BA (Hons) Fine Art graduates talked to AUB after their London Summer Shows. Here Jack Hughes discusses his work

Can you tell us about your work?

It was manifested from work I had been doing earlier on, which was more to do with celebrities and the death of celebrity and how it’s romanticised. Further on from that I started to read a lot of early 40s/50s existentialist novels, and I tried to throw a bit of youth in to it I guess, through oil paint. Also I still kept the celebrity thing going on, because I would use photoshop to make collages to prepare for these oil paintings. Both of these are Liam Gallagher, but I’ve thrown a lot of cultural references in to it, like Lord of the Rings. This one is titled The Land Surveyor, which is the title character from a Franz Kafka novel called The Castle. I remember reading it in February, and it was quite a painful book to read, you’re expecting to find out something, it’s like 300 pages trying to find something out and it’s just goes on and on and on. Also another reference to pop culture is this small one here, which is a painting of an alarm clock from the film Groundhog Day, so it links in with these as well. This one is also titled What is this? Miami Beach?, it’s a line from Groundhog Day.