Snohomish artist inspired by beauty of Glacier National Park
Published 4:41 pm Monday, December 6, 2010
Roy E. Hughes snapped 1,000 photographs while hiking in Montana.
He didn’t fill five albums back home in Snohomish. The artist used reference pictures to create a book called “100 Beautiful Views of Glacier National Park.”
Each page of his book is illustrated by a digital block print. They look like antique, silk-screened travel posters.
The work is sold at Glacier park visitor center bookstores operated by Stephan Prince with Glacier Association. He said Hughes is a talented artist who recognized the beauty of the visually striking park.
Glacier is a place visitors wish to see again, Prince said.
“If it weren’t so remote, I’m sure more would find a way back,” Prince said. “I talk with many people who found special connections and inspiration in the park and will find a way back at some point, or even wonder about what it would take to move out here.”
Hughes was chosen as an artist-in-residence in 2005 and lived in a Glacier cabin for a month. He did 10 hikes in 14 days during the experience of a lifetime.
The pages of his book show his love of Japanese-inspired block art and include historic anecdotes.
Some examples:
“One wonders if McDonald Creek looked the same on an August afternoon in 1890 when Lieutenant George Ahern and his party, the first Europeans to explore the area, visited on an exploration of the mountains north of Marias Pass.”
“This massive log and timber building (Glacier Park Lodge) was patterned after the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition’s Forestry Building, which was built in 1905 in Portland, Ore.”
Born in Montana, Hughes, 67, grew up in Spokane. He said he sketched as soon as he could hold a pencil. His art teacher in high school was pleased to have someone who could draw, he said, rather than delinquents often dumped in the class.
He attended the University of Washington, served in the U.S. Army, taught school in Edmonds and Monroe and earned a doctorate in educational technology. His wife, Jeannie Goodhope, is a media librarian at Everett Community College.
The artist’s digital block prints look like wood block and silk screen prints, he said.
“The signature of this medium is the large, flat areas of bold color that create the poster effect,” he said. “Unlike the labor intensive manual processes of wood block prints and silk screens, however, my block prints are created digitally using a computer.”
He begins with an underlying reference photograph, then creates layers of color on top of the photograph until there is a layer for each color used in the image.
“I generally begin with the area of the image that appears farthest back, say the sky in a landscape, and create the first layer of color. If the sky contains clouds, there will be one or more layers created for the clouds, depending on how may colors I interpret in the clouds. Sometimes I will end up with nearly 200 layers in an image.”
The process of creating a digital block print can be imagined as painting each color seen in an image on a piece of glass, he said, then stacking each color layer until complete, resulting in a completed piece of art that is then flattened in the computer and printed out using a high-quality ink-jet printer.
For more information about the book, visit www.royehughes.com.
The work is art, he said, but can be used as a guide to the park, which will mark its centennial in 2010. He calls it a tourist book you can use.
“I wrote like I talked,” he said. “It was fun.”
He has managed to blend his talent with a love of the outdoors.
“I’ve hiked the North Cascades for 40 years,” Hughes said. “Going to the mountains is spiritual for me. It’s good for the body, mind and soul.”
Hughes is working on another book about Hawaii.
He also sells block posters and cards.
“Ten thousand people have a piece of my art,” Hughes said.
Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451, oharran@heraldnet.com.
