Live landscape painting

I’m quite worried about meeting Maurice Bishop. With his massively successful Exmoor galleries groaning with affordably priced local landscape paintings and prints, I expect him to be a rapier-sharp businessman, fiercely protective of his product and disinterested in other artists like me, trying to talk him into fancy conceptual projects. Carol assures me he’s known to be approachable and really rather nice, but it doesn’t reassure me that asking him to give me a few of his prints to cut and stitch them – won’t offend.
Lynemouth is not what I’m used to on Exmoor. An undeniably lovely old-fashioned seaside village reached via a deeply carved road (seaside thatch, I’ve never seen that before), there are suddenly hoardes of tourists ambling about with icecreams. I ask where Maurice’s studio is at one of the attractions, a model railway layout. The layout has an impressive innovation (I know a thing or two about railway modelling but that’s another story) in its chimneys excuding an ectoplasm made of Christmas tree ‘angel hair’ tufts.
Anyhow, the attendant answers as if I have just asked a Londoner ‘Excuse me, you wouldn’t happen to know if I’m in the right city for Buckingham Palace?’. Apparently you can’t miss the studio. I realise that contrary to my expectations, Maurice isn’t hidden away in a clifftop studio but is on the main drag amidst the fish and chip shops. When I arrive he’s actually working on a new canvas in his gallery window. Actually in the window, for all to see.
Five minutes later I’m walking away from the studio with a ‘shop-soiled’ canvas under my arm to try out. Apparently a duck had flown into his gallery, landed in the blue paint on his palette and proceeded to daub all the nearby prints.

Themes : landscape painting