How Hull artist Peter Huby creates a mosaic mansion in Greece to massive paintings of the East Coast

In addition to his artistic pursuits, Huby has also hand-built a strikingly original mosaiced house in Greece where he and his wife Linda Cox have lived since 2004.

There will be large-scale photographs of the house on display in the exhibition and Huby will also be creating a scale-model of it out of cardboard, assembled in the gallery space.

The exhibition came about after a trip to the UK that Huby made a few years ago, specifically to paint Spurn Point, a subject that has been a constant inspiration to him over the years.

“I used to go there a lot as a kid – the first time was when I was about 12 and then I would go back there with my own kids on family holidays,” he says.

“I have made lots of drawings of it at various times and I went there in 2018 with the intention of making some large-scale paintings of it. I painted four in as many days and eventually made a set of six. They are quite dramatic images.”

The paintings are 1.5m by 1m and once he had finished them, Huby enquired at galleries around Hull about exhibiting them.

It was John Bernasconi, fine art lecturer and gallery director at the University of Hull, who suggested a more expansive exhibition looking back over Huby’s prodigious output across six decades.

Huby has enjoyed the process of gathering together the artworks for the show, tracking down pieces that he wanted to include.

“It has been really interesting getting in touch with people who have my works,” he says. “It has been quite nice because I have been renewing friendships with some people I haven’t seen for years.”

Huby had always been interested in art and drawing, from an early age.

“At primary school I had this little cowboy character that I used to draw. So, it does go back a long way,” he says. “For years I didn’t really think of myself as a painter, partly because I do it when I feel like it and sometimes fitfully. It is just part of what I do – it is a fairly organic business and very open-ended. I didn’t set out in any self-conscious way to be an artist.”

After leaving school, he worked in a variety of jobs before training to be an art teacher and went on to teach art in secondary schools for 26 years.

While he was able to continue making his own art during that time, working around his teaching commitments, since he left the profession in 1997, he has been able to focus more fully on his painting and other creative interests.

“By and large I paint from the elbow, not with the head,” he says. “Most of the pleasure for me is pushing paint around on the canvas – all my work is figurative, not abstract but moving in that direction. It’s an almost entirely intuitive process for me. I have been doing things the same way for decades.”

Aside from painting and sculpture, Huby has also written several novels including two – Pasiphae and Carthage – inspired by Greek mythology and ancient history and a trilogy of historical novels – Katharine, Hannah and Dill Acre – which are all set in North Yorkshire.

Filmmaking has been part of his wide-ranging creative practice too. Alongside the exhibition, Wrecking Ball Arts in Hull will be screening several of his films including some of his early movies made in the UK and his most recent, Absence, made in Greece in 2019.

“I’ve made about five films since we have been living in Greece and the latest one is about two middle-aged sisters driving from Athens to the remote village where they were born to scatter their mother’s ashes,” he says. “There is a kind of reconciliation with their dead mother but, like most of my films, it is also a lot about the landscape.”

The film is in Greek with English subtitles. “I write the scripts in English and then luckily I have friends who can translate it into Greek.”

The move to Greece in the early 2000s provided a new creative outlet for Huby.

Having bought a piece of land there, he and his wife Linda, who was Head of Performing Arts at Settle College in North Yorkshire, set about building a home for themselves from scratch.

“Linda and I had bought four acres of steep olive terraces overlooking the Bay of Messinia in 2003. We began building this structure in 2005 and it continues to evolve,” says Huby.

Having returned to the UK for a year in order to sell their house and fulfil work obligations they went back to Greece in 2004.

"For the first few weeks we lived in a tent whilst working on a modest wooden house. By the time the autumn thunderstorms arrived, the roof was on, and we were able to sleep in a dry space, while we added walls and a bathroom. I built a workshop next to the site of the big structure during that first year.” They spent six years creating the main house which is a work of art itself, adorned with beautiful mosaics and sculptures – it is a living, growing installation with Huby continually adding more embellishments. It seems to have developed organically from its beginnings nearly twenty years ago.It seemed for a while that after fourteen years the building project was winding to a halt but then about three years ago I started on a new structure, a big gate over the road, fairly close to the house. I'm not sure why.

“We started at one end of the house with a fountain and then just carried on – that’s the way it was,” he says. “We just used to turn up most days and do something. My father was a builder and I had worked for him when I was a boy, so I wasn’t fazed by it at all. It seemed for a while that after fourteen years the building project was winding to a halt but then I started on a new structure, a big gate over the road, fairly close to the house. I'm not sure why.

"Many of the external surfaces of the building are covered by tiles or tile mosaic. This is partly accounted for by the fact that for some years we had a steady supply of free broken tiles from a local tile merchant. Frosts are very rare here so there is no problem with using ceramic tiles on external surfaces.”

The good news is that while Huby admits he is doing fewer additions to the house these days, his creative drive is certainly not diminished.

“I’m 76 now and it gets more difficult to do as you get older,” he says. “But there is usually something to mess with.” It’s a remarkable achievement, among many, from a remarkable man.

Peter Huby: Hull and Back, a retrospective is at the University of Hull, Brynmor Jones Library Gallery, January 20-March 12. Open daily 10am-5pm, until 7pm on Tuesdays. A selection of Peter Huby’s films are screening at Wrecking Ball Arts, Hull, January 24-26.