The Pop-Art Pioneer Who’s Gone Viral
Four months ago, says The Telegraph, an Australian tourist pointed his camera phone at one of Patrick Hughes’s paintings in the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. In the resulting film, we home in on the painting: three projecting trapezoidal forms, painted to resemble the walls of an art gallery, fall back into perspective. It’s as though we’re looking into three rooms, which seem to swing round as we move. Then the painting’s structure comes back into view, and we’re staring again at three lumps of wood. The shaky 22-second micromovie spread like wildfire around social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit, before clocking up seven million hits on Facebook and YouTube. Taking all platforms into account, it may have had as many as 19 million viewings. True, this is chicken feed in comparison with recent viral sensations such as Damn Daniel, but for a 76-year-old painter who has barely used the internet, it’s quite an achievement. Birmingham-born Hughes, who first found fame in the Pop Art boom of the early Sixties, and whose paintings put traditional perspective into reverse, declares himself delighted.
