ARTIST David Fowkes likes to sit in his commodious chair in his sitting room in Bishopthorpe Road, contemplating the York skyline.

He is 90 now, still painting on a small scale, although unable to work in his studio upstairs, and no longer can he paint standing up in his preferred mode. Yet the artistic mind remains at work and play, never resting.

“It’s a good world, and I spend much time in this chair, and through the big, open, 19th century window, I can see the sky and get visions of all sorts of interesting things,” he says.

“That’s what distinguishes the artist. I can’t help seeing things; I almost see too much, and as I get older, I’m often able to see a potential painting in the way drapery falls or the leaves of a plant fall. They immediately suggest other things to me.

“In the skies, I’m constantly aware of the additional suggestions that are made because of the tones and the ways the colours react to each other, which suggest figures and heads and battles and chases, when it’s just clouds, but this is what comes through when your imagination is stirred by the relationships you can see so closely.”

David, who has lived in York for 30 years after teaching at schools of art in Winchester and Aberdeen, is following up his Kentmere House exhibition earlier this year with a show of 30 pieces at King’s Manor.

“I can’t get up to my studio anymore, so Ann Petherick, from Kentmere House, and my daughter have selected paintings from the past 30 years, and even some from the 1950s, that I had in there. I hadn’t seen some for 30-odd years as they were piled up against the wall,” he says.

“It was a pleasure for me to see them again – and a surprise, as I couldn’t recall some of them.”

The exhibition comprises paintings predominantly from the 1980s and 1990s, but also one or two newer works and a few from his days in Aberdeen, and the title encapsulates his abiding philosophy on art: Painting Is A Mysterious Business.

“I think it’s mysterious because the visual arts – painting, sculpture and architecture – depend on the practitioners drawing. That is the practical thing they have to do in order to paint or design, and I used to tell my students they had to carry their sketchbook at all times and always be ready to draw because you never know when you will see something new,” says David.

“The mystery of drawing is never repeated in any of the other arts. It’s separate from the world of literature. It’s mysterious! There may be references to the physiological facts of humanity but they won’t be the actual meaning of the painting.

“It’s not about references to humanity but the relationship of one colour or tone to another. If a painting works well, those colours and tones come together, and that’s why it’s a mysterious business.”

Great artists, such as Vermeer and Michelangelo, react to what they see and make fine distinctions in what they paint, suggests David.

“Those people doing performance art today, it’s interesting in a way but it’s not in the great tradition of painting,” he says. “They just don’t understand the visual world.”

David, in contrast, most certainly does understand that world and finds it more and more interesting the older he grows.

“In my later work, I’ve gone more after the abstract nature of the subject, and that’s maybe the same for most artists. You see, the abstract is really the true nature of the subject, just refined and cut down to the bare essentials and made stronger for that reason,” he says.

“It cuts out the superfluous, and that again is why painting is such a mysterious business, because it’s difficult to put it down in words.”

Painting Is A Mysterious Business, an exhibition by David Fowkes, runs in the Senior Common Room, at King’s Manor, University of York, Exhibition Square, York, until December 17. The show’s curator is Ann Petherick, of Kentmere House Gallery, York.

Charles Hutchinson