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Malvern painter David Prentice tells Terry Grimley why he had to overcome vertigo to produce his latest exhibition

Long associated with painting the Malvern hills where he lives, David Prentice has turned to an urban theme for his latest oneman show.

The exhibition which has just gone on show at the John Davies Gallery in Moreton-in-Marsh, concentrates on a series of bird's eye views of the London skyline he has been working on for the last couple of years.

Having first tentatively explored the subject around the turn of the Millennium - in his last one-man show his second London painting sold for a startling £27,500 - he has now returned to it with renewed vigour, exploring the changing light and profile of the capital's skyline, with such recent additions as the London Eye and the Suisse Re building, better known as the Gherkin.

"It's so complicated to deal with," he says. "I said to John Davies about five years ago I'm going to put this aside, it's too complicated. But then I started again last year and it just seemed to click for some reason.

"The other interesting that happened was that I found myself at the same stage I was at with the Malvern Hills, where I could turn the space round in my head. So some of these paintings are not literal views of London as it is."

Most of the views are based on drawings made from the roof of a tall office block called King's Reach, just south of Blackfriars Bridge.

"It houses a lot of magazines, and I think I originally got up there because John Davis advertises in Country Life. I'd been talking to him about working at Greenwich and he said when he was up in this building there was a fantastic view up and down the Thames.

"So I got introduced to the safety officer, went up, read the rules of the game, and he said you're not going to jump off, are you?

"The first drawings I did, I went down just before the Millennium Wheel was lifted. It was quite late, four o'clock-ish on an autumn afternoon, and it started lightning and I thought 'Oh my God this is impossible' - the combination of weather and having vertigo, which I do a bit - but I stuck it out and went back.

"For the Millennium celebrations they had fireworks or laser lights up there, and they had built a platform with a stepladder up to it on top of what I think was the lift housing. It's about as long as a tennis court.

"I got up there, and at that point I thought this is almost beyond me. It was like a box within the roof area, so if you fell off you wouldn't fall very far, but when you're up there it's very difficult to convince yourself it's safe. When you're up that high the world seems to start moving around you.

"I pulled myself together and as well as making drawings I took photographs, because it was so complicated I needed photographic evidence as well."

Now 71, Prentice trained at Moseley Road School of Art and Birmingham School of Art and played a leading role in founding Ikon Gallery in 1964.

At that time he was a painter of geometric abstracts, and the abstractionist tendency has never deserted his work even when it has represented the English countryside.

The London paintings sometimes recall another painter called David born in Birmingham nearly half a century earlier - David Bomberg, whose work traced a similar journey from severe abstraction to expressisve figuration.

"It will be interesting to see what sort of response I get," says Prentice. "We've thrown a lot of money at this, but we've already sold one big one."