IT'S probably one of the most unusual viewpoints of the Colchester skyline.

And it would probably take you a month of Sundays to actually find where to view it from.

But when I finally do, thanks to local artist Michael Goodey, it's rather a special thing with both the Town Hall tower and Jumbo peeping over the treeline like a couple of naughty schoolboys circa 1930 trying to sneak a peak at a top flight football game.

I'm looking at it at the edge of a farmer's field located somewhere between Fingringhoe and Langenhoe down the bottom of a dirt track. Behind me is Michael's incredible studio, a prefabricated-type outhouse made of Crittall windows, concrete breeze blocks and telegraph poles which dates back, of course, to the Seventies.

"That's what started it all off," Michael tells me. "That view of Jumbo and the Town Hall far off into the distance. I've been working here for 30 years and always admired it. Then I got to think about the incredible art history of the region, and the local landscapes people like Pissarro, Ravilious, Nash and Bawden had captured, and then I thought of all the other incredible views of Colchester there must be."

And so Michael's incredible View Finder: Signs in the Landscape tour was born.

Dotted around a 17 and a half mile route, included within which was High Woods Country Park, Wivenhoe Woods and Cymbeline Meadows, it featured specially designed signs, which encouraged people to take a different view of the Colchester skyline.

"The idea for the signs came about from spending time in Europe," he adds. "The signs there are very distinctive and detailed but they also use scale and perspective which are the basis of picture making.

“I got a brochure of road signs from the Department of Transport and started making my own signs but in the form of landscape paintings.

“If you come from this area, you are very much aware of the tradition of landscape painting, and I suppose this is my own version of it.

"I did 20 in all but only ten got installed in the end. That was about ten years ago and as part of the trail there was a cycle route to go alongside them. I always said it was the trail that was the piece of art not the individual signs. The signs were merely a conduit to the art itself."

Michael followed that project with another signs installation, this time following the River Stour, which included perhaps the country's most iconic landscape image of them all, John Constable's The Hay Wain, which itself went on show at Flatford Mill back in 2012.

Now a collection of Michael's old and new work is being shown at the Minories art gallery in Colchester, and unlike his trail installations before, this time the signs are most definitely art works in their own right.

The Land presents a contemporary approach to the tradition of British landscape painting that looks at the changing nature of our rural environment and our changing approaches to visual communication.

Still working in the tradition of those North Essex-based artists, Michael has taken that very English of obsessions with landscape, and developed a style of painting that employs road sign aesthetics, using both the brown heritage signs, used to indicate points of cultural interest, and the more common road traffic signs, to construct a set of images that to represents the landscapes around him in a very unique way.

Born and brought up in Colchester, Michael studied art at Goldsmiths University and after graduating he moved to Brighton where he ran a studio for a short time.

"I was like any other artist," he smiles, "trying to pursue a career straight out of art school and perhaps not doing as well as I had hoped. I was very lucky to have gone to Goldsmiths because at the time it was a place that was really buzzing with ideas, especially about conceptual art, which I was very interested in."

Eventually Michael moved back home to Colchester, where he continued his practice but it wasn't until much later in 2000, and a project in Holland, that Michael began working with road sign imagery.

"I got invited over with a number of other English artists," he says, "and we were all given some space on the Norda Pier on the Hook of Holland, the pier where the ferries from Britain come into.

"For a long time I didn't really know what I was going to do and then I caught sight of the Dutch road signs and thought how there was something universal about them in terms of other countries' road signs but also very different. Where I was on the pier was the closest part of Holland to England so I introduced my own road signs to the pier, which as they went along gradually morphed into the Dutch road signs."

Alongside his main exhibition in the galleries, Michael will also be showing his installation, Sculptureparc, in The Minories’ garden.

This consists of a series of sculptures with images made-up from road signs, produced as if they are themselves road signs.

Michael explains: "Eventually I got interested in cutting various road signs up and then making pictures and collages out of them.

"There is a sense of fun about all of that but then I also began to make an unintentional connection between that and landscape painting and once I had that idea I was off."

Michael Goodey: The Land runs at the Minories art gallery, High Street, Colchester, until February 4.

Admission is free and the galleries are open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm.