New Peter

Any new exhibition by Peter Le Vasseur is going to cause a stir - but his new show, Work in Progress, finds the celebrated local artist at the height of his powers. Shaun Shackleton talks to him about drinking wine with Peter Blake, why he hates oil paint and why he loves Jurassic Park

You know exactly where you want to go and where you should be, but you're led off course by other things and you lose your way.

He lives, with his wife, Linda, in a cottage in the deepest depths of St Peter's - not your easy-to-find, near-the-parish-church address, but the hidden-away-down-twisty-narrow-lanes address.

'It is off the beaten track,' Peter admits when photographer Ady and I finally find the place.

Bedroom and studio downstairs, living room and kitchen upstairs and fantastic views towards Rocquaine Bay, it's the ideal setting for an artist.

We request that he puts on his trademark flat cap for the photographs while I ask him about the title of his show - Work in Progress.

'Obviously I've had a lot of exhibitions - around 35 or so - and I wanted an intriguing title for this one,' he explains.

The name refers to Peter's painting, Aftermath, which is an actual work in progress.

'I wanted it unfinished for the exhibition but I can't resist working on it. I'm going to have to stop myself.'

Throughout his illustrious career, Peter has exhibited alongside and rubbed shoulders with a host of stars. His anecdotes are like a Who's Who of swinging-60s London.

He also recalls a get-together in a posh club called The White Elephant.

It was a showbiz club. Michael Caine and Sinatra were members. The owner was a famous restaurateur and his wife was on TV. She'd decided to do a book for charity and asked so-called celebrity artists to do a freebie painting for it. It's where I first met Ollie Reed. There was also Norman Rossington, Morecambe and Wise, Peter Blake and David Hockney there.'

Obviously, I'd seen reproductions of Peter's work before but this was the first time I'd seen it in the flesh. I asked him what medium he used to create his paintings' vibrant colours.

'Acrylic. I have used oils in the past - there's a big one at St James of a leopard - but there's two reasons why I don't like oils. One, I can't stand the fumes of the turps and two, it takes ages to dry. It doesn't suit my way of working. Although it can take me six months to do a painting, I actually paint quickly. With oil, you have to wait a couple of days for it to dry.'

But he's not averse to a little artistic jiggery-pokery.

I notice the incredibly detailed head of the elephant in his painting, Edge of Destruction.

'Run your fingers over it,' Peter says. I do and the wrinkles and creases are all raised, like a kind of Braille. 'It's a special gel to give elements of a painting a 3D-effect. It's a cheat really and meticulous, but I don't overuse it.'

It's this painting that perhaps encompasses everything that Peter's art is all about: highly detailed, vibrant colours, a true love of nature and a strong conservationist message.

Three elephants stand on an African plain. In the background there are two giraffes, a Land Rover and a group of men. What at first seems like an innocent group of tourists taking in the scene on closer inspection turns out to be ivory poachers - one of them is aiming a rifle at an elephant.

'The main elephant isn't actually in the foreground. The bird is, or the bushes. But I'm an artist and it doesn't have to make logical sense but emotional sense.'

And it's this emotional focal point - the awful moment before the gun goes off - that makes the painting so powerful.

He likens it to the scene in Jurassic Park - a film he's just bought on DVD - before the viewer sees the T-Rex.

The pounding footprints, the ripples in the water.

Peter first found his love of ecology in the 70s when he was still living in London. He'd designed a few book covers for the publisher, Pan.

Pan did a series of art books so, not being a wallflower, Peter said to Larkin: 'Why don't you do one on me?'

The director asked the artist to bring all his transparencies the following Thursday to a brunch at the Chelsea Art Club.

Though enthusiastic of Peter's work, Larkin said that he couldn't do a book on him. Peter asked why not and he said: 'Because you're all over the place. You have paintings of everything.'

What Peter thought was his strength - the ability to excel in different subject matters such as landscape, portrait, still life and architectural - the director obviously saw as unmarketable.

'I'm like an actor,' says Peter. 'Most actors like the fact that they can play a private, General Allcock in WWII, a politician or a romantic lead in Los Angeles.'

But despite his reservations, the art director did notice something special in Peter's work.

'What he saw was nature pushing out everywhere. And this was before the start of the conservation movement. I thought, conservation and ecology - what a fantastic subject matter.'

And since then, Peter has never looked back.

From works such as The Desert Will Bloom, with its giant hands watering a fruit tree in the middle of some Saharan landscape, to the encroaching concrete tower blocks taking over the red-brick terraces of Merseyside in Echoes of Liverpool, the earth's delicate environment versus man's ceaseless destruction of it has played an enormous part in his work.

And perhaps that is why his paintings have been revered and collected by some high-profile names such as HRH Princess Anne, Claire Bloom, Michael Portillo, Zandra Rhodes and the late Hollywood legend, Rod Steiger.

Peter's subject matter is something that is close to all our hearts and his art shows the beauty of a world that we could all have forever if we'd only stop trying to destroy it.