FIFTEEN years ago Michael Edwards left a white collar career as a personnel director for a host of blue chip firms to become a full time artist. SNJ reporter David Gibbs met the Bisley-based painter as he prepared for his latest exhibition.

With his bald head and white beard Michael Edwards would look quite at home on the bridge of a fishing trawler.

He bounds around the beautiful old vicarage he shares with partner and fellow artist Sybil, the daughter of a Canadian gold prospector, with zealous enthusiasm and good humour.

It is as if he has been given a second lease of life. Perhaps trading an office bound career with the likes of Ford and British Leyland for an artist's life less ordinary is the reason for his good cheer.

It has taken him around the world - New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Europe not to mention the length and breadth of Britain - and earned him a stellar reputation along the way.

His trademark seascapes, awash with vivid blues, have won him awards and recognition from the prestigious likes of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, The Royal Society of Marine Artists and The Artist magazine.

"I've been most successful with seascapes," says Michael, who paints in watercolour, acrylics and oil. "I like being on a beach and painting."

But scenes of far-flung locales do not sell well and, when the day is done, his art is as much his passion now as it is his livelihood.

"The overseas paintings don't sell well," he says. "That is not just me, all my colleagues find the same. "Apart from Venice we tend not to exhibit a lot of overseas work. People prefer to buy places they know."

His home has become his gallery - airy, spacious rooms and corridors decorated with the fruits of his artistic labour for the forthcoming exhibition. They include breathtakingly beautiful scenes of the Cotswolds but with a difference.

"They are really trying to get a stronger, more colourful approach to the Cotswolds," he says.

"You tend to get Cotswold water colours, which are very traditional little tourist pictures and they are very quaint whereas these strong oil paintings are certainly not quaint. They are quite powerful and more modern than I have done before." He moved to Bisley from Bristol 11 years ago.

With its ample accommodation and serenely spacious grounds the Old Vicarage was perfectly suited to the residential painting courses Michael then ran. Before moving he had authored four books on painting but gave it up as too time-consuming.

Nowadays he concentrates solely on his painting, either solo, or with the well-known accomplished Dobunni Painters - a group he founded.

Happy as he is to experiment within his medium he remains avowedly of the old school - a representational artist who paints what he sees.

His views on the conceptual art as produced by the bad boys and girls of Brit Art are as forthright as they are widely shared.

"It's a pity it's all labelled art because what they do and what I do are worlds apart. But good luck to them if they can get away with it," he says with a gentle smile. "I paint pictures that people put on walls and they certainly don't do that."

Michael B Edwards Autumn Exhibition at the Old Vicarage Gallery, George Street, Bisley opened on Saturday, October 2 and runs until Sunday, October 10. It features more than 100 paintings.

Viewing times are from 10.30am to 5.30pm. For more information call 01452 770738.