'There's a narrative, a story': Tampa artist paints people and landscapes featuring the Bay Area

TAMPA, Fla. - A local artist purposely leaves peoples’ faces vague in her paintings because she wants viewers to imagine themselves there. 

Linda Hugues has been painting for a little more than 20 years. Since the beginning, she’s focused on people.

"I think adding people really adds motion and energy," she said. "There's a narrative, a story, so you wonder what the people are doing and how they're experiencing that place together."

Linda Hugues paints the people and places of the Tampa Bay Area.

Residents of the Tampa Bay Area will see familiar sights in many of her paintings. Her galleries have featured the Tampa Riverwalk, Curtis Hixon Park, St. Petersburg’s Beach Drive and Downtown Sarasota.

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"I've started painting people from the beginning, but now I combine people with landscapes," she said. "I love beautiful architecture."

Hugues usually works in groups of paintings. Her latest series is based on Barcelona, Spain. She loves to travel, especially in Europe, so any piece of art not based in Tampa is usually based in Europe. 

The artist leaves faces vague on purpose.

"All of those paintings come up at the same time in the sense that I do the same stage, and then I move to the next stage with all of them. So, I'm working them all together so that they work together as a series of paintings," she explained.

Hugues’s process starts with photographs she takes. She then moves around various elements of those photos. For example, she can move a person from the background to the foreground.

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She’ll use a grid as a guide to start working on a canvas. Those photographs also help with colors and light sources as the paintings develop.

Whatever she paints, she hopes they illicit a reaction.

"I hope it either reminds them of places that they've been that they love or maybe some place that they really want to go visit," Hugues said. "Just a feeling, it might not even be some place that they've been, but they just love the feeling of the painting. They want to be there."

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