“I was out in the fields, Monet-style, doing plein air stuff, freezing my arse off on them Cornish cliffs, but painting as if it’s Guyana, in these bright hot colours when I’m not feeling like that at all.” It was Paula Rego, Hew Locke RA's tutor at Falmouth School of Art, who challenged him to question his subject matter, and to focus on what mattered the most to him. “My career went from day to night, it changed in that tutorial,” he says. He ditched the Cornish cliffs, and soon after, made his first trip back to Guyana. Rosanna McLaughlin visited @hewdjlocke at his Stockwell studio – where he was in the midst of painting two boats – to talk about his ambitious, large-scale commissions for the @metmuseum & @tate Britain, and getting elected to the Royal Academy in his sixties. Read the RA Magazine interview at the link in bio! Photo: Tom Jamieson. Courtesy Royal Academy of Arts, London Image: Hew Locke RA, 'Foreign Exchange', 2022. #RoyalAcademy #RoyalAcademicians @falmouthuni