Wild seas and desolate landscapes have provided the inspiration for a major exhibition of North-East art. Nick Morrison speaks to one of the artists about how running helped him find his distinctive voice.

PETER Hicks has only been down in London a few days but it doesn't take long to remember why he looks elsewhere for his inspiration. "The weather has changed considerably, but you don't see it here, you just feel it," he says.

"If you live in towns and cities, the weather is something that happens above you, it doesn't affect your life in the same way. In the country you are constantly aware of the weather changes."

Peter is one of a group of artists who have been chosen to take part in an exhibition at Messum's Cork Street Gallery in London. And what unites them is the way they have been stirred by the landscapes and changing light of the North, captured in the show's title, The Elemental North.

"The weather changes are much more rapid and dramatic, and almost every area has its own weather," Peter says. "You see these clouds coming over and somehow they shift by you or they hover perpetually over the top of you."

Peter, who lives in Danby, in North Yorkshire, studied at Cleveland College of Art under Joe Cole, another of the exhibitors, before moving into teaching and spending 21 years as head of creative arts at Queen Elizabeth College in Darlington.

Three of the other artists whose work is on display - Len Tabner, William Tillyer and Peter Sarginson - were also at Cleveland College of Art, while Lilian Colburn lived and worked in Staithes and Pam Poskitt lives near Whitby. The non-landscape painter in the exhibition, Andrew Hemingway, is a still-life artist taking objects from close to his Yorkshire home as his subjects.

It was while he was an art student that Peter found his distinctive style of painting, by combining it with his other passion at the time, running. A keen middle-distance runner, he only just missed out on selection for the British team to go to the Rome Olympics, but the experience helped provide him with a solution to a problem that had been troubling him.

"There was a critical point in my life where I thought, 'What is meaningful to me? What do I understand? What do I know?'. And I thought it was the lie of the land," he says.

He had done much of his training on the North York Moors, and this started to inform his painting. "Because you are moving, you don't see it in great detail, some of it is a bit of a blur, but you are capable of seeing the landscape as a whole, not just specific.

"I would look at a range of hillsides and think I was going for a 20 mile run, and that was a magnificent sense of power, to know you are going to run over those hills. What I didn't realise was that it was going to provide me with pictorial nourishment for the rest of my life.

"If I hadn't had that, I would have been stuck with the particular, and that would have been much more difficult for me to use as a vehicle about the landscape."

His work captures a sense of rapidly moving over the landscape, using sand as well as other materials in addition to oils. "You look at my work and you won't find any sheep or hedges, but you will get an elemental sense and the atmosphere of the lie of the land."

* The Elemental North is at Messum's Cork Street Gallery in London until December 3. More details from 0207 7437 5545 or www.messums.com