Artist statement

“Sunshine came through the window like a brick. The study of light is so important for artists, daylight is like a solid that pours into our rooms through the windows. The colour of light can change from the glow of the sun to the blue of midnight.”

— Patrick Hughes

Light you could walk around

In the original Sunshine print, Patrick Hughes draws a bare room in a few fine lines: a window, a skirting board, the floorboards running away in perspective. Through the window comes the sunshine, and it arrives as a solid. Thick curved slabs of flat yellow drop from the frame and land on the floor, heavy enough to cast a shadow, solid enough to walk around.

It is a simple image with a strange logic. We talk about light pouring in, flooding a room, falling across the floor, as if it had mass. Hughes takes those words at face value. Everything in the room is outline and air; the only thing with colour and weight is the light itself.

Painters have always studied light, chasing the way it changes a room from hour to hour. Hughes does something more mischievous: he stops it in its tracks and makes it into an object.

Setting the light in motion

The print fixed the sunshine at one hour of one day, in one shade of yellow. Sunshine, the generative collection, lets the clock run.

Each of the 100 works is generated by an algorithm, drawing from a vast array of colours and speeds. The yellow gives way to 64 palettes that shift, blend and drift down the falling bands, from the warm glow of the sun to the deep blue of midnight. Some glow like neon, some turn cool and icy, some take on a metallic sheen. The room stays exactly as Hughes drew it. Only the light changes.

Inside the system

Every work is built from the same drawing and a different set of decisions about its light: how many colours it carries, how they blend, how saturated and how soft they are, which hue dominates. With 9 kinds of motion and 6 rhythms, each piece moves at its own pace, so no two catch the light at quite the same moment.

About the artist

Patrick Hughes (b. 1939) is a British artist based in London, best known for inventing reverspective: three-dimensional paintings that appear to move as the viewer walks past them. Across six decades his work has returned again and again to paradox, illusion and the gap between what we see and what is really there.

Sunshine belongs to the heart of that project. A master of analogue illusion, Hughes has spent his career giving solid form to things that have none, rainbows, perspective, light itself. In this collection, his solid sunshine meets a medium made entirely of light.

The auction

Sunshine will be sold as a ranked auction of 100 works on FungibullX.

Edition: 100 unique variations
Allocation: in order of rank by token ID. The highest bid receives #1, the second-highest #2, and so on. Token order does not reflect rarity or features.

100 variations by Patrick Hughes, each algorithmically generated from a vast array of colours and speeds to create a unique digital experience from the master of analogue. Based on his original print Sunshine.