Mary Hughes is a Boston-based painter whose work explores the intersection of landscape, memory, mapping, and the passage of time. Drawing inspiration from both the natural world and the urban environment, she creates layered abstract paintings that transform observations of place into intricate networks of line, color, and form.

These paintings explore nature and landscapes through abstract techniques of line, color, and composition. Drawing inspiration from her Back Bay Fens neighborhood—an “urban wild” full of rich textures and surfaces—Hughes creates works that attempt to capture ephemeral moments, imagined places, weather events, and the passage of time.

These paintings imaginatively render the hidden pockets of nature within urban spaces: vernal pools, garden ponds, underwater scenes, and the river itself. Using botanical forms and underwater imagery, Hughes distills the fluctuating character of these places, translating both visual memory and sensory experience onto the canvas.

Verdant explores the tension between darkness and illumination through layered fields of deep green, blue, and black. Delicate, meandering lines and scattered points of color suggest organic forms, pathways, and traces of movement emerging from the atmospheric background. The overlapping marks create a sense of hidden structures gradually coming into view. The inspiration for this piece is the obscured view of life that lies just beneath the surface of a river.

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