00:00My name is Peter Michael Hicks. I live in Danby, North Yorkshire. I've lived in the valley of the Esk
00:09larger part of my life and I've painted almost the whole of my life although I've done other
00:17things as well. I was a teacher and I loved teaching. I still love teaching and we had
00:25this opportunity a couple of years ago. I rang up Joe Cornish who was having a photographic
00:32exhibition on at the time. I wanted to see his show and his wife Jenny said he'd love to see,
00:41to take you Peter. So he came over, picked up Stella and I and we came and we saw his wonderful
00:48work and we saw how wonderful in fact Fountains and Stirling Royal was. I was in the car with
00:59the director, Justin Scully. Eventually he said would you like to show here and I said
01:08can I think about it. It was quite an awesome prospect as far as I was concerned.
01:13It's a big place, very famous, visitors from all over the world and I chatted with my youngest
01:23daughter and she said of course you're gonna show and that was the end of it. So I came over
01:30with Stella and they gave me a mobility scooter to you know get around the place and I did a lot
01:38of work first of all here near the mill and near to Fountains itself and then later we spread out
01:48a bit further and went into the whole estate looking at different aspects of water and landscape
01:55together because essentially I'm a landscape painter. That's mostly what I paint in my own area.
02:02I've painted most parts of the country but I've got to honestly say I'm a Yorkshireman
02:10and it's mostly the Yorkshire landscapes that I'm most passionate about. In the other room
02:17there's a lot of small studies of Fountains Abbey itself. They're mostly looking and trying to decide
02:27what I would like to paint and I did about 12 of these and I did a lot of drawings related mostly
02:35to Fountains Abbey itself. But the paintings in this room are a mixture of things to do with
02:45Fountains and architecture and of course wherever possible I've taken the opportunity
02:53to concentrate on the landscape because landscape essentially is what I'm most familiar with.
02:59And how long is this show on for here? Two months, middle of June to middle of August.
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