Walking into a neat red-brick semi on a housing estate in Birkenhead I am faced with a glittering-eyed tiger. His stare is mercifully benign and his swirling surroundings cover the whole of the inside front door. The room beyond is a cornucopia of shape and colour; every square foot of wall and ceiling a mass of abstract designs, animals and faces. The paintings continue into the kitchen and up the stairs. There are carvings, sculptures, reliefs and smaller pictures propped or hung against larger ones.

This is the home of Tommy McHugh, 57, until six years ago a Liverpool builder, with a rough past as a street fighter, and no apparent artistic inclination. Now he is a man with a passion, full of emotion, driven to create. “My mind is like a volcano exploding with bubbles,” he says in a gentle Scouse accent, “and each bubble contains a million other bubbles, and then another million bubbles of unstoppable creative ideas.” He spends his days – and most of his nights – painting, sculpting and carving. So what happened six years ago to bring about this transformation? The extraordinary answer is: a brain haemorrhage.

“When you walk into my house, you walk into my brain,” says McHugh. “I’ve got that much going on in my brain, I have to let it all out or it overloads. I can’t switch it off. I have to unleash it.” He has a heightened perception of colour and shape. “If I put my hands over my eyes, I see sparkling neon, it’s on fire, bursting with light . . . and I can’t look at the clouds, the trees, a pebble-dash wall, without seeing faces. And the faces keep rotating, changing. By the time I’ve painted eyes and a mouth, the image has changed 50 times and I’m trying to catch it.”

According to the Harvard neurologist Alice Flaherty, who has a special interest in this field, McHugh’s manic creativity is likely to be down to changes to the temporal lobe. “This is the part of the brain that is responsible for understanding meaning,” she says, “both the meaning of language and the ‘meaning of life’. ” And its border with the neighbouring occipital lobe is thought to be the site of facial recognition. When McHugh had his haemorrhage, blood gathered around his brain putting pressure on the brain tissue, probably causing these changes, she says.

Van Gogh had a similar condition

Flaherty has corresponded with McHugh for several years and came to the UK recently to meet him. Cases such as his are rare, but not unknown. Flaherty herself suffered a period of hypergraphia, a compulsion to write. But the most similar case to McHugh’s is that of an American man, a chiropractor, who, after a brain haemorrhage, became a compulsive painter.

“Van Gogh almost certainly had temporal lobe epilepsy,” Flaherty says, and at times of great creative output he not only painted but also wrote constantly – several long letters a day – to his brother. McHugh has also been hypergraphic. Before he started painting, he wrote reams of poetry, at lightning speed.

“Temporal lobe changes often increase idea generation,” says Flaherty. The increased creative output may be partly because the brain is becoming less self-critical, no longer editing ideas out at an early stage. Such brain-change creativity is, therefore, no guarantee of quality, Flaherty points out. However, she adds that research has indicated that if the individual chooses to concentrate and improve, good work can result.

This seems to be the case with McHugh. His early paintings are artistically nothing to write home about, but some of his recent work, particularly his stone carvings, is wonderful. The artist Marion Kalmus, a Jerwood prize nominee who has exhibited at the Tate and the Victoria &Albert Museum, says that she would love to curate an exhibition of his work with the freedom to pick out the gems, particularly recent “totemic” carvings, which have a “primal quality”. These sit in McHugh’s kitchen on turntables extracted from his washing machine, allowing you to rotate the stones to see every angle of the multiple, intertwined images of animals and human faces.

These carvings are made out of bits of sandstone brought to McHugh, who lives on income support and disability benefit, by his old building partner. Almost all of McHugh’s materials come from building sites or car-boot sales. Besides his obsessive creativity – which he describes as like an addiction to heroin, which he took for four years in the 1980s – he has a slight deterioration in memory, an inability to sleep for more than about two hours at a time and he has to keep a sign in his kitchen to remind him to eat.

McHugh is used to having little. One of 12 children of Irish immigrants, he had a deprived and sometimes violent youth, but by 2001 he was comfortably settled with his second wife, Jan; a calm that was rudely interrupted.

“I was in the bathroom one day when something popped in my head.” The pain was agonising. By the time he reached hospital, his eyes were bright red. Two aneurysms (weak points) in arteries in his head had leaked blood. A long, delicate, life-saving operation stemmed further bleeding.

He was angry and took it out on his wife

A few days later, he was sent home. “We were given a bag full of tablets and told ‘Thank you very much and goodbye’,” says Jan. “I didn’t know what to do. He looked like Frankenstein with staples all round his head; he couldn’t walk or feed himself or do anything. Sometimes he didn’t even know where he was. It was awful.” A look of strain crosses her open, friendly face as she sits at her desk in the estate agent’s office where she works. “He became totally frustrated. He was angry and in pain and I couldn’t get any help, [so] he took it out on me.”

Jan was desperate to find anything that might give McHugh an outlet. She had always painted as a hobby and McHugh now said he wished he could do it. Jan told him he could, and handed him a pen and a piece of A4 paper. “I turned back from cooking the tea, only a minute or two later and he’d filled the whole page with tiny faces – all different,” she says.

