New York: Blossoming in the Nothingness of the City

May 1960 - March1961

Hugh was very much looking forward to returning to New York as he felt that only in the impersonal atmosphere of the city would it be possible for him to give “new serious attention to painting”; Trinidad was ”too strongly scented and flavoured.” John had secured him a street-level basement flat at 13 Jones Street in Greenwich Village and he planned to turn it into a workshop and art gallery, which was common practice in the area. He also secured a place in another exhibit with the international show at the Arts Club on Gramercy Park.

He began painting West Indian figures, works he had been planning to do once he returned to New York. By late 1960 and into early 1961 he began producing an extraordinary series of small gouache paintings of abstracted female West Indian women with flowers, which integrated realistic treatment of tropical flowers with a looser more abstract approach to the figure and a spatially abstract, often highly patterned, background sometimes based on brightly coloured fabrics. He turned these into large oils as the year progressed.