On heels of almost $5 million sale, B.C. artist E.J. Hughes gets feature documentary treatment

Former Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Ian Thom surveys some E.J. Hughes paintings in the VAG's vault. The VAG is home to the largest collection of Hughes' paintings. Photo by Kevin Eastwood /Kevin Eastwood

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While doing research for a series of short films focusing on B.C. artists, filmmaker Jenn Strom found the inspiration for her first feature-length documentary: The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes.

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Strom points to work by biographer Robert Amos, who has written five book on Hughes, who lived and worked on Vancouver Island, as inspiring source material.

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“I was just looking at this book full of beautiful images of B.C. and also layered with photography of how these little towns have looked then and now and I thought, ‘All these materials have already been gathered. All the ingredients are here. It’s just ready to be made into a film,’ ” said Strom, who specifically points to Amos’s E.J Hughes Paints Vancouver Island.

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“I knew that no one had made a major film about Hughes, and that it would be something particularly the Knowledge Network audience would love. There’s just a great love for this painter’s work. So I pitched it.”

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The film, which enjoyed a successful festival run and recently sold out multiple screenings at the VIFF Centre, will have its broadcast premiere on the Knowledge Network on April 16 at 9 p.m., and will stream across Canada on knowledge.ca.

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Through interviews, archives and biographer Amos’s work, Strom has created a detailed and fascinating look at the painter, who died in 2007 in Duncan at age 93.

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Renowned B.C. painter E.J. Hughes is seen here at work in a photograph taken by his wife Fern in 1944. Photo by Knowledge Network /Knowledge Network

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“He painted till the day he died,” said Strom. “I think there is a contradiction, where the media has often presented him as a recluse, which really has a lot of connotations of being kind of a weirdo, or kind of, grumpy, or you don’t like people or something. And yet, anyone who knew him describes him as sweet and open and curious, and really interested in people and lovely to talk to.”

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Major Canadian institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada, have Hughes’s work in their collections. Strom points to the Vancouver Art Gallery as holder of a very extensive public collection.

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But while galleries have his work, they don’t display it full-time. The only place with Hughes’s work out in the gallery daily is the Audain Art Museum in Whistler.

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“It’s quite hard to see these paintings in-person,” said Strom.

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His work is also in many private collections, including at The Vancouver Club, which owns Eagle Pass at Revelstoke (1961).

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“It’s a gorgeous painting, but that’s pretty much, at this point, the only one that someone can access, aside from the Audain Art Museum,” said Strom. “What the Audain Art Museum has done is very important.”

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Filmmaker Jenn Strom, whose documentary The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes will air on the Knowledge Network on April 16, says the Vancouver Island painter “embodies the spirit of slowing down, going quiet and being really, really present with what’s right in front of you.” Photo by Kevin Eastwood /Kevin Eastwood

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With his paintings not easily accessed, the film presents a wonderful opportunity to get to know his work — along with a bit more about the province that inspired him.

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In the film, Strom shows the evolution of Hughes who, as a young man, tried to work as a commercial fisherman during the Great Depression but sea sickness made him miserable.

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He also became a war artist during the Second World War.

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The film tracks his work and, in turn, offers a large brush stroke of an artist many B.C. residents likely recognize from his flattened, beautiful and colourful depictions of boats and shorelines, and the familiar places that we call home. But what really gets collectors going are the bolder, stylistic works from mostly the 1940s and early 1950s.