The great outdoors

Renowned landscape artist Richard Pikesley invites us to join him painting en plein air in the Dorset countryside

Progressing through art school in the early ’70s I was a bit of an oddity, I wanted to learn to draw well and paint what I saw. I was lucky to have encountered inspirational teaching early on and in their very different ways Ken Howard RA and the amazing Ian Dury (of Blockheads fame) both had a hand in shaping the painter I was to become.

Ken, now a distinguished and much-loved Royal Academician and a lifelong friend, had just started teaching at Harrow School of Art when I enrolled on the Foundation Course; encountering this wonderfully gifted painter at a time when I was so hungry to learn was perfect timing. Ian Dury taught part-time at Canterbury and, alongside a history of rock ’n’ roll, taught us to really care about the paintings and drawings we made. He’d come up the hard way and passed on some of his grit to those of us who were lucky enough to be his students. Plein air painting was deeply unfashionable but quickly became the thing I wanted to do. I understood early on that a painting, while it can never fully duplicate nature, was to become a route into connecting and understanding what I saw.