My first real encounter with art was when, as a twelve-year old boy, I visited an exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. It was a profound experience, and it has stayed with me for 60 years. That’s where I saw for the first time just how powerful a painted mark could be: the feeling of contact with the paint, with the artist’s hand, and with the subject. What Celia Paul describes as ‘making immediacy immediate’.

Some years later I was at art school. In retrospect I can see that I was fortunate to go through college in the last year of the N.D.D. and to benefit from the discipline of the life room and from teaching whose roots lay in the Slade. At the time we were also being experimented on by disciples of Victor Pasmore and Maurice Sausmarez, whose neo Bauhaus teaching with bits of black paper and balsa wood has left me cursed forever with the compulsion to rearrange everything, including books and placemats on a coffee table, in a ‘just’ way. Later an M.A. course in fine art gave me confidence to further develop my own language and made the headaches caused by French intellectuals seem worthwhile.

I was involved in art education for many years, throughout which I continued to paint. It has always seemed natural to me to respond to my environment and my experiences, so my first exhibitions were of paintings which related to urban environments in the north east of England, where I grew up. Later, after four years in rural Jamaica, my work changed to reflect the land and the lives of country people.

To me the strongest experiences of being in the world are bound up with being in the landscape - with travelling, walking, or simply being there and taking it in.