Chasing Sublime Light was based on the travels of eighteenth and nineteenth century artists - such as Turner, Girtin, Cotman and Sandby - in search of Sublime landscapes in northern Britain.  The word 'Sublime' at that time had a more specific meaning than today, describing awe inspiring or even terrifying landscapes, and these were found in the wild and mountainous areas of North Wales, northern England and Scotland.  I made trips following the routes of these landscape painters, responding in my own way to the areas which they visited and the places which they painted.  I responded to what I found - in some cases landscapes had barely changed in two centuries; in other cases lorries and traffic signs appear in my paintings, reflecting the urban and industrial expansion that has massively changed some parts of northern Britain.

The experience of the Chasing Sublime Light project has given me a much broader view of British landscape, and of the painters who focussed on it.  I think it is fair to say that as a result I am travelling more widely within Britain, and that I am looking at, and painting, a greater variety of landscapes.

Travelling more widely than before must be very exciting, and I think that I am correct in recalling that you searched out the very locations or perspectives where Turner, Girtin, Cotman and Sandby stood or sat to make their studies.  Tell us a little about establishing these viewpoints…

This question points up one of the major elements of the project.  On the one hand the structure provided by the research into the routes and subjects of the earlier painters led me to visit places, and to see fascinating subjects that I would never otherwise have seen. Balanced against this was the emphasis that I placed from the outset on the importance of this as a creative project.  In other words, fascinating as the antiquarian element of my travels were, I was never going to allow myself to be imprisoned by the historical subject matter - I could respond how I liked to anything that I encountered whether painted by the earlier travellers or not.  Given this, the effects of two centuries were always thought provoking.  As a painter I found it impressive, on my visit to find Girtin's view of Kirkstall Abbey, to see that the landscape painted by him at the end of the eighteenth century showing Kirkstall in a wide, empty scene of open fells and quiet river valley had changed radically.  Searching for the same view as Girtin I found myself confronted by traffic signs, electricity pylons and a skyline marked by modern buildings - a subject which I painted with relish.  By contrast I found Byland Abbey almost unchanged, the half-ruined west front looking exactly as Cotman had painted it - interesting to note how little impact two centuries of weathering had had, compared to the physical dismantling subsequent to the Dissolution.  The only major change that I noted was that the rough path in Cotman's picture had become a busy road, and a lorry appears in my treatment of the subject.  Weather and time of year were also an important factor.  I visited Gordale Scar in a storm in late spring.  The structure of the actual rock mass departed quite clearly from the treatment given to it by James Ward in his painting of around 1813, which I knew from childhood visits to the Tate Gallery.  It did, I was pleased to find on that stormy day, retain a raw power - which would be much less evident on a sunny bank holiday with crowds of visitors and ice cream vans.

Yes, indeed, what a powerful work the James Ward painting is - making use of the bull, a large beast in itself, appearing so small, maximising the dramatic aspect of this landmark.  I can see that a stormy day provided the ideal conditions for you to respond to such a strong subject. Talking of your response to it, engaging with such a demanding, iconic landmark, this has brought about two very physically involved results in graphite - the one after James Ward, and then one from your own viewpoint (both illustrated centre spread of the catalogue), with much layering of paper and scoring into the surface.  Can you run us through your working process here - the work you did on site, and in those conditions, and then I assume, starting and completing the final works from sketches in the studio…

The conditions in which I made the studies for Gordale Scar were physically demanding - which was an asset.  I tried to find some shelter at the base of one of the crags - a wall of limestone with a slight overhang.  The ground around me was littered with boulders which had presumably fallen from the crag, and were enough to make me a bit uneasy.  I squatted down with paper and paint behind one of the boulders, and started to work, although every now and then the wind was strong enough to blow me over.  It was both stormy and raining and struggle as I might to get paint on to the paper, it was washed off faster than I could put it on, and I had to abandon this initial attempt.  The next morning was just as stormy but was dry, and on my second attempt I was able to make a good study.

