Landscape and figure painter David Inshaw is about to launch his new exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London.

A long way from Inshaw’s Staffordshire roots, it is the county of Dorset which has played a big part in inspiring his distinctive paintings.

Reading Thomas Hardy’s novels and poems in the 1960s showed Inshaw a way of expressing landscape in art.

An English Romantic painter, he paints nudes and lyrical landscapes in a style similar to William Blake.

Speaking from his home and studio in central Devizes – a former Quaker meeting house built in 1703 – Inshaw cites Hardy as a key influence on his work.

He said: “I first became interested in Hardy when I fell in love with a girl in the 1960s who was doing English at Reading University.

“What struck me was how Hardy used landscapes as a metaphor for human emotions.

“I had just learned to drive as well and I decided that I’d find out about these places in Dorset that Hardy wrote about. He seemed to me to sum up my own feelings about landscape.”

Despite growing up in Kent, after being drawn to Dorset in the late 1960s Inshaw started becoming a regular visitor.

One Dorset scene, the footpath from Lower Bockhampton to Stinsford, near Dorchester, and famously trod by a young Thomas Hardy on his way to church, resonated with Inshaw.

So much so that he painted Path to Stinsford in 2008.

He said: “I’ve walked along that footpath so many times over the years and it has inspired me.

“There’s always activities and incidents there. I’ve done some paintings of the water meadows there – I’ve painted the area a few times over the years.

“I’m always on the lookout for something like that to paint that captures the imagination.”

Other parts of Dorset that have inspired Inshaw are West Bay – “I’ve been going there for years” – and the Cerne Giant at Cerne Abbas.

One of the works that will be displayed in the new exhibition in the London gallery is Pink House, East Cliff, West Bay – the late Stanley Kubrick’s home.

Inshaw said: “I think that house really stands out. I have painted the cliffs a few times and the house is very interesting.”

Dorset residents can also expect to see some large paintings of Weymouth beach in the exhibition.

Inshaw, who has also exhibited at Sladers Yard, West Bay, said: “I did these two large paintings in the last six months from photos I took of Weymouth beach.

“I came down on the steam train from Bath because I love steam trains, it was a beautiful day and I was very interested in the people there.

“I added things and subtracted things and it might not be recognisable as Weymouth Beach, but it is.”

Inshaw is best known for his painting The Badminton Game.

Normally displayed at the Tate Gallery, it is currently on loan to a gallery in Mexico City.

Suggesting that its popularity is perhaps down to its depiction of a quintessential English scene, Inshaw tells me: “I’m not sure about that but the painting is about sex. It’s about what you feel.

“I did it over 40 years ago and I was young and it was what I was feeling at the time.

“I think of the landscape as a metaphor.

“It’s the way I work, I look beyond the landscape, it’s more about the human condition and about what people are about.”

With Inshaw telling me about a day out he has planned in the next week on Portland, it appears as though Dorset will be providing him with subject material for many paintings to come.

“They are full of rolling hills and have a very feminine landscape.

“There’s a sexuality to that that you don’t find in other places.”

*David Inshaw – New Paintings Time Past and Present is at The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, London, from September 16 to October 1.

Email art@faslondon.com for more information.