Patrick Hughes

The British Painter Invites Rosalind Ormiston Into a World of Distortion With His Three-dimensional Reverse Perspective Artworks.

When you were an art student in Leeds, was there a tutor, or tutors, that influenced you?

I had two. Muriel Atkinson picked me out and allowed me to study art because I was going to be a writer at the time but they wouldn’t have me on the writing course and I took art instead. And the other teacher was John Jones. The two of them were influential, she especially.

Your first 3-D ‘reverspective’ work, Sticking-out Room was made in 1964. Could you give me your definition of reverspective?

Everything in ‘reverspective’ is back to front, and thereby front to back, back to front. It has to be both. Mine is false perspective.

When did your interest in ‘reverspective’ begin?

One thing was watching my mother cleaning the Peerage plates, made of pressed copper and brass. They are hollow on one side with the image in reverse order. The inside-out quality of the plates was one. Another was being in the cupboard under the stairs, when Iwas a child of four, and the Germans were bombing Crewe in 1941, during the Second World War. Under the stairs was the safest place to be... And, I saw it there in the underside of the stairs, they were the wrong way round…