KENTMERE House Gallery owner Ann Petherick first discovered John Thornton’s work in an open exhibition in Hull.

Using her well-honed detective skills for finding under-the-radar artists, she tracked him down and arranged a meeting.

That was ten years ago. It was to be the beginning of a partnership that continues to this day with John’s latest show of coastal Yorkshire paintings, Turning The Tide, now running at Ann’s gallery in Scarcroft Hill, York.

John had entered the Hull exhibition on a whim and, when he rang to arrange to collect his work, he was told that not only had both works sold but he was the joint prize winner too. “The encouragement that gave me has remained with me,” he says.

His success has grown over the ensuing decade and his excitement when he sells a painting still prevails.

“More important than the money is the thought that someone has chosen to spend their hard-earned cash to buy my work,” says John, whose paintings have drawn comparisons with the work of Cornish artist Kurt Jackson.

Ann notes how John remains modest and still welcomes support. “He needed help with finding his way around the gallery system, which is something I try to do for all my artists,” she says.

“There are many excellent artists in Yorkshire who show locally but have no idea how to get their work seen further afield. I like to help by suggesting galleries and societies they can apply to; in John’s case it was the annual exhibition of the Society of Marine Artists at the Mall Galleries in London, where his work was immediately accepted.”

John was thrilled, as he recalls: “That was a fantastic day, when I first exhibited in the society’s gallery on the Mall it was beyond my wildest dreams.”

He spent much of his working life as a joiner, like his father and grandfather before him, but interspersed with selling leather clothes in Chelsea in the Sixties, living in a hippy colony in Cornwall and travelling to Morocco in a Dormobile van.

It was the mid-Seventies before John made his way back to Yorkshire, to a house in Selby that was home to his grandfather, then his parents, next himself and his sisters, and now John and his family.

The influence of the sea can be found all around him there, where he works from a studio in the garden, which he insists on calling The Shed, surrounded by fishing nets, glass floats and pieces of flotsam and jetsam picked up along the coast.

All of them may one day make their way on to a painting, his seascapes being worked in a combination of watercolour, ink and acrylic, using whatever comes to hand to add texture.

John has always loved the sea. So much so that still water does not interest him, except perhaps to provide reflection in a woodland painting. “He likes water to be alive,” says Ann. “Just look at the foreground in his painting Wave; it is translucent, it is moving, it is everything that a painting of the sea should be.”

His larger works often incorporate collage from the aforementioned flotsam and jetsam to create relief. “After all, on a beach nothing is flat. The beach is always moving,” says John, who loves to discover quiet, unknown beaches along the Yorkshire coast. “The best are those where the access is extremely difficult. It means there’s no one there.”

As befits his joinery skills, he still works in wood too, carving life-size birds from pieces of driftwood and making beaks and legs made from corroded metal rods from the Second World War reinforced concrete defences found on his beachcombing trips.

• Turning The Tide will run until April 14. Opening hours are the open weekends this Saturday and Sunday and on April 5, 6, 12 and 13 from 11am to 5pm; every Thursday night from 6pm to 9pm; and at any other time by advance arrangement on 01904 656507.

Charles Hutchinson