Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, February 3, 2023: Patrick Hughes, a British painter (#1769)

Friday, February 3, 2023

Artist of the Day, February 3, 2023: Patrick Hughes, a British painter (#1769)

Patrick Hughes (1939) is a British artist working in London. He is the creator of "reverspective", an optical illusion on a three-dimensional surface where the parts of the picture which seem farthest away are actually physically the nearest.

Patrick Hughes was born in Birmingham, attended school in Kingston upon Hull and went on at the James Graham Day College in Leeds in 1959. Later he taught at the Leeds College of Art before becoming an independent artist. He has three sons by his first wife, Rennie Paterson, and was later married to the author Molly Parkin. Hughes lives above his studio near Old Street, London, with his third wife, the historian and biographer Diane Atkinson.

In the 1970s Hughes hung his investigations of perception and illusion on the motif of the rainbow in a series of prints and paintings, such as Pile of Rainbows, Prison Rainbow and Leaning on a Landscape. Later prints like Leaf Art (1975) and paintings like Realistic Paint (1977) expressed similar interests with color.

His first "reverse perspective" or "reverspective" was Sticking Out Room (1964), which was a life-size room for the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1970. He returned to explore the possibilities of reverspective in 1990 with Up the Line and Down the Road (1991)

He explains reverspective:
Reverspectives are three-dimensional paintings that when viewed from the front initially give the impression of viewing a painted flat surface that shows a perspective view. However as soon as the viewer moves their head even slightly the three dimensional surface that supports the perspective view accentuates the depth of the image and accelerates the shifting perspective far more than the brain normally allows. This provides a powerful and often disorienting impression of depth and movement. The illusion is made possible by painting the view in reverse to the relief of the surface, that is, the bits that stick farthest out from the painting are painted with the most distant part of the scene.

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