Some weeks later in the studio I began a large drawing with graphite on paper.  I love powerful black and white images, and this interest in black and white extends to other media. The photography of Bill Brandt, Edwin Smith and Fay Godwin, and films by Powell and Pressburger are favourites.  Whether making a drawing or painting, I am engaged in a journey which may or may not end in a successful image (failure is the necessary partner of success). It is not just a matter of recording the subject to be drawn or painted - though the skills necessary to do this are a prerequisite.  In working on the image I am trying to re-live the experience of being in the landscape, and my methods have some of the physical immediacy that this suggests.  I will make and re-make an image until I have an almost visceral sense of recognition, a sense that the image does indeed begin to record something of the physical experience of the landscape.  This process involves many things; certainly the fundamental skills of drawing and painting - space, light, tone, perspective, form, composition - but it also involves gut response, risk taking, and an almost subconscious knowledge of materials that has been built up over some thirty-five years as a painter.  If all this works the image will, at some point, almost spring to life.  This may happen, initially, in just one area, but once an image has begun to take on this sense of life there is a good chance that the whole will be made to work.  Conversely, if this sense of life fails to appear, grind away as long as one might, it is unlikely that anything will be achieved.

In working on Gordale Scar this process entailed drawing and re-drawing, scoring, cutting and layering paper and graphite until I had some sense of the immediacy and physical directness of my time spent crouching at the base of the rocks.

This offers us a great insight in to why your paintings are not entirely about image and picture making, much more about reaction and your inner feelings - the conveyance or transportation of your on site experience through your materials to obtain a result.  This is quite high end stuff, almost action art, Jackson Pollock even, except that his art was I suppose, as abstract as one gets in paint.  I'm throwing out a lot of points here, but I don't want to lose them.  Some people say to me that they can't quite live with this level of physical activity evident in your works, and I try and tell them to be braver! And graphite, black and white (or black and grey), I would love more people to realize it's qualities…

I am interested that you make the connection with American Abstract Expressionism.  It is certainly something that critics and writers have noted.  Andrew Lambirth has discussed this and, most recently, Jackie Wullschlager wrote 'Tress's collage and impasto paintings…are a vibrant attempt to renew the language of landscape painting after abstract expressionism' (Financial Times, January 31/February 1 2009).  These painters were a big influence when I was a student, and although I was doing very different things as a young artist there is obviously something in their approach to painting which I continue to find fundamental.  I would demur in one respect from what you say, because I feel that this does not mean an abandonment of image and picture making, rather a combination and working together.

As you say, my work has a fairly strong character which, of course, is not to everyone's taste. However the people that do respond to the paintings, and to the graphite drawings, usually do so in such an enthusiastic way that it gives me a great sense of support in what I am doing.

It is really interesting thinking back to the New York School in the 1950's and detecting its presence, to a degree, in your work.  On the one hand we can detect the continuation of the English Romantic tradition in your oeuvre, the classic conception of the God-given landscape, nature, and even sometimes the revered golden triangle of proportion - sky, horizon land and so on.  So to go back to the easily misconstrued word 'image', in many of your works we see an easily readable landscape, for example Year Ending (Light, Pen Caer) illustrated on page 11, or even if a landscape subject lies behind wild and vigorously described greenery as in I am Blinded by the Light (Winter Sun), page 13; but when we come to paintings like Fields (Sunflowers, Tarn) shown on the inside front cover, and Big August Sky on page 15 we are strongly into abstract expressionist territory.  The latter paintings to which I refer display a tremendously spontaneous, highly gestural celebration of colour and atmosphere, and are obviously works that were brought off with great intensity.  One can even cite De Kooning here, and such paintings as Suburb in Havana (1958), September Morn (1959) and Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louse Point (1963) - what staggering paintings these are!  Tell us something about how your varying subjects drive the mood…

