These days those moments are largely set close to Leach’s home in north Devon, an imposing ‘big’ landscape where Exmoor meanders down over rolling hills to the rocky coastline of the Bristol Channel. Leach works almost invariably en plein air and his chosen medium is tailor-made for forays into those hills and wooded valleys; just a sheaf of pre-cut paper rectangles – some perhaps already tea-stained – a few delicate brushes, maybe a pencil or two and a couple of pots of ink and water to dilute. No easel, no palette, no array of tubes of oil paint to lug uphill or down dale; and what he invariably returns with, will match any heavily worked canvas or board in its intensity and evocation of place and weather - and indeed compare pretty favourably with some of his artistic heroes.

But while so many artists aspire to tread in such illustrious footprints, Leach really does merit attention as an exceptional and sensitive draughtsman. The subtleties of light and landscape he is able to elicit from just brush and black ink, that pure intensity and focus he seems intuitively to engender on these tiny scraps of paper, mark him out as a singular artist.