Jan was unnerved but this was, of course, only the beginning. As soon as he was fit enough, he started on the walls, and began to melt candles to sculpt heads of wax. “He was painting on the walls of my lovely house and filling the place with black smoke,” Jan recalls. “Then he shaved off all his hair and stuck it on a wax head. He said that he was Van Gogh and he could kill me and nobody would find me. I thought he was insane.”

Nine months after the operation she couldn’t take any more and she had to leave: “I knew it wasn’t his fault, but I was frightened, I was down to 6st, I had no support and I didn’t feel like a person any more.” Jan and McHugh are now friends. Neither blames the other for what happened. McHugh says that while he is profoundly grateful to the hospital team that saved his life, he is still upset about the lack of appropriate aftercare and the impact it had on his relationship with Jan.

At this stage he did not enjoy his manic creativity: “I was frightened at first that what I was putting on the wall was dark and dangerous.” In desperation, he wrote 60 cries for help – in crazy rhyme – to doctors around the world. Most ignored him but two letters hit home: the one to Alice Flaherty and one that was picked up by Marion Kalmus, then the artist in residence at the Institute of Child Health.

“He was so distressed [when we first met],” Kalmus says, but she recognised in him an extreme version of what many artists feel: “I told him I can’t stop the bubbles exploding [in your head] but I can tell you I know a lot of people who feel like that sometimes. I feel like that sometimes, and it’s called being an artist.”

This was a turning point for McHugh. It gave him a name for his new identity and he began to enjoy his work. He has recently exhibited at a Liverpool art gallery and is hoping to begin to sell his work.

He has also come to terms with the more overtly emotional person he has become. Where once he squared up to trouble, fists at the ready, now he cries over hurt animals. His current partner, Frances, describes him as the “gentlest man I have ever met”.

McHugh is well aware that his aneurysms could burst at any time. “I could pop off like that,” he says clicking his fingers, but it doesn’t bother him. He simply says that he wants his brain studied after his death to shed more light on the creative process. He is not in the least depressed, either. “I’ve nothing to be depressed about,” he grins. “I’m on an adventure. I’m walking the Yellow Brick Road of life.”

Tommy McHugh will feature in My Brilliant Brain TV series, Five, Monday July 23, 9pm

The accidental artists

William Fairbank, 57, lost his short-term memory in a car accident 20 years ago that damaged his brain. He was married with three young children, and he ran a successful carpentry business. He lives in Norfolk.

Fairbank likens his life to living in a film: “I can visualise only the present, and so live my life one frame at a time.”

Although unable to return to his job – as well as memory problems he still has ringing in his ears, double vision, and he walks with crutches – the accident left him with the ability to feel powerful emotion, and to see images and shapes vividly.

A friend suggested to Fairbank that he should apply his woodcarving skills to sculpture, and he quickly discovered that he had a passion for this art form. He also realised that living in the present gave him an incredible focus, allowing him to devote total brainpower to his creations.

He went on to exhibit his work at Norwich Cathedral, then nationwide, and he entered a piece for the 2000 Turner Prize.

Although his art has flourished since the accident, his personal life has suffered. He divorced ten years ago and has never remarried. Given the choice to rewind time, Fairbank doesn’t hesitate. “You wouldn’t choose to go down this road,” he says. “No way. You just have to make the best of it.”

www.williamfairbank.com

Helen Kirk, 53, a former biochemist from Greenwich, underwent brain surgery 18 years ago when doctors discovered a brain haemorrhage.

Kirk was strolling to the next hole on the golf course when she had an excruciating headache and was violently sick. Two weeks later when she saw her GP, she was sent to hospital and had brain surgery.

Kirk, who was 35, went back to her job in a brewery nine months later, but found that she couldn’t function. “I’d terrible problems

with concentration, and my speech and memory were badly affected.” The left side of her brain was badly damaged, but the right side was relatively unscathed. Kirk had read that the right side of the brain is responsible for creativity, while the left is used for logic and problem-solving, so she decided to give up science and try to use the part of her brain that still worked properly.

She discovered that she had a flair for painting. She now spends her time doing botanical paintings in Kew Gardens and Greenwich Park. Kirk believes that her art was instrumental in her recovery: “You never become the person that you were before, but you can always find something else that you can do. Painting made me realise that I had other talents to use.”

For more Information on brain injuries: Basic, the brain and spine injury centre: basiccharity.org.uk ; 0800 7500000 Headway, the brain injury association: headway.org.uk ; 0808 8002244 The Stroke Association: stroke.org.uk ; 0845 3033100

INTERVIEWS: KATE WIGHTON

Brain trauma

A brain haemorrhage is bleeding in or around the brain. Sometimes brain haemorrhages are caused by injury; they can also occur spontaneously, with weaknesses in brain blood vessels sometimes running in families.

The leakage of blood puts potentially damaging pressure on brain tissue. The long-term effect of a brain haemorrhage depends on where it occurs and how much bleeding has occurred before it is stopped. The brain damage can cause physical or psychological changes, or both.

There are two main types of brain haemhorrhage: an intracerebral, when the bleeding occurs in the brain tissue, and a subarachnoid, when one of the blood vessels within the membranes that cradle the brain bursts.

Brain haemmorhages are one of the causes of strokes; the other is a blockage in blood vessels leading to the brain.

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