E.J. Hughes painted about a dozen canvases of ocean-going ships docked at Cowichan Bay between 1968 and 1998. One of his finest paintings was Ship with a Blue Hull, Cowichan Bay, this acrylic canvas from 1982.[1] The work was based on a detailed pencil sketch he made on location in 1978. In a letter to his dealer, Max Stern of the Dominion Gallery of Montreal, that accompanied the painting, Hughes wrote: “Cowichan Bay is just a few miles from here [Duncan, BC] and this view is from the side of the Cowichan Bay Road, now a secondary road, but a few years ago part of the main highway between Victoria and Nanaimo, on the east coast of Vancouver Island.”[2]

The ship with the blue hull, which appears to be a bulk carrier for lumber, is moored at a wharf on the far side of the estuary of the Cowichan River at Westcan Terminal Road, the water frontage of the Cowichan Bay Sawmill. The view as Hughes painted it is seen through a forest of pilings and log booms across the water of the bay, which is freshened with a lively repeated pattern of wavelets overlaid with the stems of dry grasses. The bottom third of the painting is taken up with logs washed up on the shore and wildflowers, most prominently red and white clover.

Hughes took enormous care with every detail of his preparatory drawing for this work, giving loving attention to the wood grain of logs on the beach, to each blade of grass and every leaf of the common weeds. While sitting in the front seat of his car, over the course of two or three days he drew the forested hills and bare earth of Mount Tzouhalem and Salt Spring Island in the distance, fronted by the ship and activity along the wharf. “There is a wide place to pull off the road, and this view can be seen from the shelter of the car, which is most welcome when it is raining,” Hughes wrote to Stern in 1979.[3]

A few years later in his studio, Hughes translated his drawing into paint: each leaf was counted, positioned and coloured precisely according to the notes he had made while sitting before the subject. In the same letter that accompanied this painting, Hughes apologized to his dealer:

I’m sorry about the long time since I sent the last canvas—it has been 2 ½ months. The ½ month was spent on my “reconnaissance” trips up and down the coastal area here, photographing desirable scenes to save me time next summer when I hope to go sketching. Thanks to my new 35 mm. camera I have 105 accurate-to-nature photos.

A glance at these photographs makes it clear that Hughes did not use them as anything more than a general reminder. As ever, he based his paintings on his keen eyesight, powerful analysis and extraordinarily retentive visual memory. Ship with a Blue Hull, Cowichan Bay is among his best. Executed in his largest format, filled with detail and incident, it is an exceptional record of a specific time and place. As a representation of the environment, both natural and man-made, it exemplifies everything for which Hughes’s works are renowned.

We thank Robert Amos, artist and writer from Victoria, BC, for contributing the above essay. Amos is the official biographer of Hughes and has so far published five books on his work. Building on the archives of Hughes’s friend Pat Salmon, Amos is at work on a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

1. For a discussion of Hughes’s switch from oil to acrylic, and his paintings of Cowichan Bay, see Robert Amos, E.J. Hughes Paints Vancouver Island (Victoria: TouchWood Editions, 2018), 78.

2. E.J. Hughes to Max Stern, October 22, 1982. Correspondence available at Special Collections, University of Victoria.

3. E.J. Hughes to Max Stern, July 24, 1979.

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