Occupying An Odd Space: David Shrigley
Elaine Liddle, 2005

Like some kind of real-life Mr Men story, the artist David Shrigley is a very tall man who lives in a very tall house. His home in Glasgow's West End is one of those beautifully stretched old buildings where the ceiling is high and distant and the stairs sweep down to the bottom in a rather impressive, majestic fashion. Right now, to add to the drama of the place, the walls are painted a dark blood-red - he thinks it was probably the last owners trying to fit in with the period style. He and his girlfriend are planning on painting them soon in off-white: it should look very good, much brighter, but as an averaged-sized girl I don't envy him the job. Shrigley himself, though, looks as though he could cope well with the height of the house. At 6'7, he is the kind of person who could probably give you a crick in your neck from looking up at him. Luckily we sit down after he's made some tea.

Shrigley's studio, where he does the drawing work he's best known for, is at the top of the house. When he and his girlfriend moved in, it had old window frames and dry rot in the floorboards, but they've renovated it into an airy working space. It's warmed by a heater that was inherited from a relative, which is doing a good job - along with the newly-reinforced windows - of keeping out the bitterness of the Glasgow winter. He's lived in the city for 18 of his 37 years, since moving here to go to the Art School from his hometown, Oadby, in Leicester, which he described once as "Suburban, red-brick, could be anywhere in the British Isles." In the corner of the studio there's a desk where a construction of books are piled high in a makeshift stand for his laptop. He explains that it's a solution to working on it with his bad back. "It's not particularly technical," he admits, but it does the job. Behind this desk is the vast, red, sloping drawing desk where he draws.

His drawing work is his most instantly recognisable, and seems to spring from the depths of a dark and humorous imagination. He tried for a time to be a cartoonist after graduating from Glasgow School of Art with an environmental art degree. After a while a friend convinced him that he'd be better off publishing the stuff in his sketchbooks, which was darker, funnier, and far more immediate. Made of basic and sketchy line drawings and printed text, crossings out, it pours forth thoughts and observations that are as accurate as they can be cutting, as dark and crazy as they can be recognisable and as hilarious as they can be sad.

Asked how he comes up with his images, and the stories and text that go along with them, he says, "It just comes out - blueh - onto the page. That's the spirit of the work, I think, and it has to be or else it becomes contrived." It works - his work has a quality that seems fresh and spontaneous, and certainly far from "contrived".

Some examples - a drawing entitled "Perversion" features speech bubbles that tell an imaginary conversation: "Tea or coffee?"

"Tea and coffee"

"A cup of tea and a cup of coffee?"

"No, a cup of tea and coffee"

"I can't do that, sir."

"Why not?"

"Because it's obscene"

"That's true, but I am business class"

"I'm sorry I didn't realise sir. Please give me your cup."

Another is the drawing of a scribbly man sitting in front of a computer screen reading "You have no fucking emails."

It's this kind of work that can be seen in many small books and postcard collections: Kill Your Pets, Let's Wrestle, Evil Thoughts, Joy, and many others. They're sold in all kinds of outlets, from galleries to bookstores to fashion boutiques to record shops, an emblem of how Shrigley's style is placed between fine art and more accessible pop culture. "I'm well aware that my work occupies an odd space between two schools, but that probably says more about fine art versus other cultural forms than it does about my art," he muses.

"It's a different audience from fine art, I suppose. A lot of people see what I do as just illustration, in the same way they look at other cartoonists like Steve Bell or Gary Larsson. That doesn't bother me, because fine art is quite an elitist, inaccessible form. I think it's quite nice if people just see what you do alongside other things. I like the fact that it sort of blurs the boundary between fine art and illustration and cartoons and other things."

His work, though often bizarre, seems to benefit from his own ordinariness. He's very normal and incredibly polite to talk to, which might seem to jar somewhat with some of the harsher of his drawings. On the other hand, though, it simply confirms that the kind of things that come out when he puts pen to paper are the kind of thing which could spring from our own imaginations too - which is why they retain their immediacy, and why people get them so easily. The sense of humour implicit in his work is obvious in his everyday talk too.

At one point, talking about the animation work he's increasingly involved in, we get onto the subject of pop videos. He's done two - one for Blur, and one for Bonnie Prince Billy. He liked that the Blur one was different from the story of the song - "I like videos like that... like the Thriller video. Maybe if I got to do that, I'd do another pop promo. Michael Jackson, that would be a good thing to do. But I don't think it's likely to happen."   He laughs a bit and I'm not sure if he's joking or not - much like some of his drawings, the statement is strange and a bit true and funny.

Shrigley's latest book, The Book of Shrigley, is halfway between an anthology and a new creation. Standing out as a big, thick book in his pocket-sized collection, it brings together drawings from the last few years, back to early sketchbook work and found objects.

"It was really the publisher, to be honest. They just said, oh, we should do a really big book- like a greatest hits kind of book. And I was like, well, I don't really want to do a greatest hits book, so I just did something that was a mix of fairly recent stuff and some of it's older stuff."

