When Harry Pye’s name was read out on his first day of school, the class burst into laughter. When he was in college he put his work forward for an exhibition and the tutor thought he was joking. Aged 33 he’s opening his first solo show, and still faces two common misconceptions — that Harry Pye is not his real name, and that he can paint well but chooses not to.

Block-pink faces, dots for eyes and red-blob mouths — his paintings have a childlike quality that’s hard to fathom. Surely he’s just being lazy, or making some statement about contemporary art with this crude style?

Strangely, those minimal marks are a pretty good representation of Pye himself — round-faced, balding and gentle-looking. Buying his canvases from budget shops such as Poundstretcher, he claims his paintings look the way they do because he has only recently learnt to paint, and is unused to handling brushes. “I’m really like a baby artist,” he says as he glances around his first solo show, Me, Me, Me . “I’m getting better. I’m quite happy with it now it’s up.”

Pye grew up in Eltham, South London, and experienced panic attacks and depression during his late teens and early twenties. He trained as a print-maker at Winchester School of Art, but finding it conservative and uninspiring spent the following years editing fanzines and curating shows of other artists’ work, including that of Dinos Chapman, Jeremy Deller and Grayson Perry. Single, he now lives in Stoke Newington with seven flatmates, and has worked part-time at Tate Britain as a “till monkey” for the past ten years.

“Art is inarticulate speech from the heart,” he explains, “so it doesn’t matter if it’s silly. Even a daft Monty Python sketch is telling the world how you feel.” Using countless references to art, books, film, music and comedy as inspiration — from borrowed compositions to slogans — he now paints, often in collaboration with friends, about things that everyone can relate to, from a feelings of hopelessness to eating a biscuit.

“They’re mostly about losers, aren’t they?” he giggles. His cheeky paintings are usually self-portraits in unfortunate, comical situations. The Man Who Suddenly Fell Over is a good example. “It’s like Ricky Gervais — David Brent is who he’d be if he didn’t have a sense of humour.”

You can imagine these gawky figures coming alive in a comedy sketch, or appearing on Harry Pye TV. This one-hour programme playing during the show includes a music event that he arranged with terrible performers and improvised comedy with Richard Herring. The final part of the exhibition consists of five copies of Pye’s hand-written (“so it’s more personal”) autobiography, My Struggle , on sale for around £300 each.

Pye’s bumbling everyman, Neo-Expressionist approach seems at odds with the trendy London company he keeps, and his apparent lack of technical skill won’t appeal to traditionalists. But so far he’s a hit. Fans and friends from the art world are desperate to get their hands on his work, and when he showed some to Lucian Freud in 2005, he got the thumbs up.

Back in the gallery, I point out that one of his figures looks like Dr Bunsen Honeydew from the Muppets. “Yes,” he says calmly. “A lot of them tap into something familiar from childhood. In fact . . .” He leads me to three paintings leaning against the wall, whose location is undecided. They turn out to be paintings he did at the age of 6, including one of Mr Greedy.“I saw some paintings by untrained artists from Papua New Guinea, and they have the same very direct, instinctive experiences as children’s paintings. I’m trying to get that. Childlike is a good thing.”

From the outside, it all looks like a bit of joke, but he’s adamant that he’s for real. “People think I’m literally insane, or that I’m pretending to be. These are things I can’t do much about, but it can be quite painful. Maybe it’s best just not to worry about these things.”

Me, Me, Me, Sartorial Contemporary Art, London W8, to Mar 9 (020-7792 5882)

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