You’ve worked with many different mediums throughout your career. What is it about the canvas that has continued to interest you? 

With painting you’re free. You don’t need anybody – you can just do it on your own. For about the first 30 years of my career I didn’t have any money, but in a way you don’t need any money. If you’re a photographer or a filmmaker you need money for equipment and space and time. All you need with watercolours is a bit of paper and a brush. 

How have financial restraints impacted on your career? 

Freedom comes in different forms. Now, the turnover for my company is around a million pounds of my work every year. That enables me to employ five people working for me, painting pictures. It’s as if I’ve got 10 hands, like an octopus. Whereas 25 years before I was living in an unlicensed squat for three years. You can get freedom from money, but you can have freedom when you have no money. 

At what did you start to think ‘I can make some money out of this?’ 

It just gradually happened. It somehow came to be that somehow people started to by my work, but for a long time I had find other ways to support myself and my family. When I started as 21, I was a schoolteacher and I would use my six-week holiday to paint. Then I worked three days a week as an art teacher. There were forms of subsidy from the state back then, and to some extent I was kept by my then wife, who was more successful than me. I’ve had those means of subsidy to keep me going. 

You’ve talked before about how popular art and high art have merged. Is that something that happened in the course of your career? 

They are in a close relationship; they always have been. I found on Google a guy that has discovered 40 of 50 comics that Roy Lichtenstein exactly copied. If you like, the comics are better drawn and more interesting than the Lichtenstein. 

In what other ways has the art world changed since you started out? 

It’s changed hugely. There was seven or eight [artists] that made a living when I started out, and there were a very small number of galleries. But like gymnastics or fly-fishing or golf, everything is bigger and better than it was. There are more than 1,000 galleries now. It’s burgeoned, like everything has burgeoned. 

If you could meet your young self again, is there anything you would say to him? 

So many things. One makes so many mistakes. This is a carefully selected show of my successes but there could be an alternate show of 50 years of failures. 

What would be your advice to young artists?

It’s important not to be too involved in yourself and to find out what’s happening. I’d looked at every Magritte image there ever was by the age of 25 by collecting all the catalogues. Now you can Google it, but you had to work at it when I was growing up. There’s no substitute for knowing what is happening. Otherwise you’re condemned to repeat what other people have already done.

Patrick Hughes’ exhibition 50 Years of Showbusiness – A Retrospective will be exhibited at The Flowers Gallery, London E2 until 3 September.

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Image In Black and White 2005.