An artist from Alton has been depicting a picturesque part of the Suffolk coast in the town’s Freedom Through Expression gallery.

Tim Burns, formerly an art teacher at St Nicholas’ School in Church Crookham, has an exhibition of portraits plus still life and landscape paintings at the Normandy Street venue.

Oil paint is the kind usually found on his brush. He said: “You can always go over things and update a picture with oils. I don’t like acrylics and watercolour is a very exacting medium.”

He was working on a painting of a house overlooking the beach at Aldeburgh when the Herald visited on April 23.

Tim, 69, said: “I went to paint the sea but it was so windy that I had got into the lee of the wind down the side of the house, and just started doing a sketch of the house next door. Having made that effort, I thought I might work it up into a larger painting, so it’s completely unlike anything I’ve been working on in the last few years.

“I used to paint at Dungeness and Hastings. I used to paint the fishermen’s sheds down there, so it’s a little bit like that, but in the last almost two years I’ve painted nothing but portraits.”

Tim explained that American figurative painter Edward Hopper was his muse for the work.

He added: “There were two figurative painters of great note working in America at the same time as the abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

“But these two just stuck to their guns and painted figuratively, and they were much respected even by the abstract expressionists. They’re both wonderful painters. To emulate them would be a great thing.”

Tim’s exhibition runs until May 17. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am until 4pm.