Still only 38 years of age, Akash Bhatt has already gained more than his fair share of awards and recognition. A winner of the Villiers David award, the BP travel prize, the Windsor and Newton Award, he has also been a winner in the Discerning Eye and the Sunday Times watercolour exhibitions. A featured artist in the Royal Watercolour Society’s book celebrating their centenary, his work ‘Life’ was recently chosen as the winner of the ‘London Lives’exhibition and a 25 feet long replica of the work is displayed on Blackfriars bridge in London until spring 2012.

Bhatt appears to be able to capture perfectly the essence of the places he visits by painting their streets and buildings which at times appear so vivid and imbued with character as to be watching the artist observing them. In fact one watercolour in the show (depicting a suburban North London apartment block) is entitled ‘Stop Looking at Me’. As Churchill once put it ‘We shape our buildings- thereafter they shape us’. It is tempting to assert that Bhatt’s background is a key to his own wanderlust- a son of Gujarati parents, his father himself was born and lived in Kenya until the family, motivated by political events in East Africa in the late sixties, relocated to Leicester. ‘I have been fortunate that my work has given me the opportunity to travel widely but I am equally comfortable working from material closer to home, something that is necessary as it keeps the whole machine of creativity well-oiled and balanced for me.’ Fortunate for us as well, as streets in Leicester, Redditch, North London, Gujarat, New York and Cuba feature in this body of work. However a collection of romantic travel images these are most assuredly not. They in fact form a composite but detailed and intriguing self-portrait in what has been a period of much change in this young artist’s life.

In Cuba, among the distinctive crumbling old colonial and neo-soviet buildings, Bhatt avoids any clichéd or sentimental view. We see his long format canvases depicting remote factories near Bayamo, and street corners in Havana. Despite the attenuated shape the long format works seem to open up into broad landscapes, and as ever there are vertical signposts of detail on every tableau’s edge and at every turn in the road. For You depicts a quiet street in Santiago de Cuba, the faded pastel hues on walls and houses and the rusting iron window grilles baking in the sun. This is a painting that would have been appreciated very much by Bhatt’s late father, as it would have had him reminiscing about Nairobi. He might have pictured himself enjoying a well earned post-work beer sitting on the empty bench on the left of the painting, watching the world go by. Indeed the sky, the worn facades, and the faded colours are evocative of similar tropical dusty streets the world over.

The paternal influence is again evident in the painting ‘Gone’ which portrays a street in Leicester near to where the artist was brought up. Graffiti from the artist’s journals is scrawled and stencilled on to the surface includes quotations, favourite haunts, turns of phrase, all of which create a haunting atmospheric ‘feel’ for the magic of this place. It is as if this junction has that enchantment that we (and we alone) perhaps all have for a childhood location, a vista that we walked, non-descript to others, the emotional charge of which can instantly return on smelling, say, soda bread baking or ripening gorse flowers, or burning turf downwind. Like ‘Gone’, the paintings ‘Rose beneath the surface’, ‘Find you there’ and ‘Going Home’ are paeans to a life once lived. They have formed the artist and his oeuvre. They are what it feels like to have been there.

As a watercolour, ‘Stop Looking at Me’ is a painting that typifies the artist. The paint is laid on in an uncharacteristically opaque manner- Bhatt by nature will always take the road less travelled. He describes reaching a point in a painting when he can see where the work should naturally go. He will walk away from it, and find a new route ‘getting myself stuck and starting again’. It is akin to relearning how to go about painting, and this process is just as important to him as the finished work itself. He goes on to explain how life as an artist ‘is very often a solitary existence that is on occasion balanced by those rare fleeting glimpses of ecstasy that comes with a successful period of work. The process is like finding an answer when the question has left the room. And thus you begin again to search for the answer knowing full well this is a never-ending chase’.