I would like to pick up on your mention of the Romantic tradition.  When I was at college it wasn't something that I had ever considered - not many did at that time - but as I developed as a painter I realised, almost by default, that the things that I was involved with, a sense of the past in the present (landscape as palimpsest), an expressive response to the natural world, indeed a sense of the numinous in the experience of landscape, were all part of the Romantic tradition.  Romanticism is a far more potent element in British painting than many people, until recently at least, have acknowledged.  It is a continuing thread in the visual art of Britain and is made and re-made for each generation.  The details change but the impulse is consistent.  For me, the move to landscape painting developed out of a critique of post Second World War Modernism which had more or less hit the buffers by the 1970s.  Yet the way I paint retains, as you point out, the painterly vocabulary of that Modernism - Abstract Expressionism. I think that there are some interesting parallels here with the Neo-Romanticism of the 1940s. John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash all painted the British landscape through the lens of Picasso and Surrealism.  Piper, of course, abandoned Abstraction with a flourish at the end of the 1930s, making a strong argument for the necessity of objects in painting, as well as for the Romantic tradition.  Yet his work, his vocabulary, was always profoundly influenced by Picasso and Modernism.  In recent years there have been a number of splendid essays and books published on Neo-Romanticism.  The one element missing from many of them is the recognition that they are describing a continuing tradition, not one that ends at the end of the 1940s.

You ask me 'how the varying subjects drive the mood'? Not easy to answer, as a lot of what goes on is subconscious.  My interest in landscape and buildings certainly ranges across quite a wide territory from the painter as topographer, to the painter as a recorder of a spiritual and emotional response.  Even this has historical parallels as, of course, many of the great Romantic painters were great topographers - Turner, Girtin, Cotman, Constable to name a few. If I am to provide a simple answer it would be that there are some landscapes that I know well from visiting them over many years.  They are private places - slabs of anonymous landscape to most viewers - but to me they have resonance and memory, and my painted response tends to focus on emotion, and indeed gut instinct.  When I travel I come across places and buildings which are new to me.  Their details are often fascinating - this particularly applies to my interest in small churches - and the paintings reflect this.  Nothing is entirely simple, of course, because my interest in old churches has much to do with the sense that they have, quite literally, grown out of their surroundings; they are spiritually and materially an expression of a building and it's sense of rootedness in the landscape.  This is more than simple topography.

You may or may not be surprised to hear that I often feel a magnetic attraction to historic sites, urban and rural.  I was driving through outer Birmingham earlier this week, Yardley, and drove past a brown sign pointing to Blakesley Hall; I thought, perhaps on my way back I might have time to take a look.  I did, unfortunately it closed at 4pm and I could not go inside, but encountering this perfectly preserved timber framed building dating from 1590, in a location now surrounded by mid 20th Century urban sprawl, was a notable experience.  I mention this because I can identify with how one can pick up whispers from certain sites, locations, tracts of country or urban landscape.  The spirit of times and lives past, in the making and remaking of the landscape.

To go back to your painting methods and technique, I imagine that it did not always have such surface texture, such three-dimensionality with the layered paper and applied description of twigs and shoots and so forth.  Consequently, in turn, I wonder if you might over time move away from this very emphatic form of interpretation of natural elements and travel into a more abstract exploration of the landscape…

I agree with you about the fascination of certain urban situations, and I remember as a boy growing up in Wembley, with it's suburban sprawl and swarms of 1930s 'Tudorbethan' semis, searching out odd corners where fragments of field hedges and small pubs and old houses remained from the earlier villages and farmland.  To a boy's mind, allotments gone wild could become copses in Kent or stretches of Dorset heathland full of interesting wildlife.

You are right about the way that I paint.  In early years I was, for a period, making photo-realist paintings.  I would spend weeks just painting grass with tiny sable brushes.  These were powerful paintings but after a while I began to feel that the technique was taking over from what I wanted to express, and from that point I began to work more broadly.  There was no immediate jump to the very vigorous way that I now work; instead a slow, incremental development of a more immediate and expressive approach.  The scoring and layering of paper developed from quite ordinary beginnings.  When I was making drawings and wanted to recover a highlight from an area covered with graphite I would first use a rubber to get back to the white paper - but this never reveals a pure white as the graphite will always leave a (rather nice) grey stain, and it was necessary to scrape off the paper surface with a knife blade.  There is nothing novel about this; every life class student will have done something similar, and Constable and Turner regularly achieved highlights in their water colours in the same manner.  But these are the sort of humble beginnings from which, over many years, and in an attempt to achieve a power and immediacy of expression, my techniques evolved. 

