Mr Fielding, my geography teacher, would talk continually about atmospheric pressure. From what I can remember, atmospheric pressure is the weight of the air around us and this weight presses down on everything it touches. Depending on the weight of the air, this creates high and low pressure which then determines the weather.

As I sat in Mr Fielding’s class and stared out of the window at the hills of the North Downs, all I could think about was what the weather was doing and that I needed to get out and paint it.

Even now, 45 years later, it is still all I think about and when I do get out to paint and have set up, the first thing I start to paint is the sky. It is the sky that sets the mood of my painting.

No matter how remote the location where I go to paint, there is always someone there doing stuff. There was a man the other day at a spot where I had chosen to work, shouting to someone on the phone that he was up on Dartmoor in fantastic weather.

It seems, like him, we are all open to the skies, each of us in our own landscape and the paintings I make are the depictions of mine.