Tony Dexter wasn’t always a painter. In fact, he’s only recently taken it up.

He is, however, a trained artist, having studied fine art, specialising on sculpture, 40 years ago.

After leaving art college, Tony ended up taking the route of a commercial career in Leeds in advertising, marketing and business consultancy.

However, the creative bug was unrelenting and his retirement in 2013 gave him the opportunity and the time to paint for the very first time.

To add to this he built a studio at his Addingham home, which has given him the freedom and space to indulge himself in his new-found passion, particularly using acrylic paint, which gives an ideal vibrant finish for his current body of work of small East Coast (particularly Filey) fishing vessels, known as coble boats.

Tony said: “I love acrylic paint. It’s quick drying and when applied to the canvas impasto (where the paint is applied thickly) and then gloss varnished the finished result is fantastically colourful.

“My work is on ‘block’ canvas, which means they don’t need framing and the majority are sized at 30” x 30” - a dimension ideal for today’s contemporary home.”

Tony’s first painting was a portrait of his grand-daughter Kitty that still adorns his studio. Other subjects have included fairgrounds, people and fish – water-related subjects currently seem to dominate his work.

“My most recent work is based on Filey coble boats. For many years we have and continue to take regular family holidays at Filey. Sadly in this time we have seen a decline in the fishing activity so I thought I would try to capture some of the essence of these boats by undertaking a series of coble pictures.”

The artist tends to take pictures of the boats and paint from a carefully cropped version of the image back at his studio in Addingham.

“I tend to use the images as inspiration – the scene I paint tends to be my interpretation of the boat,” he said.

In 2013 Tony was selected to exhibit at The Great North Art Show at Ripon Cathedral – the first exhibition he had ever entered and he sold a number of his fish pictures at the exhibition and subsequently privately. One painting on display at Ripon was sold even before the show officially opened!

Tony has recently applied to be able to exhibited his work as part of The Great North Art Show again this summer.

He added: “I’d like to believe that my work is interesting, reasonably priced and visibly distinctive, and that as a result people like it!”

Tony is currently in the process of setting up his own website. If anyone knows of anywhere Tony could display his work, he would like to hear from you. Or if anyone would like to buy his work, e-mail him at tony@stonesthrow.org.uk.