‘I was his surrogate mother who happened to double as a tree’: How Frieda Hughes fell for a magpie chick
This article is more than 3 years old
The writer and artist always longed for stability, but after the death of her mother, Sylvia Plath, her father Ted Hughes found it hard to settle. When she finally bought a home, her world was turned upside down by a baby bird
Frieda Hughes
Sunday 16 April 2023
Imagine wanting something since you were old enough to be conscious of wanting it. Imagine longing for something all your early years, picturing it inside your head because, as my late father always said, if you truly want something you should visualise it and make a space for it in your life.
Frieda Hughes: ‘A crow’s death linked me to all the other losses in my life’
This article is more than 3 years old
The poet and painter, daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, explains how raising a large aviary of rescued birds in the Welsh countryside gave her a new purpose – and fresh pain
Lisa O'Kelly Sunday 16 April 2023
Frieda Hughes is a poet and painter. She has published seven children’s books and four poetry collections. She lives and works in mid-Wales where she rescues, keeps and paints owls.
How did you feel in the days and weeks after George flew away? I had this huge bird-shaped hole in my life. I had my painting and my poetry, but my third marriage was crumbling and all the attention I had paid to George really had nowhere else to go. I also had this vast aviary I had built, so I set about determinedly trying to find occupants for it. You can go and buy a bird but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. The birds had to be unwanted and they had to need care – birds that could not otherwise fly free. The first bird I took in was an elderly crow named Oscar, who couldn’t fly. But he died after 46 days.
Describing Oscar’s death, you write: “The sense of emptiness and loss was so profound, so deep, it seeped through my veins like a sticky ink.” Why do you think it hit you so hard? I felt that Oscar’s death, coming when it did, linked me to all the other deaths and losses in my life: my mother’s death, my father’s death, my brother’s death, my collapsing marriage, George’s departure and all the other deaths. Somehow for the first time I felt the weight of them all. On top of that, when a creature needs you and is totally dependent on you and then, inevitably, it dies, the bereavement process is always really hard. Some days I felt I would never stop crying. I cannot help it, I do anthropomorphise: I kept thinking about Oscar’s lack of family and how he might feel about dying in my house.
You went straight out and bought yourself a motorbike. Did that help your state of mind? Oh, yes. I have loved motorbikes all my life, ever since I was 15. And it did help because it enabled me to get away and escape. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my home but it is full of work, and obligations, and things crying out to be done. To be able to go out on a motorbike is to be free. I don’t need anybody else with me, all I need is a folder full of poetry, so I can go and sit in a cafe and write, completely unencumbered.
One of Frieda Hughes’s illustrations from George: A Magpie Memoir.
What role do birds and animals play in your life now? I now have 13 owls, two rescue huskies, one royal python, six chinchillas and an ageing ferret called Socks. I live by myself in the middle of nowhere so they are my little feathered and four-footed family, really. One of the owls, Wyddfa, a male snowy owl with a damaged wing, lives in the kitchen and utility room and has his little places to perch. And I let the little ones out of the aviary for bit of time flying around inside during the day, too. So, they form the household. If you took them all away, it would be really cold and empty and still and silent. When you have all these little creatures to run around after, cleaning up, and feeding them, it gives a structure to your day. They’re very grounding. The world can go mad, but they’re very consistent. Animals and nature generally are a constant reminder to me of what really matters.
Would you say that George changed your life? Well, he certainly kicked my life in a completely different direction. He and his magpie presence had a very powerful effect on me. He left me with a love of birds that I just hadn’t expected. If you had told me, a few years before, you’re going to fall in love with a magpie and be completely crackers about it, I would have laughed at you. If you’d told me I was going to end up with 13 owls in an aviary, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d looked after birds before but with George it was different because we really related to each other. We had such a connection. I never knew that having a magpie would be so much fun. It was like having a whole little person in the house but with wings – and a really mischievous brain.
Frieda Hughes Photograph by Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
Frieda Hughes: ‘I felt my parents were stolen’
‘When I read what people had written about my mother it was quite a shock to find she wasn’t angelic because that was how my father had presented her.’
