Vic Reeves: comic artist

'Bono In A Boob Tube On A Choirmaster's Lap'. 'Hello Elvis, On Your Way To The Shops Then?' (right). 'A Family Of Foxes Glowering At Some Soap'. 'A Lump Of Nazi Nougat Walking Down The Avenue'. 'Tapir'. 'Mike Tyson'(pictured). I could go on, but you get the picture. And if you've got a spare 250 quid, you could literally get the picture. These are all works of art on display at the Britart gallery in July. You don't need to be told who's responsible for them, do you? The titles alone have the stamp of authentic Vic Reeves, the high priest of the surreal juxtaposition.

How surreal is this for a juxtaposition? Reeves lives in a somnolent village in rural Kent where, you suspect, not many locals have ever seen Shooting Stars. It feels like a primetime TV kind of place where, sure enough, he mostly gets recognised from the adverts he does on ITV. Reeves cuts a distinctive figure when he rolls up to his front door in a Bentley with his tall, blonde fianc?e Nancy and his two children, Alice, nine, and Louis, five. They are carrying a bundle of new tennis rackets.

Not many celebrities welcome journalists so comprehensively into their home, unless they're from Hello! Either Reeves can't quite be arsed to find somewhere less private to do his interview, or he has an ulterior agenda of presenting a regular family life to the world. His baroque relationships have been raising eyebrows since his former wife left him for a woman, then put him up when his engagement to actress Emilia Fox fell through. Normality is finally descending on Reeves in his forties. He and Nancy are getting married early next year, and he wants more children. 'Yeah. I'd like to be like Picasso. I think his last one was born when he was 91.'

Art-wise, he could be closer to Rolf Harris, with his fascination for animals. (Alice fondly recalls the day a family of lemurs climbed all over her dad's head). You've heard of the book of the film. You've heard of the film of the play. His works are, to all intents and purposes, the paintings of the gags. 'We always use illustrations,' says Reeves - 'we' being he and Bob Mortimer. 'When we send in scripts I generally do drawings that accompany them. I always wanted to be a painter. I always thought when I left art school that what we were doing on stage was like Gilbert & George, so it was just an extension.'

I ask him what Bob's draughtsmanship is like. 'He's fantastically diabolical. I often get him to draw something just for my own personal amusement. I'm sure he can see what something looks like but he can't physically put it onto paper. I did copy one of Bob's once. It was a drawing of a frog. It was an indescribable thing which looked as if it had a biscuit hanging from its face. I really think he should be exhibited, whether it's in a coal shed of this parish or a major gallery.'

Reeves's line is that 'everyone can draw, whether or not you draw in a way that is representative of an image. I think the ones that aren't representative are more interesting. You start making marks on things from birth. It depends whether you like doing it or not.' The first time he went public was when, under a girl's pseudonym, he entered a picture of Marc Bolan in a drawing competition in Jackie magazine. 'I don't remember being told I was any good. You work it out for yourself. If you like doing it, it doesn't matter if you're any good. I don't think there is good or bad. It depends whether you've got ideas or enthusiasm.'

Reeves doesn't let it bother him that he may have attracted more attention from gallery owners for his name rather than his talent. 'There's not a lot I can do about that. When you're in that celebrity category, like Paul McCartney and Ronnie Wood, you have to take that baggage along with you. I think Paul McCartney's very good. A lot of struggling artists get the hump about it. I take their point of view, but I'm doing it because I like doing it.'

One of the things Reeves likes about it is that he can do it on his own. He and Mortimer are currently writing another series of Shooting Stars and funnelling the overflow into a new sketch show. They meet at 9.30 every morning at Mortimer's house. When not writing, they dream up a wish-list of guests. ('We asked Prince Charles to be a team captain and we never even got a reply.') But, he says, 'It's nice to whittle a stick and you can't whittle with someone else. I would never do it with anyone else, although the Chapman brothers wanted to do something with me.' For the record, the brothers describe his art as 'an abundance of surreal disjunctions and warped mutations which jam any sober investigations into the cognitive processes of his mind'.

I risk a sober investigation of his humour anyway. Why is it so different? 'It's very difficult to explain how it works without blowing your own golden trumpet. It's just a world viewpoint. It's the way I see things. I want to make bird-nesting boxes which have tiny holes in them that birds could never get through. I like doing things which are an object everyone could recognise, but you might not think on first viewing that there's something terribly wrong.

'Last year I was walking up and down mountains in the Lake District. I had a banana in my packed lunch. I went up three 3,000ft peaks and I never had the banana. It always came back down with me. So I had it cast in bronze. You can get them cast for about a hundred quid. If you wanted to get a nice brass fruit bowl it would look quite nice. You could put it on your coffee table. I got this post. There was a bit naturally split in it, so I burned and waxed and polished it and set the banana in this split. The garage door was open and people were walking past and raising an eyebrow. I stood back and looked at it and it is the most phallic thing you've ever seen. It's a brass banana set into what looks like a woman's...' He is temporarily lost for words. 'A woman's split. A crack. It's like a Neolithic fertility post.'

Alice saunters in at this point brandishing a large painting of a dragon. I ask her what she thinks of her dad's pictures. 'Well, they're a bit rude sometimes. He did one of Geri from the Spice Girls and she had really, really big boobs and there was one nipple and she put her hand on it and it was disgusting!'

'There was one in your bedroom I had to take out,' her dad says to her. 'It was an autopsy.' 'It was a man that was chopped in half,' says Alice. 'It makes me feel sick. It makes me think about ugly stuff.'