From quite some years ago now, I was driving in the little, very bright yellow van ( 100% Yellow plus 15% Magenta for complete accuracy) towards Stroud on a mission for the company I worked for: Severnprint. I was probably delivering proofs for a job and trying to drum up a little more work from the area. In those days, one could wander around trading estates and shops looking for work. I learnt early in my brief and not that distinguished career as a print salesman ( though it read ‘ Account Manager ‘ on the business card) that one dressed differently in Stroud, to Cheltenham, or Gloucester. In Stroud, a suit was not a good idea: “You look like you’re a solicitor looking to deliver some unwanted papers”, one fearsomely honest potential customer told me. So not a good look. I might even have donned a woolly jumper for the Stroud trip. In Stroud, people called you ‘mate’ if you donned woolly wear, or even ‘man’ if they were original Stroudies. Not so in Cheltenham, a suit and tie was ‘de rigeur’ dress code, and if you wore what looked like an old regimental tie, so much the better. In Gloucester, they didn’t care what you were wearing, and just looked at you suspiciously, and might have murmured ‘alright?’, which wasn’t a question but a silent space filler greeting. Response should always be the same word repeated back to them in a low murmur. Nuff said.

As I approached Slad from the top of the hill at Bulls Cross, I descended through a wooded area on either side in the late afternoon light and spotted a shed on the right, bathed in dappled light. Slowing down, I pulled in and took a couple of quick photos of the shed. It looked fantastic next to the small cottage that it belonged to, which itself seemed as if it had grown out of the hill like a big fungus. It’s one of my favourite sheds. In a large list of ‘Sheds that I like’, it’s pretty near the top, helped by its location and the late afternoon shadows.

I’ve photographed a lot of sheds since and before. I’ve drawn Slad shed too, and in the next year plan to paint Slad shed.

I’ve got a plan to paint quite a lot in the coming year. A new adventure, a new medium. There will be a number of sheds in the new ‘oeuvre’, as we painters call it.

One of the joys of painting, and in a way it is just with painting because drawing has become a bit instinctive now that I’ve done so much of it, is that one thinks a lot. In fact, the painting itself is for me quite a quick process. The thinking about it is much more drawn out ( forgive the pun ). I wake up thinking about what I might paint. It’s preferable to reading the news, believe me.

One recent thought is: Why would people be interested in what I paint? It needs words. I’m much more used to pictures and words rather than just pictures. So when I come to do my Slad Shed painting, I shall write some words for it. They will be something like this:

Born out of the hillside on the approach to the small village of Slad, where Laurie Lee was brought up and wrote his famous book Cider with Rosie, this is the sort of shed that should have a preservation order on it. It will probably last many years, as it is painted it seems numerous times, so that it now appears black with creosote, a substance used to coat sheds and prevent woodworm that is so fierce that it is now banned. Now so ingrained in the pores of this wood that the shed will not have any wormy visitors, ever. In the dappled light of a late afternoon and with its wrought iron former garden gate and Cotswold stone walls layering the garden beneath it like a two-dimensional display, it is the prince of sheds. And what is within? I suspect well-oiled tools, a push lawn mower from the 1950s and perhaps even a Primus stove for brewing the odd cup of tea in the Summer. Who knows, there might even be a collection of Eagle comics from that same era stored away in a steel trunk.

Who knows?