INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK HUGHES

Has Literature ever played an important part when you conceptualise your artwork?
I am devoted to reading books, as a child I could recite in French the label of the sauce bottle on the table, even though I could not speak French. Certain eccentric authors like Christian Morgenstern and Ivor Cutler and Samuel Butler and Franz Kafka and Laurence Sterne and N.F. Simpson are very important to my way of thinking. I have learnt from literature the ways of rhetoric, of poetic imagery, of structure, of metaphor and simile and oxymoron and paradox that I use in my work.

When you started your career, which artist were you most influenced by?

 When I started my career as a student the most influential artist on me was Paul Klee. I warmed to his subtle sense of humour, his child-like sense of design, his variety of materials and imagery. I still practise in my drawing a Klee-like combination of geometric design and figuration, as when his concatenation of triangles becomes a fleet of yachts, especially when his viaducts take off on their own legs to pursue their individual freedom.

What is your favourite artwork from your collection?

In my own collection I have artworks by M.C.Escher, René Magritte, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, Meret Oppenheim, Anthony Earnshad and Nancy Fouts. A favourite of mine is Nancy Fouts’. hourglass. It is an hourglass full of sand. It is useless as an hourglass, but it is useful as an artwork to remind us that time passes anyway, whether we measure it or not. The fullness of the glass is equivocal, both a frustration and a  plenitude, time stopped and time filled.

Would you consider using digital technology as a medium to make art in the current times?

In my studio we use digital technology to make all our designs to paint from. My designer, Donna Kemp, takes photographs, for example of Venetian palazzos, and adjusts them in photoshop to templates we have scanned from our trapezoidal wooden shapes. The digital technology enables us to print out same-size designs for our pictures, we then revert to more conventional techniques by tracing the print-outs onto our shapes and painting them in oils in our art.

How do you think the pandemic has changed the art industry?
The art industry at its most basic level is providing wall furniture for dwellings. When people are stuck at home in the pandemic, looking at their four walls, they sometimes think I would like a new picture to look at, and the art industry can oblige. For my work the computer allows us to create videos to send to galleries to show the way the work looks and more importantly, the way it moves. I am pleased that I can easily show in video the magic of my work – but it is even better when the movement is made by your own body.
What has been the most memorable highlight of your career so far?

 

When I was twenty-one in 1961,  I had my first exhibition , at the Portal Gallery in Mayfair. (It was where I had seen an exhibition of Magritte paintings.) The catalogue was written by David Sylvester, who interviewed Francis Bacon so many times, and George Melly, who had been a Surrealist and owned a couple of fines Magrittes. Also there was E.L.T Mesens who had been Magritte’s dealer all their lives. That night was the first and most memorable highlight of my career, it has been downhill from then on. I sold a majority of the paintings and I thought I had arrived. I still have not got there.

Is there any advice you would like to share with upcoming artists and collectors?

My advice to collectors is to study art in books and catalogues, you can learn a lot from small printed images and adjacent words.  But you really have to be there to see what art does to you, what pleasure you get from being with art, being amazed or delighted or amused or moved by the art of the artist. My advice to upcoming artists would be to go right through the influences you feel and come out the other side as yourselves, having enjoyed the ride with a good driver, but ready to take the wheel yourself.

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