Double trouble

Anyone strolling down the busy thoroughfare of Great Eastern Street on the edge of the City of London can hardly fail to notice a huge brightly lit ground-floor window in which a skinny, clown-like figure can be seen working on the most peculiar sculptures. Or are they paintings? And why do these artworks seem to twitch and tremble, duck and dive, as you walk past them?

The brightly dressed man-at-work is a creature called Patrick Hughes and these unstable, sticking-out objects, which now sell for as much as pounds 65,000 each, are his latest and most lucrative invention. Similar pieces by this prolific oddball now adorn private collections from Chicago to Cologne " including those of Oprah Winfrey and Glenn Close " and can also be goggled at in the British Library, the Birmingham City Art Gallery and other public spaces. An exhibition of six vast new visual shockers opens at the Flowers East Gallery in London on 20 January.

Who is Patrick Hughes? Is he an artist or an optical illusionist? Is he highbrow or lowbrow? An anarchist or a reactionary? An insider or an outsider? I have known this complex man for over 20 years but still can't answer these questions.

Is it significant that he had a wild past, running away from home at the age of 17 and not seeing his mother for 30 years? Or that he was once married to the femme fatale Molly Parkin and features in some of her raunchier novels like Up Tight? Surely it's more important that he is a writer and philosopher in his own right, author of Vicious Circles and Infinity: A Panoply of Paradoxes (1975), More on Oxymoron (1984) and other esoteric works quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary? And does it matter that he is also a fitness freak, a mad-keen cyclist, swimmer and occasional long- distance walker?

Probably not. Until recent years, Patrick Hughes's chief claim to fame was simply as the Rainbow Man. During the 1970s and early 1980s, he depicted the rainbow in innumerable witty and irreverent guises, once even as an arc-shaped stream of multi-coloured urine issuing from a man's flies.

Everything about Patrick Hughes is multi-coloured and difficult to classify. He is certainly not an artist's artist " never mind his period in St Ives and one-time chairmanship of the Chelsea Arts Club " and indeed has become an increasingly subversive force in the art world. From the very beginning, he was fascinated by paradoxes and visual trickery. 'I always wanted to do things the wrong way round," he says today. Born in Birmingham on 20 October 1939, the son of a shop assistant, he sheltered from the German bombs under the staircase at his grandparents house in Crewe and was utterly riveted by what a staircase looks like from underneath, the reversal of its normal self. Even more spellbinding was the effect of the two mirrors in his Nan's front parlour. 'If you stood in the middle of the room," he recalls, 'you could see infinity."

Inspired by Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp and Rene Magritte " George Melly later described Magritte as Hughes's 'spiritual papa" " he travelled down from his home in Leeds in 1961 to open his first one- man-show at the Portal Gallery in Mayfair. Aged only 21, he offered his own rude versions of the ouroboros, best exemplified by a snake with its tail in its mouth, along with pictures of Bassett's Liquorice Allsorts and the cartoon character Desperate Dan. In the catalogue, the critic David Sylvester marvelled at Hughes's ability to be surprised by what the rest of us take for granted.

In spite of this early success, Patrick Hughes remained in the North supporting his young family " his first marriage took place when he was 18 " by working as a teacher. But Surrealist works continued to pour from him " in 1964 he painted a door made of bricks " and he was soon sufficiently renowned to be sought after by the young would-be art dealer Angela Flowers. Hughes responded to her initial overtures with an arrogant 'The person who gets me will be very lucky!" but eventually acquiesced and, after many exhilarating ups and downs, the Flowers family reap the rewards of still representing him today.

In 1970, an exhibition by Patrick Hughes opened Angela Flowers's first gallery, up two flights of stairs in Lisle Street, Soho, and featured a toy fish bursting through some sea wallpaper and a ball- on-wheels now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. But by now, the artist's private life was as dramatic as his artworks and there were drunken scenes and violent fallings-out that a devoted friend describes as 'diabolical" and 'frightening". Hughes prefers not to talk about the 11 tumultuous years with his second wife Molly Parkin but did once boast to me that he had smashed Molly's yellow Rolls Royce " or was it a Morgan? " minutes after collecting it from the resprayers after an earlier accident for which he had also been responsible.

Was he rescued by his Rainbow Period? 'A rainbow is a transitory event composed of water, air and light," he now says of this effervescent phase of his life. 'I tried to give it a mass, permanence and personality.' By all accounts he succeeded in this task and today claims to have sold a million rainbow pictures in postcard form.