Why Ted Hughes?

As I work on my current series of Ted Hughes-inspired paintings, I am often asked 'Why Ted Hughes?'

Poet Simon Armitage puts it far better than I can. He had this to say of first encountering Hughes as a teenager in school.

My own experience as an uninspired and uninspiring secondary school student is one shared by many of the same age group, in the way that Hughes’s poems were the first captivating moments in English literature, and were read and described by teachers who could not hide their enthusiasm for the work or their eagerness to share it. Poems like ‘Wind’, ‘The Bull Moses’, ‘The Horses’ and of course ‘Hawk Roosting’ are not only fastened in the imagination of a whole generation, but for some, like myself, were a kind of Rosetta Stone – the means by which the surrounding world could suddenly be translated, understood and experienced.

I was also uninspired and uninspiring and I too remember feeling jolted awake by the power of Hughes’ language, by the sheer alive energy of it, and by the way it spoke to something deep within me.

My subsequent degree was a combined BA in Literature and Art and I chose to write my final dissertation on Hughes’ nature poetry AND to make him the focus of my final art show. For that, I made a series of fairly inadequate paintings and drawings which were displayed alongside printed lines from his poems (an idea that caused some technological issues back in the days before everyone had a printer on their desk!)

Then life took different turns. I moved to Canada and then to the US. I stopped painting for many years and I rarely glanced at my poetry collection. And yet, no matter how many times we moved house and how many times we cleared out unwanted possessions, the Hughes collections stayed with me. I wouldn’t have dreamed of parting with them.

When we finally returned home in 2012, and I found myself living just a few miles from where the great man was born, my interest was re-ignited and I dug out all those books.

Reading them again, the old excitement returned. I often found lines from the poems running through my mind as I walked the moors, or passed a ruined building or a tumble-down wall.

And I began to paint again – semi-abstract landscapes inspired by those walks.

And finally, in 2019, I saw where all this was leading. That degree show really had been inadequate. Back then, I had neither the life experience or the painting skills to do justice to words that Keith Sagar describes as ‘crackling with surplus energy.’ (The Art of Ted Hughes). But maybe now, with more wisdom and more experience …. maybe now I could do it?

Hughes believed that poetry was a way of understanding oneself and I believe the same about painting. Maybe – just maybe – through the act of creating, I can get to the essence of what has always so appealed to me about these poems and in doing so, get closer to the essence of myself?

So the answer to “why Ted Hughes?” is simply nothing and no-one else has ever inspired me in quite the same way. And perhaps my paintings can ignite interest in others, so that they too can be transported by the work of this marvellous poet.