Hugo Shaw was the first real artist I met. Hugo and Hatherleigh were friends of my parents, and he and my father both taught at St Peters College in Adelaide. From the ages of eight to sixteen, I lived with my family on the edge of the campus, and the Shaws lived a few streets away.

At some point, my parents talked Hugo into making some portraits, in red chalk, of the individual members of our family. My turn came, which meant riding my bike to Second Avenue and sitting in Hugo’s studio while he stared at my face for an hour or two, then coming back for more.

He did the same with my parents, my sister and my Swedish grandfather. They’re all amazing portraits. But it was the experience of sitting that I remember very distinctly. This was the first artist’s studio in which I ever spent any time, and it was fascinating. The materials, the tools, the window where the light came in, the sketchbooks, the wide, shallow drawers for storing works on paper. Had I ever seen an artist’s easel or a palette before? I don’t think so. And what is red chalk exactly? These sorts of questions, and many more like them, had never previously occurred to me.

Hugo was wonderful company. He liked people and knew how to talk to them. He could transform even the most casual conversation into a little conspiracy. This was very flattering when you were just a boy, and equally flattering when, as an adult, you found yourself in the strange position of being an art critic.

Hugo was an enthusiast. He was an enthusiast for great art, of course (and I learned a lot about artists through talking with him, everyone from Augustus John to Mark Rothko). But his enthusiasm extended to so many other things, too. He appreciated talent in whatever form it took.

I’m sure the fact that he was the only male in his formidable (to a young boy) female household must have influenced the way he thought about things, or perhaps it was innate, but I noticed the way he tended to talk about masculine things in an almost feminine way. Those terms are crude, of course, but if you register that I was a boy in a boy’s school who was excited by things like cricket and Formula One, you can probably grasp my sense. Hugo loved tennis, for instance, and talked passionately about certain male tennis players after seeing them live. But instead of obsessing over statistics or scores or moments of dominance, he would talk about timing and style and grace. His hands would move sensuously as he spoke, as if they were riding air currents, and without realizing it, he’d given me a whole new way of thinking about something.

For Hugo, things weren’t just effective or ineffective; they weren’t even simply beautiful or ugly. If something was beautiful, he was interested in what made it so, in the elements within beauty, in its intricate, moving parts. He especially loved to talk about color. In class, he took great delight in demonstrating color’s relativity by placing the same strip of red (for instance) first alongside a blue and then a yellow, thereby completely transforming the way the red hit the eye.

I think the fact that Hugo loved to speak about these things affected me more than I appreciated at the time.

We lived with Hugo’s paintings and drawings – not just his portraits of us but quite a few of his hilarious and incredibly deft cartoons, which he would magically produce at restaurants or in living rooms. A cartoon, I think, is a kind of conspiracy, a visual shorthand, and so these drawings were an extension of Hugo’s wit and mischief and high spirits in conversation.

But what of Hugo’s paintings? My parents have displayed one of his magnificent, horizontal South Australian landscapes, in a beautiful, fresh palette, in their living room for many years.

I have one of his small paintings of the cliffs at Port Willunga in my house. It’s like one of Monet’s paintings of the cliffs at Etretat or on Belle Ile’s Atlantic coast, transposed to the bleaching, South Australian light and painted with an economy I associate more with Berthe Morisot than Monet or Renoir. It shows off Hugo’s lovely painterly touch. Large parts of the primed canvas have been left bare, exactly capturing the effect of the South Australian light’s whitewashing dazzle.

The sensation of sun and heat and sheer expanse given off by this small picture is a consolation to me during the dark, cramped winter months in Boston.

Port Willunga was Hugo’s laboratory – the place where he honed his eye and analyzed all the manifold, constantly shifting interactions of light and color and texture. But I suppose a laboratory is a closed place, and it’s hard to think of anywhere more open and expansive than Port Willunga. In any case, although he spent years honing his craft, Hugo was no scientist. What he was responding to – what you not only see but feel in a masterpiece like “Big Blue,” which combines the freshness of the Impressionists with the color saturation of Rothko and the atmosphere of Turner – was the place’s poetry. What Hugo celebrated was the way Port Willunga, which he and Hatherleigh knew so intimately, was woven through every aspect of his life. Knowing how much this place meant to him, and what an inexhaustible resource it was for his art, reminds me of something the painter Lucian Freud once said:  

“My idea of travel is a downward travel really. Getting to know where you are, better, and exploring feelings that you know more deeply. I always think that thing ‘knowing something by heart’ gives you a depth of possibility which is more potential than seeing new sights, however marvelous and exciting they are.”

Hugo knew Port Willunga by heart. He knew the wreck of the “Star of Greece” and the old abandoned jetty pylons, dark below and bleached above. He knew the row of man-made beach caves, excavated long ago to store boats and fishing gear. He knew Miss Polkinghorne’s cottage on the north side of Willunga Creek, where Miss Polkinghorne once shot at him with a .22 rifle while he was walking through a field, and where his teacher, the great Ivor Hele, later stored his paints and bicycle. Later on, he got to know the neighbors and holidaymakers who came down to the beach, the dogs they walked, the clothes they wore, the striped towels they spread on the sand.

And of course, he knew the weather. He might paint the celestial drama of thickening storm clouds, for instance. But he wouldn’t get carried away by the drama. He understood that painting the clouds meant painting everything under them in different hues, because that is what his eye saw even as it was happening – the way every color and tone is in a constantly shifting relationship, and you have to keep adjusting to what your eye is actually seeing, not just to what it thinks it knows. That dynamic relationship – between seeing afresh and using all his deftness and tact to capture what he saw on canvas – was what kept things so interesting for Hugo because it was always evolving, it was never finished.  

Hugo liked freshness and frankness in things and in people. His art has a dispassionate quality. It isn’t expressionistic or histrionic. But it is deeply felt, always fresh, always evolving, always alive.

- Sebastian