A childhood love of painting birds and animals was rekindled when JUSTIN BARNARD met a pupil of Salvador Dali on the Greek island of Skyros. He returned to Norfolk to study Fine Art and tells how you can make your way as an artist with help from training and enterprise agencies .

I loved to paint birds and animals when I was a boy. They were the most miraculous part of my life.

An acrylic on canvas called A Flight of Birds, by Justin Barnard.

I was reintroduced to the beauty of paint by a pupil of Salvador Dali, an American called Robert Venosa, while making up the options during a Greek activity holiday.

Already a poet of nearly 20 years, I viewed visual art at that time as the poorer cousin of the written word as a medium for artistic expression.

Now I think they are both enormously powerful, in some ways that differ, but also in many ways that overlap.

I remember sitting in the golden September sunshine hearing distant goat bells, breathing clean air off the ink dark sea, colours pouring out of the well of my subconscious like prisoners suddenly freed after years of incarceration.

“Paint!” said Robert, a man of many brushes and few words, at the end of the fortnight.

As soon as I returned home, I enrolled on a life-drawing summer school at Wensum Lodge. Within days, a few dusty charcoal strokes had begun to give body to the human form, making two dimensions become three – a magical thing to watch.

For the next few years I laboured at evening classes which I continued when I moved to London in 1998, still benefiting from excellent tuition.

I returned to Norfolk in 2002 and within a year I was taking a foundation course in Fine Art at the Norwich School of Art and Design.

Here I was nudged into trying out new visual languages, yet remained adamant (in a way that may have been a little tiresome for others) that I was following my own path and not conforming to contemporary norms.

I called myself an “organic artist”, available to be pulled in a new direction by the next available wind if inclined to go with it.

I still quote Keats to myself to justify this deep marriage with spontaneity: “If poetry does not come as easily as leaves on a tree it had better not come at all.”

After a period of unemployment I decided to set up an artwork and photographic business in September 2006, enjoying benefit support under the New Deal scheme. Just Pictures is now nearly five months old.

Unsuccessful grant applications for new camera equipment have impeded early financial success but I must confess that I have also been “brush-bound” like many other artists for whom commercial networking is shunned in favour of the peace and quiet of the studio.

I am trying to rectify this now as my training provider, Norfolk and Waveney Enterprise Services (NWES), is encouraging me to don a salesman’s clothes and get on my bike to look for work.

So if you are interested in quality artwork that is powerful and original, telephone 01508 480651 or e mail me at Justinbarnard@btinternet.com.

You can also visit me at the Walnut Tree Gallery in Thurton on the Norwich-Beccles road.

Commissions for portraits of friends, pets, loved-ones, and also for landscapes, cityscapes and dreamscapes are all welcome.