NORTH Yorkshire artists Richard Barnes and Rob Shaw, with Richard's two Labradors in tow, decided to start 2016 with a winter month of painting in Staithes.

Richard has since enjoyed short stays every other month in the East Coast fishing village, where Rob lives. Now the results can be seen in two exhibitions: The North Remastered, at According To McGee in York, from Thursday's 6pm to 8pm preview until June 27, and Resilience at Staithes Gallery, Staithes, from Friday's 7pm preview to July 10.

"We negotiated a rate for a cottage and holed ourselves up by the log burner to watch the winter storms from our cottage perched half way up the cliff," says Richard, a York artist and art teacher with a long connection with According To McGee. "I made many trips to Staithes, living there for a month when my home in York was affected by the floods, and it turned out to be a joy to live by the ocean during the winter."

Although Richard had painted Staithes previously, he never felt he had "really got under the skin of the place". This time would be different. "Armed with a deck chair and an Arctic suit purchased many years before in Tasmania from an explorer returning form an expedition to the south pole, I took to sitting out in the elements, the dawn and the fading evening light, armed with paints and sketch books," he says.

Perhaps it is a bit of a cliché for the artist to hide away in a little fishing village and stare romantically out to sea, acknowledges Richard, but many of us would gladly swap the stresses of city life for a month lived cut off from mobile phone signals.

York Press:

Rob Shaw and Richard Barnes's collaborative painting of Staithes at Staithes Gallery

"You hope as an artist if you stay in one place long enough, something will emerge that will allow you to see your own vision and that somehow that will manifest itself in the paintings you make," he says. "Part of that process is just being around observing. One morning the wild wind came at such a low angle in the opposite direction to the rushing waves that the white spray was blown for over a hundred metres in horizontal shafts across the wild grey sea. Light momentarily catching these jets of spray and forming miraculous rainbows."

Richard and Rob, who moved to Staithes in 1995, have made their two joint shows an experimentally collaborative project. "The collaboration has worked in the way many artistic collaborations work," says Richard. "Partly by spending time in each other's studios and also in the pub talking about painting, love, life and the universe.

"I've worked collaboratively before on digital projects but never painting. This year I've also worked collaboratively with neuroscientists at the University of York and psychologists and philosophers from Canterbury University to create public works of art. I do go out drawing and painting with other painters, which I find very liberating and inspirational, but the thought of working with another artist in my studio really goes against the grain."

So how did the two artists progress? "Both myself and Rob really value the privacy of our studios. I know many artists through time have worked together in big studios, but the lone artist slogging away in his garret is a very outdated view which in fact hugely appeals to me," says Richard. "We're both artists who like to work very intensively and alone in the studio."

The experimental aspect of the collaboration has been to create two works together, firstly one of Staithes, now the other of York. "The York work is still in progress. It's a view from the steps of York Art Galllery looking across to the Minster and Bootham Bar that I've started, and Rob has already 'attacked' it but it's not quite finished," says Richard.

"The Staithes one is complete and forms part of the exhibition at the Staithes Gallery. At first it felt like I was just colouring in Rob's work.

"Then it felt like I was defacing it. I kept it in my studio for four months and just added bits every day. Now we're both pleased with it and feel it captures the spirit of the collaboration."

York Press:

One of Rob Shaw's paintings of York, on show at According To McGee

How would Richard describe Rob's artistry? "I'd first seen Rob's work five years ago in Staithes and immediately thought it was something I had not really seen before in Yorkshire," he says. "It has an amazing balance between raw passion, emotion and energy and control. He takes high risks with his work, never knowing exactly how they will end. He creates a brilliant duality between surface and illusion. We've got to know each other slowly and I hope made friends for life."

Summing up his own pieces on show at the two galleries, Richard says: "My latest work takes in views in Staithes and York and the moors in between; views that I think will be pretty much the same in 1,000 years' time. They're unapologetically trying to capture the magic, the twinkle, the special moment.

I want to take iconic scenes we all know and love and try to really capture them. I just keep changing the paintings until they seem right. They all capture that period of time when the natural light dies and man-made illumination takes over."

Finally, Richard, if you could collaborate with one other artist, living or dead, who would it be and why? "It would be Van Gogh. I would have been there next to him when he created Café Terrace At Night, to me the most beautiful painting I have ever seen. It looks wonderful in reproduction but is infinitely better as the real thing."

"I did in fact once get very concerned about collaborating on a painting with Kevin Keegan, the footballer, but it turned out to be an hallucination! The nurses told me not to worry about it and my worry was caused by the anaesthetic and morphine I'd been given for an operation."