Notebooks

In an astonishing collection of twenty-seven notebooks created over a quarter of a century, Philip Hughes has sought to capture the spirit of a place: its geological structure, its relationship with the surrounding landscape, and its occasional signs of human intervention. These painterly but topographically precise notebooks record moments when the artist has been moved to draw what he can see, whether from the shelter of a standing stone in Orkney, Scotland, from the air over the Simpson desert in Australia, or from a postal boat sailing through the Norwegian fjords. Pieced together by Hughes himself from over a thousand drawings, this is a logbook of momentary observations. Some are swift sketches of fields or horizons, others are slower studies of lichen and flowers in Antarctica, or lines of quartz in granite in Cornwall. The depth of feeling and knowledge Hughes has for different terrains and climates underpins the beauty of this essential and inspiring selection of notebooks.