Frieda Hughes is a painter and poet. She is also the daughter of two giants of the literary world, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and didn’t read her parents’ poetry until her mid-30s
Kissing coppers to rutting rhinos: Banksy’s artworks – ranked!
The quality of the enigmatic street artist’s murals veers wildly: from self-satisfied satirical statements to truly funny political provocations. Our critic rates his pieces, from worst to best
Jonathan Jones
Wednesdayt 14 August 2024
One of Banksy’s best-known but emptiest artworks, this mural that first appeared on London’s South Bank in 2002 is the 21st century answer to John Everett Millais’ gooey Victorian painting Bubbles, which was used as an advert for Pear’s Soap. The heart-shaped balloon floats away. The little girl is sad.
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When the artist came home from LA, it seemed like a retirement. But it heralded an astonishing new chapter. Our critic remembers their thrilling dinners together – and the dazzling new works that arrived in his inbox every morning
Jonathan Jones
Monday 15 June 2026
I
t was springtime in Paris and I was floating among young green leaves and white blossom – but I was not in a park. I was on an upper floor of the Fondation Louis Vuitton delighting, wallowing in several of David Hockney’s iPad paintings of his garden in Normandy. In one room, this green oasis was shown by the light of the silvery moon: the darkened chamber was alive with shining white lunar discs, blue clouds and the shadowy fingers of tree branches.
‘Hyper-stylised, ultra-cool visions’: 10 ways David Hockney changed art
He pushed landscape painting into the stratosphere, demolished one-point perspective, invented the Los Angeles look, embraced iPads, created dazzling stage sets for theatre and opera …
Eddy Frankel Saturday 13 June 2026
He was the ultimate synthesist
David Hockney didn’t just appear out of nowhere like some fully formed artistic wunderkind. His work was a synthesis of so much that came before and was happening around him. He took the ideas of minimalism and abstraction, fused them with the traditions of portraiture, and filtered it all through the innovations in pop and conceptualism that were going on in the 1960s. He was heavily indebted to a lot of other artists, but he synthesised all those influences into something so simple, immediate, digestible and approachable that it became something new.
‘He found the right style to show gay life as it is’ … David Hockney, 1966, by Jane Bown.Photograph: Jane Bown/From Observer Picture Library
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He was subversive and bold, yet also playful and accepting – putting the fun into pop art and finding freedom and fulfilment amid the blue skies and pools of California. David Hockney, who has died aged 88, lived and painted the truth
Jonathan Jones Friday 12 June 2026
David Hockney’s art was a feast of unabashed visual pleasure, one long orgy of the gaze, the delighted lifelong epiphany of someone who cherished flowers in a vase and freeways in the sun and thought endlessly about new ways of making pictures of such passing treasures. He changed the world just by looking at it. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the way he saw was revolutionary – all he cared about was truth. But no one had ever captured the look and feel of the contemporary world with such acceptance before. He has the same simple perfection as the Beatles – just as they caught the sound of the modern world, he caught its look.
British painter David Hockney poses at the Pompidou Centre in Paris on September 26, 2017 in front of one of his painting, a work made of an assemblage of various paintings, that he donated to the museum.Photo by STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN
He outlived four of his doctors’: what was behind David Hockney’s lifelong love of smoking?
His passion got him into scraps with the Paris Metro and numerous other bodies. Was it a social crutch? A Freudian response to his father? And why did he take such delight in writing to the Guardian about it all?
Zoe Williams
Saturday 13 June 2026
David Hockney’s last self-portrait that went on show while he lived, in 2025’s Paris retrospective, has a Droste effect: the figure holds a picture in which the figure holds a picture. Between the fingers of one hand, a paintbrush; of the other, a cigarette. He could have been smoking and smoking and smoking into infinity. That’s the elemental truth of the work, and even while that turned out not to be literally true – he died this week, aged 88 – he gave it his best shot.
David Hockney: I wasn't keen on Hillary when she banned smoking in the White House
In an exclusive interview the artist treads carefully – for most of the time – around US politics but is firm in his favour for painting. ‘If those were photographs in there, it would be a lot less interesting,’ he tellsGay Alcorn
Gay Alcorn
Fridady 11 November 2016
David Hockney laughs, and pauses to think. It is one day after Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States, and the world has shifted a little on its axis.
