In 1959 I gave up a successful career in design and advertising to see whether I could establish a life for myself as a full-time painter. Like many others at the time I was drawn to the picturesque artists’ colony of St Ives in West Cornwall, where studios and other forms of accommodation were still cheap and where I already knew a number of the town’s established artists. At the time when I first began to make art professionally, a strange-seeming critical orthodoxy prevailed which effectively dominated contemporary practice. To explain this at its simplest, this orthodoxy centred around the…