Paul Kenny’s abstract images of the Northumbrian coastline have become sought-after artworks. KATE CHADWICK speaks to the artist as he reflects on the region that has defined his career for more than 35 years

IT WAS in 1972, while still a fine art student at Newcastle Polytechnic that Paul Kenny first began to appreciate the wilderness of the Northumbrian coastline.

Catching the bus out of the city to spend a day walking along Cheswick sands, he remembers being struck by the vast emptiness and endless horizons that were so alien to his Salford upbringing.

Taking out his camera he started to photograph sea water and rocks in black and white – focusing in on the tiniest detail of beauty that he felt captured his weird and wonderful new playground. Now, more than thirty years on with work hanging in the Scottish National Gallery, National Photography Collection, the offices of Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank and a forthcoming solo show in London, Paul said he continues to be inspired by the Northumbrian landscape and feels lucky to be able to call this place home.

“When I came to the North East from Salford I didn’t really know much about the coast and the landscape was very unfamiliar, so different to the North West where I grew up. I started to go on trips out to the sea and beaches and the roots to a lot of my work started then,” said Paul, who turned 60 this year.

“Alnmouth, Druridge Bay, Cheswick, those trips as a student where I experienced the isolation and emptiness of the coast were very important. I still go out two or three times a week to the same eight-mile stretch of beach between Holy Island and Berwick. I’ll do some drawings for reference, picking up stuff I might want to use in an image later. I still find the place beautiful every day and like it even more when the weather’s really dramatic.”

Since returning to the North East after a ten years in Lancashire, Paul now works out of a studio attached to his cottage in Lowick which he shares with his wife, textile artist Margaret Kenny. While his work is technically classed as photography, Paul is more commonly likened to landscape artists and sculptors like Andy Goldsworthy where the relationship with the natural environment is more interactive.

He doesn’t just capture what is in front of him but collects objects, playing with scale and layout back in his studio to create a negative on a glass plate which he then scans into a computer. It is his innovative “camera-less” approach that has won him such praise from critics and last year, a place in London exhibition The Photographers, where his work sat alongside David Bailey and Patrick Lichfield.

“There’s no physical camera anymore,” said Paul. “I use a glass photographic plate and repeatedly drop sea water onto it and allow it to dry to salt crystals before applying more water. Sometimes I might include stones or for one image I used a feather I’d collected. The idea is to try and find the awe-inspiring in something which is easily lost, something you would just walk past and not really notice.”

Colours are gleaned from his various beach finds like a rusting green Heineken can which creates the startling green pulses through his image Night sky over Heineken, (2010). Once scanned into a computer his images are blown up to a dramatic size, several meters square by Paul and his printer Jack Lowe of Hoults Yard, Newcastle – who also supplies prints for Turner Prize-winning artist Rachel Whiteread.

The colours are mesmerizingly vivid for images which are essentially close-ups of seawater and collected debris, strewn from nature.