Interview: Philip Hughes, artist

FOR almost 50 years now, the artist Philip Hughes has walked back and forth through some of the most ancient and iconic landscapes in the British Isles, recording them in his instantly recognisable trademark style: bold blocks of colour enclosed by sharp, precise lines. He has made work all over the world, from Mexico and Peru to Australia and Antarctica, where, from 2001-2, he was artist-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey.

There are, though, certain corners of his native land that always seem to draw him back: Orkney, Islay, Assynt and Rannoch Moor in Scotland; Hadrian’s Wall and the Three Peaks in the north of England; and in the south, Cornwall, Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury, Ridgeway and the South Downs

In his new book, Tracks, published by Thames & Hudson later this month, Hughes illustrates 11 routes through these 11 distinctive areas, using a potent combination of paintings, drawings, short texts and maps, often providing several views of the same landmark, appraising it from an array of different angles as if trying to puzzle out how it fits into its surroundings.

To coincide with the launch of the book, there will be a series of related exhibitions around the UK, including shows in Stirling, Stromness, Ardyne and Aberfeldy. In each case, the work on display will be selected with reference to the local area, so the Cromarty show will have a particular focus on the paintings from Assynt, while the show at Salisbury Museum in October will be strongly biased towards Stonehenge.

On the face of it, Hughes is a landscape artist, but in her introduction to Tracks the novelist and poet Kay Syrad suggests he has more in common with artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, who see walking itself as an art form, than he does with conventional landscape painters. Does Hughes agree?

“In a funny kind of way I think I do,” he says, “but I don’t think I’d ever thought of it before Kay wrote it down. I’m a great admirer of Richard Long and Chris Drury and Hamish Fulton’s work, but I’m not trying to represent the walk as a sort of physical act in the way that Richard Long does. But what we do have in common is the desire to express the walk in a whole variety of ways, to give a feeling of what it is to move through the landscape. I do it in a very different way from Richard Long, but I do feel a kinship.”

As suggested by the book’s subtitle – “walking the ancient landscapes of Britain” – Hughes is usually drawn to places that have remained relatively untouched by the concrete sprawl of the modern word, where it’s still possible to encounter the landscape as it would have appeared to our distant ancestors. He is particularly fascinated by ancient monuments, from the Ring of Brodgar, on Mainland in Orkney, to the similarly arrayed monoliths at Stonehenge. On encountering one of these mighty stone circles for the first time, most people will ask themselves “What was it for?” For Hughes, the big question is: “Why is it here?” Or more precisely: “Why is it over here and not over there?”

“For me they’re sort of extraordinary installations in the landscape,” he says, “and it’s really the positioning of the site in the landscape which I find interesting. I’m concerned with how they relate to that hill in the distance. Why was the stone circle put there? They could have put it anywhere – why did they put it there?”

Although he is now a well established artist, with work held in major collections from the V&A in London to Australia’s National Gallery in Canberra, and honorary doctorates and fellowships from the Universities of Stirling, Kent, Queen Mary’s College and Royal Holloway, Hughes, 76, has also had a successful career outside the art world. He initially worked as an engineer for Shell before co-founding the UK computer giant Logica. As you might expect, given his background, there’s often a somewhat restless relationship between art and science in his work, particularly in the contrast between the precision of line he uses to capture landscapes, and the vivid, hugely expressive but not always entirely natural range of colours he uses to bring them to life.

“I think [my works] are possibly a slightly uneasy mixture between realism and abstraction,” he says. “In terms of line, it’s like a religious belief – I will never alter a landscape, I’ll never say ‘Oh, it would look nicer if that mountain was a bit to the left’ – that is sacrosanct, so they’re almost photographic in that sense, but within that I feel I can do whatever I want with colour.”

His next project will be a return to Stonehenge. “I’ve become very interested in tracks that approach the stones,” he says. “Normally you simply drive up to the car park and get out – it’s difficult to walk to, with main roads crushing it and the like. But once you start doing it, you do realise the extraordinary importance of the approaches to it. It’s obvious really – if they sited it there, and had people coming from all over to worship there, the tracks to it are very important. Must be.”

• Tracks is published by Thames & Hudson on 28 May. There will be complementary exhibitions at the Cromarty Arts Trust, Ardyne, from 10 June; the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, from 13 June; the Watermill, Aberfeldy, from 16 June and Stirling University from 27 September. www.philiphughesart.com