A new documentary premiering this weekend at the Vancouver International Film Festival offers a deep dive into the personal and professional life of the renowned Canadian landscape painter E.J. Hughes (1913-2007). The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes was written, directed and edited by the Vancouver-based film-maker Jenn Strom and is a lovingly crafted homage to an artist whose often-dreamlike visions of British Columbian coastal life are inspiring a new generation of admirers and collectors.
The oeuvre of the reclusive Hughes, who was often too shy to attend his own openings and maintained a singular commitment to realism even as Abstract Expressionism eclipsed its popularity, seems to be having a moment. His 1949 oil-on-canvas work, Entrance to Howe Sound, a haunting and beautifully detailed landscape of an island in the waters surrounding Vancouver, is going on view across Canada ahead of an auction next month at Heffel. The auction house estimates the Hughes canvas will sell for between C$1.25m and C$1.75m ($896,000-$1.25m). Hughes’s Fishboats, Rivers Inlet, which he painted in 1938 as a struggling artist, sold for just over C$2m ($1.4m) at a Heffel auction in Toronto in 2018, shattering the previous secondary market record for the late artist.
“The film will be wonderful for Hughes’s loyal collector base and we’re looking forward to seeing his market continue to thrive,” David Heffel, the auction house’s president, tells The Art Newspaper. “At Heffel, we’ve proudly led his market for decades, with major works achieving exceptional results, including, most recently, works from the Barbeau Owen Foundation. These results are a testament to the enduring strength of Hughes’s market and his lasting legacy.”
E.J. Hughes painting outdoors in 1944 Photo by Fern Hughes
According to Strom, the documentary was inspired by a series of Hughes books published by the Victoria-based author and artist Robert Amos. Strom’s previous films include A Golden Voice about the Haida sculptor Bill Reid, and the hand-painted short film Assembly. She began researching Hughes in 2020 and the film’s completion was set back by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The slower process has actually had great advantages for gathering material,” she says. “Over that time, some major Hughes works have come up for auction—allowing us to locate and film many of his most famous paintings in person. These works can be extremely hard to access when they’re in private hands.”
Strom adds: “One of my favourite parts of making this film was trying to find the real-life views he painted. My travels took me all over the province—and even to remote Rivers Inlet, up the British Columbia coast. I would take Robert Amos’s books and a clipboard of images and research. Some locations were easy to find and some were a real scavenger hunt—talking to locals, even knocking on strangers’ doors to ask if I could look at their views.”
The documentary crew filming in Courtenay, British Columbia Courtesy Wildflower Productions
The film brings viewers inside the walls of important Canadian institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian War Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery (which has the largest collection of Hughes works) and the Audain Art Museum, which also has a significant Hughes collection. It is imbued with reverence for archivists, writers and knowledge keepers. “These roles are undervalued and essential to the preservation of culture,” Strom says. Through interviews with prominent Canadian art historians and former curators Ian Thom, Charlie Hill and Laura Brandon, as well as Amos and a slew of local characters who knew Hughes personally, the film reveals the artist’s intimate struggles and professional triumphs.
We learn that Hughes’s teacher at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts in 1929 was Frederick Varley, a member of the Group of Seven who was an early influence and champion of the young artist. But their styles and methods were distinctive. Varley and his Group of Seven colleagues—including Lawren Harris, who in 1947 recommended Hughes for the Emily Carr Scholarship, which allowed him to make his first sketching trips on Vancouver Island—would often paint romantic, impressionistic landscapes in a few hours. Hughes, meanwhile, could take months to finish a painting.
Ian Thom looks at paintings by E.J. Hughes in the vault at the Vancouver Art Gallery Photo by Kevin Eastwood
That painstaking attention to detail is mirrored in Strom’s film. His career as one of Canada’s longest-serving war artists and his under-recognised mural work inspired by Diego Rivera offer interesting contrast to his magical BC landscapes. But we also learn of his personal struggles to have children with his wife, who suffered from muscular dystrophy, and his quest to find a perfectly quiet artistic sanctuary, one which led him—just like Emily Carr—to an ill-fated period as the owner of a Victoria rooming house.
After Hughes found his sanctuary in a house on Shawnigan Lake, he was finally “discovered” by Max Stern, who promptly bought up all his work and exhibited it at his Dominion Gallery in Montreal. Consequently, for decades many of the best-known works by this painter of sublime BC scenes were largely unseen by audiences in his home province. Strom’s thoughtful film corrects that with empathy and insight into one of Canada’s great painters.
The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes screens on 5, 7, 8 and 11 October at the Vancouver International Film Festival