Unlike the other books, which were edited and designed by Shrigley himself, it's a "very much produced" work, collaboratively between the artist and Redstone press. It does have what seem to be editorial flourishes by him, though - like the page holder ribbon on which is written the message "Smile, David Shrigley loves you". It's a different kind of book, though, and for people more unfamiliar with him it's a good way in to Shrigley's work.

"The scale of it I like," he says, "It's nice to have something big and substantial that you can swat flies with."

Shrigley's drawings have recently become more familiar to Guardian Weekend readers after starting illustration work for them. It's a position which further confuses how he's seen, despite doing a lot of illustration work - in the Japanese Esquire , for example - he doesn't see it as his job title. He was recently asked to be part of a panel discussion at a conference on illustration, which he found strange. "We were asked to give some sort of introduction and I said, well, I'm not an illustrator. And the reaction was, like, "that's a controversial thing to say! You 're not an illustrator!" But really, if I told my friends back home where I was, they'd be going, "You're not an illustrator, you're an artist!"" He maintains that although illustration is one of the things he's ended up doing, he's coming at it from a very different angle.

"I have an odd relationship with illustration. It's like problem solving, and there are things like deadlines and briefs and things that make it less fun to do," he says. "I almost feel like I'm taking the piss, sometimes, with illustration. I think, "I'm gonna just spend ten minutes doing this and do it once - that's it, it's done, email it". And they always say, "Yeah, that's great!" "

He shows me an example of a drawing he's just done for the Guardian to, well, illustrate his point. "I just drew it really quickly, and then I was thinking, oh, I drew that hand really badly. It's a lot smaller than that one. And then I was thinking, well, it really doesn't matter, does it? It's not like they're gonna care."

His irreverent view is typical of his nature, which is very easy going. Though his quiet way of speaking hints at shyness, he's confident in talking about his work, happy to go on and tell stories about the various things he's done or is doing. "I have to talk about it all the time now, in stuff like this, so I'm quite comfortable with it now," he says. Apart from the drawings, animations and illustration, he also does sculpture and photography.

He sees photography as a very slow medium saying it takes a long time for him to make the decisions as to what's good or bad. His photographs have the same style of wit as his drawings - one famous example is of the sign he put in front of the Armadillo building in Glasgow saying "IGNORE THIS BUILDING", another, in a patch of grass, of a red sign reading "Imagine red is green" - but he feels that "with drawing you're very in control of what you're doing, you know, you're always constructing the images yourself whereas with photography there's an aspect of chance to the images you get."

His sculpture features objects like a biscuit nailed to the wall. He has another studio for the sculpture across the city, but he doesn't visit it right now because it's too cold.

The cold, in fact, is important right now as he's just caught one from his nephews, who he was visiting with his girlfriend the previous weekend. They don't have children of their own - Shrigley has claimed before that he's "too selfish to have kids", but he thinks nephews are "better than kids, actually... because you don't have to look after them, you can just leave. That's the thing about nephews - you can engage with them to a certain extent, but then you can be kind of hands off. Whereas their parents, you know, have to stick with it 'til bedtime." His tea mug proclaims him to be "the world's best uncle". "My mum bought me this, actually, when my first nephew was born. I don't think I am really the world's best uncle," he says. Thinking about it, though, one of his drawings that reads that "The needs of Children" are simply "sugar" and "pets" - and the vast imagination that is shown by his work - hints that he'd probably be a pretty popular one.

Shrigley says he started liking surrealism when he was 12 or 13 "in the way that a lot of kids that age, I guess, find it appealing." Though he says he doesn't really take his inspiration from there, he says that "Rene Magritte has always been the one enduring artists that I've liked." It seems fitting that an artist with somewhat bizarre thoughts and paintings has been someone Shrigley has admired. However, most of his inspiration comes from literature and found art, which he particularly likes. But how do you "find" art? Does he look for it himself when he's walking around?

"It depends on how much I've got on my mind. Sometimes I'm totally preoccupied and forget where I'm going, sometimes I look at every little bit of paper I walk past." He says his website means that he gets sent a lot of stuff, because people know it's what he's interested in. A friend who works in a charity shop is also one of his "sources" - sending him shopping lists and notes found in coat pockets. There have to be limits, though, to what you use, he supposes. "If you made everything into art, you'd have nothing to enjoy really."

When I get up to leave the very tall man in his very tall house, he gives me a copy of the London Tube Map, which he's just designed the cover for. The front is a mass of squiggly intersecting lines, in the colours of each of the Tube lines. It's perfect because it's just how a lot of people, if pushed, might really imagine the tube to be like - not the perfect and measured diagram inside but a mess of criss-crossing lines. Not only that, but it's even surpassed the previous accessibility of his art - potentially anyone travelling in London can pick this up and understand it. And they can smile, because, as is so familiar in Shrigley's work, they too get the joke.