In 1934, he formed a partnership with the muralist Paul Goranson and Orville Fisher in a commercial art firm.[3]
World War II
When World War II began in 1939, he enlisted with the Royal Canadian Artillery as a gunner and was posted to England. From 1943 to 1946, he served as one of Canada's Official Second World War artists.[4] Hughes traveled to England and Alaska where he depicted ordinary men caught up in this worldwide event. He produced well over a thousand drawings, many watercolours, oil sketches and almost 30 paintings.[5]
One curator calls his work between 1940 and 1946 for the Canadian war records perhaps the "most significant body of work by a Canadian artist in the Canadian War Museum".[6]
Post-War period
After being discharged from the military in 1946, he returned to the west coast of Canada with his wife Fern and settled in Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island, at first concentrated on waterfront subjects near his home. Hughes spent much of the remainder of his life living on Vancouver Island where he pursued a lifelong study of the province and its landscape as a professional artist.
In the 1950s, Hughes' reputation grew, especially after he signed an exclusive contract to sell all his work to Dr. Max Stern, the owner of the Dominion Gallery in Montreal in 1951.[7] Stern encouraged him to expand his range of subject matter. In 1954, he was one of eighteen Canadian artists commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway to paint a mural for the interior of one of the new Park cars entering service on the new Canadian transcontinental train. Each of the murals depicted a different national or provincial park; Hughes' was Tweedsmuir Provincial Park.[8] In 1992, Canada Post used one of his images ("Christie Pass, Hurst Island, B.C.") on a stamp commemorating 125 years of Confederation.[9]
Hughes' paintings are best known for their strong and appealing images of the landscape and seascape of British Columbia. Jack Shadbolt described Hughes as "the most engaging intuitive painter of the BC landscape since Emily Carr." His distinctive style of painting is marked by the use of flattened space, skewed perspective, and simplified shapes. The paintings combine compelling clarity with a sense of the unknown and an appreciation for his natural surroundings. His sources are many, among them Jan Vermeer, his favorite artist, and the Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera.[11]
His painting Lake Okanagan was purchased at a rural Ontarioyard sale for C$200. Six years later, in 2007, the purchaser sold it at auction for $402,500.[15][16][17] In November 2018, his painting Fishboats, River Inlet sold for $2,041,250 CDN (premium included) at the Heffel Auction.[18]
E. J. Hughes: Canadian War Artist, by Robert Amos (2022), 216-page hardcover book publisher by TouchWood Editions. ISBN9781771513852 The book was the winner of the 2023 Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Book on British Columbia, the 2022 PubWest Book Design Awards Gold Medal for Historical / Biographical Book, and was a finalist for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.
