PERSPECTIVE
The strong gravitational pull of a parent means a
professional passion is often passed on to the child.
Story Brook Turner
Two years ago the Sydney art dealer Ray Hughes and his son Evan went into business together as God - or Ray - had always intended. Evan not only grew up with art but had deepened his experience with an art history degree at Cambridge and a stint in the London gallery scene.
Yet perched above the father ship in Sydney's Surry Hills, the Evan Hughes Gallery sailed into trouble almost immediately, in the global credit crisis of October 2008. That only amplified some pretty tangled motivations, however. The project foundered. Tempers frayed. Father and son didn't speak for months.
"Part of it was just pent -up frustration and I took it out on Ray. I hated the rest of the art and I was kind of angered that it wasn't like what he had got to do when he was 22 and opened his first gallery in Brisbane. There was an innocence then, a vigour and excitement, and a lot of young collectors with open eyes. And you didn't have seven art magazines telling you what to like and who was most fashionable."
Like any red-blooded kid, Evan rebelled, hitting on the one course of action his father couldn't accept: law at Sydney University.
At 25, Evan Hughes is headed to the bar, though a very different one from the all-you-can-drink version his father ran for 40 years at his famous Thursday lunches. Then again, when you father is the most Rabelaisian figure in a Rabelaisian art world, what's left but rules and precedents. "A judge said to me 'you must be the only boy whose father is dismally ashamed he's studying law'," Evan says, sitting in the gallery the week before Christmas dressed in a grey pin-striped suit and parrot- coloured tie, his socks - mismatched, pale pink - a riff on his father's candy-coloured pair. Not that he's as sure he will end up in the law as he was when he
first slammed the upstairs door. These days he is back working with his father as an associate while he studies. "The minute Ray accepted I was going to study law and started asking questions and listening to me rabbit on about jurisprudence, I got far more interested in art again," Evan says. "A couple of months ago my fiancée turned to me and said 'don't tell anyone but you look like you're enjoying art dealing again'."
"Sometimes you think you've been too soft," Ray says, eyeing his only child adoringly. "I don't knowwhat he'll end up doing. I wouldn't say I'm holding out, I just won't be surprised."
Evan: "That's absolutely right: if I think art dealers are nasty colleagues, I'm sure a couple of
years on Phillip Street will sort me out. But you either have the fire burning constantly or you don't. My fire burns somewhat,,, it's nev4er going to be like Ray's."
Ray nods. "I remember [the late Australian painter] Sam Fullbrook saying you're like a priest, you've had the calling", he says. "If you're going to be any good at any thing, you've got to have a calling."
And as Evan Hughes spends his 20s sorting his calling from what is just his father's calling, he will be following a time-honoured tradition.