As to whether my paintings will become more abstract - I wouldn't rule out anything, but I do find the variety of buildings and landscapes that I see so endlessly fascinating that I can't imagine moving away from a strong link to the world that I encounter.

Yes, of course, I can see that your love of and attraction to buildings would limit the degree of abstraction that you can bring to such subjects, but imagine that there is much greater scope for all sorts of developments in the treatment of form and colour in the landscape. Going back to the Travelling Exhibition, touring so many interesting venues, how did this prestigious event come about?

The touring show was just something that I wanted to do.  From the beginnings of the idea in 2001 the whole project spanned ten years to the final showings in spring 2011.  For years I had been interested in the development of ideas of The Picturesque and The Sublime in eighteenth century painting - in itself rather odd for a painter coming from a background of Modernist painting and Conceptual Art at college in the 1970s!  By developing the idea of a touring exhibition I was able to give this interest a focus, and to explore landscapes in northern Britain that I had long wanted to see, as these parts of Britain were the areas in which the topographical painters at the end of the eighteenth century went to discover Sublime landscapes.  Of course the project did not only involve painting trips to Scotland, the North of England and North Wales, and a great deal of work done in the studio.  There was also a simply enormous amount of planning, preparation and administration involved.  My original idea was to tour the show in the areas of northern Britain of which I had made paintings - but, of course, things never work out quite as one intends.  In the end the tour really depended upon which galleries were interested in the project and had space and facilities to take what was a pretty large scale exhibition.  I was delighted in the end that the tour ranged from Petworth House in the South to the Maclaurin Galleries near Glasgow in the North, and many points between.  The show went to thirteen venues around Britain and lasted for three years.

Moving on from your current conception of your painting and choice of subjects, and it's evolution, we haven't talked very much about materials.  Although your work is pretty much labelled 'mixed media', apart from the graphite studies, I think I am correct in saying that it is primarily water based, an amalgam of watercolour and acrylic, with added pastel; but I suspect that there are areas in some of your paintings that are pure acrylic, in other words acrylic colour mixed with acrylic medium, rather than water as a vehicle, which I anticipate helps bond the layered paper.  Are these observations sound?

Then thinking on from here, and speculating about materials that I have not seen you use, I imagine canvas and oil must be very enticing.  Except that you obviously work quickly, and the speed of execution is an integral part of a successful result, and oil might slow you down, although of course working wet into wet and with added materials is always possible… 

There are two fairly clearly defined uses of mixed media in my work.  I regularly use a combination of water colour, gouache and Indian ink often with the addition of water colour pencils and water soluble crayons.  I also use acrylic, often over some thin layers of water colour.  There are technical demands here which have to be met - clearly water colour or gouache may not be used over acrylic as there would not be sufficient purchase over the shiny, water proof acrylic surface.  I describe these acrylic paintings as mixed media as they also contain collage and pencil lines scored into wet paint.  Acrylic paint is powerfully adhesive and bonds the layers of collage.  For the paintings in water colour and ink I use a museum/conservation quality glue to fix the collage.

I used to work regularly with oil - initially on canvas, but subsequently on prepared board as the vigour of my painting meant that I simply went straight through the canvas!  In the end I found that working on board was rather constricting; one is more or less confined to the dimensions of the board, and this is why I have recently been working with acrylic on paper, an enormously flexible medium. 

Yes, I can imagine you scoring through a canvas because of the vigour of your technique, and reflecting on the physical activity you exert on a work, whether in situ or in the studio, gives us a good appreciation of the passion and energy in your expression.

We are probably running out of space now for full reproduction of this interview, so are there any further points or angles on your work that you would like to comment upon for our readers? 

People often ask me about the future - which is a difficult, or perhaps easy, question to answer as I never plan.  My work evolves, and I follow my current lines of interest.  I don't expect big changes, but I will always be exploring and as long as my fascination with what I am seeing, and what I am learning is expressed in my work the paintings will continue to have vitality.