The work of Patrick Hughes is inspired by optics and illusions, paradoxes and perspectives, and he is also the author of a number of books on these tantalising subjects. He has been aligned with both the Surrealists and Pop Art, though remains very much his own man. The 1970s were Hughes’ ‘rainbow period’, in which screen-printed rainbows are placed in impossible, often two-dimensional worlds, trapped in contradistinction to their usual evanescent nature.