Hugh Dunford Wood: The Art of Life

Above: Hugh in the process of making his wallpapers

Above: Hugh Dunford Wood

Above: 'Cardoon' wallpaper, in burnt ochre

Above: ...making his wallpaper

Above: 'Shoebaloo' - what every girl wants - wallpaper covered in shoes!

Above: 'Above Stoke Abbott', painted from nature

Above: 'Coney's Castle', one of Hugh's woodland scenes

I’m with the painter, sculptor and craftsman Hugh Dunford Wood in the garden of his home in Lyme Regis. It’s a big, rambling garden and everywhere there are sculptures. They peep out from amongst the flowers, hang strangely and unexpectedly from the branches of trees and half hide in the long grass of clearings. The result is that this ordinary garden has for a brief while become a kind of terra incognita where art lies in wait to ambush the explorer. The sculptures are the work of not one but many artists. Some of them are abstract, some naturalistic, some distinctly whacky, to say the least, and they are all here because Hugh’s garden is open to the public as ‘The Lyme Regis Sculpture Garden’.

Talking to Hugh is an exhilarating and at times a slightly vertiginous experience. Ask him a question and he will do his best to answer it, but in doing so, his is one of those minds that sees connections everywhere so that a question on, say, his time as a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Arts, Oxford in the late 60s can lead to talk of the value of draughtsmanship and life classes, to Old Master drawings and to the place of Hockney in the pantheon of great draughtsmen – and that’s just for starters. His talk is by turns witty, erudite – though with never a trace of smugness – funny, serious and, on occasion, disarmingly frank when it comes to his personal life.

To say that Hugh’s life has been an interesting one is a bit like saying that Einstein was quite good at maths. Here’s a summary of his CV. He was born the son of an army officer in Watlington, Oxfordshire. He went to the Ruskin and from there he embarked on a career that saw him not only painting but becoming a textile designer, a maker of hand-blocked wallpaper, and a glass etcher. He painted portraits – Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, the present Poet Laureate, Philip Larkin, David Lean, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, Bill Williams, Mark Rylance and Dame Peggy Angus are just a few of the great and the good who have sat for him. He’s had art residencies with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford and with the Globe Theatre in London. As a visual artist, designer and craftsman he’s had shows not just here in the UK but in Rio, Paris, Reykjavik, Varanasi in India, Hokkaido in Japan, and in California and Philadelphia in the USA. It is the CV of a successful artist, the sort of CV that might with variations hold true for many a successful artist working in England today. But it is only half the story. In fact, it’s less than half. Here, précised almost to the point of destruction, is just a little of the story behind the CV.

All over the world to Lyme Regis...

Somewhere between arriving in London in 1973 and pitching up in Lyme Regis in 2002 Hugh led a life that saw him befriended by the film director David Lean. He went, amongst other places, to Tahiti with him and Robert Boult when the two film men were exploring the possibility of making not one but two films about Captain Bligh, one about the mutiny and the other about Bligh’s long voyage in an open boat to safety after having been cut adrift by the mutineers. Hugh’s friendship with the great film director saw them in New York where they stayed with – can you believe this – Katherine Hepburn. He lived for a time in Brazil where, with his first wife, Candida, his first child was born. Later we find him in Paris where he drew Eugene Ionesco and met Erte.

Back in the UK, amongst a whole host of related activities Hugh taught art to adults and young prisoners at Oxford Prison, ran art courses for detainees at Campsfield Removal Centre and was a volunteer art teacher at the Passage Night Shelter for the Homeless in Victoria, London, where he developed the Streetwise Artpack, a small art kit for those living on the streets. He co-founded and led courses under ‘The Elder and the Ash’, a mentoring training for men, including retreats for fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, and for men surviving loss of work and relationship.

His work with school children has seen him organise arts and crafts workshops with pupils and young people all over the UK, whilst closer to home in Lyme Regis he led the ‘Boats Adrift’ and ‘Moving Kids’ art projects at St Michael’s Primary School in 2003.

Bringing Art to Lyme...

Also in Lyme, Hugh not only established the Artists’ Working Galleries, a small collective of artists’ open studios, he also found the time to launch the first Lyme Regis Arts Festival, a local celebration of all the arts, performing, visual and literary, among all local inhabitants, old and young, professional and non-professional, to encourage visitors in the off-season. And remember, as I said earlier, all that is just a snippet of the life that lies behind the bald statement of Hugh’s CV. To tell it all would take up this entire issue.

As for his own creative work, amongst other things Hugh is currently working on a series of paintings of woodland scenes. They are big, forceful images that far from being what the great 18th-century artist Fuseli called ‘tame delineations of a given spot’ are more an expression of the life force that drives not just the wood but also Hugh’s act of making the work. ‘I paint from nature,’ he tells me. ‘I lug my stuff up into the wood and I work fast. We are losing touch with the natural world and this cannot be right. I am passionate about wilderness and I would like to think that people, when they look at these paintings, will feel something of what I felt when I was in the woods painting them.’

As for his work as a craftsman, from 13th August to 13th September, as part of the ‘Made in Dorset’ venture, examples of Hugh’s beautiful printed wallpaper will be on show at the Bridport Arts Centre. You can also see more of Hugh’s work at www.dunfordwood.co.uk

A talent for luck...

I end by asking him about his take on life, he has, after all, led one hell of a life. ‘I believe that there is something up there watching over me. I am a Quaker and I try hard to live a life based on Quaker principles. I also believe that I’ve had another life before this one. I can’t honestly say what it might be but I have this faith that there is something,’ he explains.

Then, smiling, he goes on: ‘I’ve always lived beyond my means but then I’ve always seen life as a dare. You should recognise opportunities and take them. And then there is luck. My kids have got luck. I have a talent for luck – yes, above all I have this talent for luck.’

Well, having been in this exciting man’s company for two hours and more, it seems to me that his life does indeed owe a little to luck. More than luck though, Hugh’s is a life that owes a lot to his seemingly limitless energy, his unflagging desire to live out his Quaker principles and not a little to do his boundless creativity.