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Having grown up on a subsistence farm in the rural backwoods of northern Minnesota, Philip Hughes-Luing’s first exposure to artmaking occurred his freshman year of college as a nude model for the Art Department of Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. A Theater and Philosophy double major, during his junior year he first enrolled in an art class. At the Art faculty’s invitation, he presented a Senior Thesis show in Fine Arts his senior year.
He planned to attend art school after college until a positive HIV test required the pursuit of medical insurance. He devoted twenty hours per week for nearly forty years to creating artwork while working administrative jobs at a medical center in Chicago. He has worked with charcoal and pastels, oil and acrylic paints, and ceramics.
Following the death of a life partner from AIDS in 1994, he moved into Artists in Residence, an apartment complex leasing only to writers, musicians and visual artists the while obtaining an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College of Chicago in 2000. Altogether, he has grieved deaths of four intended life partners since the age of sixteen, serving as the primary caregiver for three, all of whom died with AIDS diagnoses. The first was killed instantly in an automobile accident. All four were visually or musically creative.
His fourth partner died in 2013. He retired from the medical center in 2015 and retired to Grants Pass, Oregon but following a series of strokes in 2017 sold his live-in studio along a salmon stream to stay at an assisted care facility. Physically and cognitively debilitated, he was unable to hold a pen or paintbrush. His impaired mental acuity undercut his filing for disability as well, which was denied due to insufficient documentation.
Depleted, rather than filing an appeal, he donated his belongings, including forty years’ worth of the artwork he’d created or collected from other artists to a Goodwill donation center, then headed to Oregon’s coast to wade away into the currents. Instead, he ended up at a homeless shelter in Eugene, Oregon, staying there for over a year writing poetry and using squeeze tubes of liquid paint and a sling, splash, splatter and drip style to paint on donated clothes in a public park -- a collection which still constitutes most of his wardrobe. When he arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico in October of 2019, he had been homeless since April Fool’s Day of 2018, which had coincided with Easter Sunday that year.
In November of 2019 he obtained transitional housing located a block from the OffCenter Community Arts Project, which he started attending immediately. In February of 2020 he participated in a drawing class, using jumbo-sized chalks, and by May he could again hold and manipulate a paintbrush. He acquired an easel and has spent most of his time since then in front of it. Since May of 2020 he has created well over 250 paintings with acrylics and water-soluble oils on canvases ranging in size from 18”x24” to 30”x48”. Currently he serves as Treasurer on OffCenter’s Board of Directors.
Like love, art is no one thing, but many and varied expressions of the survival instinct.
I believe that creating and viewing art serves the human survival instinct by developing our intuitive abilities. Using intuition, we instantly organize information in our subconscious minds into a coherent metaphor, a “big picture” that explains the world around us – alerting us to hidden dangers or leading us to unseen opportunities.
By allowing intuition to guide me, I create a visual expression of a mood, drawn from my subconscious in response to one or more of the concerns in my life. I believe that my art represents the scope, depth, and integrity of my response to life. By creating artwork, I hope to find spiritual or psychological common ground with my viewers, hope that people can recognize intuitively something of themselves in my artwork.
Philosophically I align with Jackson Pollack's Jungian inspired ideas about using spontaneity to access and express subconscious material. My creative process is to empty my mind of any conscious intention and allow myself to be drawn to select colors and brushes intuitively, in the moment. Spontaneously I make a mark, then another. My only rule is that each mark must respond somehow to the preceding mark. Allowing intuition to guide me, I dance my marks into balance with each other until I am caught by surprise when a moment of exquisite, delicate harmony between all the elements at play in the piece emerges.
At those times I pause and wait. Sometimes the moment proves fleeting, and I will resume the dance. When the piece is done, though, the moment stands still, and the piece feels at rest. Chaos and order have found balance. I feel that I have drawn from my subconscious a visual expression of an emotional state held in response to one or more of the concerns in my life, something which, whether hopeful or sad, feels expressive of our shared human existence. By doing so, I trust that my expression will find spiritual or psychological common ground with my viewers.
That is not to say that common ground is necessarily stable, unshifting ground. Ironically, In our contemporary Information Age, we no longer live in a time of simple, definitive statements. Instead, we contemplate complexities. With the internet, almost instantaneously every statement, whether presented as fact, fiction, opinion, theory, speculation, or any combination thereof, reverberates globally from every possible angle, and every reflection from each perspective is generally presented to us as exclusively true. What appears accurate from one angle appears distorted from another. We have yet to develop unbiased means for reconciling all these differing perspectives coming at us all day every day. We live with ambiguity and ambivalence.
In my art, to be relevant and true to the times in which I live and create, I search for ways to find balance and harmony, ways to maintain a sense of equilibrium, while viewing the complexities whirling around me. I hope art will help us find ways to see through all the confusion, to listen for music within and beyond the noise.
When I contemplate one of my paintings, I like to relax my gaze, which allows me to travel through time from the front plane, through the surface drops, splatters, and runs of color, through the dancefloor of brushstrokes performing gyrations of different sizes, intensities, and attitudes, back to a glimpse of the beginning of the painting, the first layer of color, sometimes back to a bit of white canvas.
Traveling from front to back, there’s always something happening behind where my eye is resting, something further off that’s partially obscured, something that asks what’s happening back there, how can I get there, and is it safe? Feeling my way through, I lose track of myself and my external world as I explore the mystery unfolding within my mind.
Due to caregiving while working a full-time job to maintain insurance, pay rent, and buy art supplies throughout my adult life, I have neither systematically pursued nor recorded the exhibition of my artwork.