Patrick Hughes interviewed by Murray McDonald -
In this interview from August 2003 with Murray McDonald, Patrick talks about
his influences, aims and ideas.
Extract from 'Patrick Hughes, Perspective'
- 8 pages selected from John Slyce's 1998 book (ISBN 1 873362 87 0).
3D animation of 'Rolling Dice 2002' - If you can't get to
see a Hughes reverspective this interactive animation that allows you to 'move
around' a virtual painting will give some impression of reverspective. Animation
is 300Kb and requires Quicktime, available free here.
More information about Patrick Hughes can be found in the press
and books and films sections. More technical information
about reverspective can be found in the science of perception
section. To see a reverspective (or two) why not take in a show
or visit a gallery. A selection of reverspectives
can be viewed on this site in our own online gallery
section.
Murray McDonald: How did you start in art?
Patrick Hughes: When I was nineteen I went to a training college to learn
to be a teacher, specialising in English. We were asked to write about our
six favourite authors, mine were Eugene Ionesco, Laurence Steme, Franz Kafka,
Lewis Carroll, Samuel Butler, N.F Simpson They said their idea of Eng.Lit
was the Brontes, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, so I should take the art option.
MM: What did you learn at college?
PH: The art course was a basic design course, Bauhaus influenced. So I never
did life drawing. Although abstract art did not interest me, I soon got into
Paul Klee.
MM: Some of us might find it hard to see Klee as part of your foundation?
PH: I take three things from Paul Klee, organisation, humour, and invention.
He was very varied - I have tried to be. His principle of organising the space
and then deciding what it is to represent I still hold to. But I never wanted
my work to look like Klee, or Magritte for that matter.
MM: I'm glad you mentioned Rene Magritte. I know he is your model artist
PH: Magritte at his best, in The Human Condition, The Blank Signature, On
the
Threshold of Liberty, is ineffable. He knew how to get behind the surface
of things,
with a hundred strategies and witty discombobulations. I don’t particularly
like what
Magritte’s paintings look like, I like what they think.
MM: What is your philosophy, what do you want people to get from your
art?
PH: My philosophy is paradox. I am of a logical cast of mind, and find common
sense hopeless. Philosophers have found paradox cropping up at the crux of
every enquiry, and have tried to explain away this vicious circularity. I
embrace the contradictory and celebrate the paradoxical. A paradox to me is
like a pearl.
MM: How would you compare your earlier work with your perverspeetive
? After all you were a successful artist for thirty years before you decided
to devote yourself to this sculptural painting.
PH: I hope people remember my earlier work - The Space Ruler, Infinity, Sunshine,
The Endless Snakes, Prison Rainbow - I had some very good ideas, refined ideas.
But I was telling people about paradox. With reverse perspective I am letting
the viewer experience a paradoxical relation between the self and the work
of art.
MM: In your reverspectives you have externalised the structure of perception.
Were you always interested in perspective?
PH: Not at all. I preferred to have my art flat, two-dimensional. So when
I made the Clown in 1963 he was made to lie on the ground as if flattened
by a steam-roller. I was always interested in perception, and kept up with
the Ames demonstrations and JJ.Gibson’s Our Perception of the Visual
World. But I have studied perspective very closely in the last fifteen years.
MM: People confuse the solemn with the serious, the literary with the
learned, the autobiographical with the real I know your work inside out, and
I find you an outsider in today’s art world
PH: I have always believed that one should wear one’s learning lightly.
I am not a clown who wants to play Hamlet: on the contrary. I studied paradoxes,
(with George Brecht) puns (with Paul Hammond) and oxymorons (on my own). These
findings were published in three popular books, influential, complete, and
original. But I would never let this research show overtly on my art work,
it is in my art and in my heart.
MM: What do you think art is?
PH: I like the idea that art is a lingua franca, a language that we can all
read. For someone so literary, I abhor words as back-up for visually inadequate
visual art. I am not interested in the personal in art - we are all persons
- some want to be more personable than the rest of us - creeps.
MM: What do you hope people take from your work?
PH: I believe they have an experience, unlike any other, in which they see
the impossible happen. And I hope that they then think a bit about why that
is. If lookers and seers experience the paradoxical and reciprocal relation
between parts of the world and themselves, they get a sense of the flow of
life.