At the SWAc AGM last year, I gave a talk which outlined the way my painting had developed from the British Modernist influenced abstract painting through to the small realist still life groups that had kept me obsessed for the last decade. I confessed to feeling I had taken this particular genre as far as I could and was considering a change in approach.

I went back to my beginnings and in a cheap spiral sketchbook began to make small collages from paint scraped paper. The paper was cut into irregular, curved sided forms and arranged in pairs or groups within ten-centimetre squares. Not being one to sit doing nothing while waiting for paint to dry on the current work, I busied myself with these little sketches and before I knew it I had created over a hundred.

Then in 2019 I took a last-minute holiday to Spain. The Alhambra has always been on my list and there was an opportunity to visit and also to enjoy Ronda, Cordoba and Saville. I took a sketch book and a camera and came back enthused by the sights, sound and smells; wanting to encapsulate them in painting.

I started to rework my sketches but struggled to create something figurative, that worked for me, and so went back to browse my photographs. On one occasion I had nudged the camera settings to wide angle by accident. The images of the narrow Spanish streets showed extreme barrel distortion; initially I was annoyed but then I saw a relationship with my abstract collages.

Taking inspiration from both sketchbooks I began to strip back the street scenes to basic barrel forms and concave strips then scale these up on primed boards. Adjusting the concave strips, that I began to see as streets linking wide plazas, I worked with acrylic in layers over scraped gesso to create the textures and colours of terracotta and stucco.

The Coronavirus lockdown was now underway and while I had stocks of board and paint, I decided to focus on a series of paintings that I called ‘Gaps – Spain 2019’. My progress with the work was recorded through a series of ‘vlogs’. These were posted on YouTube and Facebook.

Gradually I became bolder both with scale and colour. The series is coming to a conclusion in almost pure cadmium yellows and reds with contrasting inky blues on boards as large as I can comfortably handle.

Two of the first paintings were shown with the SWAc Spring Exhibition at the Penwith Gallery and another four were destined for the 21 Group Exhibition also in St Ives. The six paintings remain with the Penwith online gallery - penwithgallery.com (current exhibitions).

Robert Mountjoy was born in North Devon, UK and attended Bideford Grammar School before training as a teacher of art in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He subsequently read for a degree at Bristol and taught in comprehensive schools and colleges until 2011 when he retired to paint full time.

He was elected to the South West Academy in 2003 and has served twelve years as trustee.

Opposite: a short video Robert talking about these paintings during the first Coronavirus lockdown.

Discover more articles from the A View Shared series