbing the quiet ebbs and flows of his new outlook. From here, the artist gradually started to create this new body of work.

His process involved collage-based colour and texture studies, breaking images apart and reforming them. In this sense his visual language is less about botanical descriptions of plant life and more about creating the sensory experience of potential worlds, pushing at the boundary between the familiar and the un-familiar. Using the logic of collage and his instinct to build relationships from unrelated forms, McHugh presents the viewer with a highly constructed world, pieced together from fragments and reflection.

The artist has produced a potential universe rather than directly reflecting our own flora, allowing his imagination licence over his carefully reached botanical drawings. He offers a new world where structures flow and grow through the paintings, creating vibrant textures and patterns which overwhelm the scenes. As such the viewer is confronted with a complete loss of identity as they are absorbed into these accidental worlds.

McHugh’s imagery is often encrypted with personal significance, corresponding to a memories and moments from his own life. We might for example not know the significance of

 (we presume a homage to his father) or that 

 makes reference to a recent encounter with Japanese Kimono. While these details are not necessarily available to us the viewer, they reflect an intimate state that resonates on an emotional level. Spending time with the paintings this sensation increases, as mysterious and hidden details emerge through overlapping forms and swathes of colour. Previous bodies of work have suggested lush habitats, even marine landscapes but the recent inclusion of human or figurative elements - such as the suspended legs of Rush Hour and the anthropomorphic forms of Playground and Green Way, suggest a more expansive environment.

Alive and against a background of disorder we see McHugh’s 'accidental gardens’ reorganise themselves, inviting us to get lost in these paradisiacal worlds.

Föenander Galleries | Auckland

Michael McHugh