Imogen Lycett Green meets the elusive draftsman and printmaker.

You might spot Bob Dixon making prints in Glynde, the Sussex village where he lives – “it’s ridiculously picturesque – like a made up place,” says Bob – or you’ll observe him in London, drawing urban scenes, his hand moving swiftly over the pad as he stands on street corners, sits on the bank of the Thames, lopes through deserted industrial wastelands. He might draw the graffiti he finds on a warehouse wall, or a dog and a pram in front of a crane; he might focus on the juxtaposition of a lorry and a building. The line drawings capture that essence Matisse spoke of when he said: ‘Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.’ Dixon’s drawings document his wanderings, the visual diary, it would seem from his Instagram, of a Lewes-leaning, confident and chuckling poet-artist flaneur.

Yet when I pitch up to interview him, Bob Dixon seems less than confident. In a tight corner of the hall in his 18th-century cottage, he stoops low under a beam, his eyes darting left and right. His wife Lucy, by contrast, is all smiles. Also an artist – a printmaker and video artist – she brings a tray of sheep’s cheese and fresh-out-the-oven marjoram cheese straws (goddess!) and tells me about the history and restoration of their former wheelwright’s cottage. Bob has done some of the DIY work, he murmurs darkly. Tentatively, I follow him up wooden stairs to his studio, which is neat and organised with paint brushes in old tin cans [see Studio Visit ROSA #6]. It is cold up here. I feel like an intruder in a private space. We sit down facing each other over a table.

Bob is shy talking about his work and our conversation is stilted. “It just is what it is. I don’t know what it’s about, you have to tell me.” Black sketchbooks are piled on the table, the names of places on their spines – not just London, but Granada and India and Paris. On these urban walkabouts, how does Bob decide what to draw? Is he noticing and choosing? No, it is the other way around. His work tells him what he is thinking.

“The composition evolves by looking, you just keep looking and suddenly you see in the frame the relationships that you want to draw. It’s about the spaces in between things.” He knows how to start, but not how to stop, how to come to the end of the line. “I like it when a car drives across, blocking my view, so I have to stop.” Then the drawing is officially ‘finished’, though of course it may only be midway. But where the line ends is where the drawing ends.

Round the studio are also pinned up felt-tip pen drawings that remind me of Derek Boshier, the renegade 1960s pop artist. In reds, blues and black, Bob’s pictures are political and cartoonlike, depicting desolate abandoned landscapes, apocalyptic endings. Then there are supine figures lying in despair, surrounded by bottles and cigarettes: a Philip Guston style elevation of the everyday, veering towards Charles Bukowski? Bob warms to his subject. “I’m interested in how everyday objects become sacred when used in rituals.” He explains he means regular rituals such as making a fire or pouring a libation or tilling the earth at a certain time of year. The spade is then a sacred object involved in elemental change. Similarly, an empty tuna can has power, if the fish has been used to bring people together, to share a meal around a table. Here and there are prints hanging in various stages of production: primary colours, simple still lifes. The prints are studied, he says, and lead him towards introspection. The line drawings are by contrast spontaneous and energetic, and focus him on the exterior world. He enjoys switching from one form to the other. “You get bored of yourself if you are only looking inwards,” he says. He never goes back and edits his drawings. “Where would you take that? Who would it be for?” He is more interested in ‘what comes up’. “It can take me into a trance,” he says. “The act of drawing.” He enjoys getting out of his head, focusing on the exterior world. However, while quickly done, they are not sketches. There is nothing scanty about those deliberate lines.

And there is nothing scanty about Bob. He is tall and broadshouldered, with a strong gaze and angular cheek bones, hewn as if from stone. I know he was born in 1964, but there is an out-of-time quality to him. Something feral, though he is clearly a thinker and is also a big reader, he tells me, of history, stories of alchemy and folklore. The alchemic process of gardening has him in its thrall. He works hard throughout the year, keeping up with gardening jobs. I think we are both relieved when he suggests we move outside. “In the garden, the seasons come and you have to do the work. You observe, you tinker, you help things along, but essentially you are just joining something that is already happening.” He adds: “It is non-linear.”

Where the house is neat and ordered, the large sloping garden, which backs (over a beautiful flint wall) onto estate parkland, is fecund, celebratory, wild. Grape hyacinths meander in swathes across circular beds with wonky apple trees just coming into blossom. Broad beanstalks make ready to reach the sky. There are small makeshift ponds which Lucy has built, teeming with newts and frogs at certain times of year, and, now, bursting yellow with marsh marigolds. Bob disappears and returns with coffee, croissants and those cheese straws on a wide tray. We sit at a large round table in the middle of the garden, surrounded by blue cushions of forget-menots. Our conversation is drowned out by the profound and vital chirruping of a hundred sparrows, and the sun, absent all winter, suddenly comes out, warmly. We drink and eat. Both of us fall silent, entranced. “This garden casts a spell on you,” says Bob. He clearly means on himself too. This is not a cultivated ‘wow factor’, like so many gardeners intend. This is a feeling, an invitation into the cyclical process of the natural world.

After a period of silence, Bobs opens up. He started out drawing trains and windmills, over and over. The third of five children brought up in Nottingham, he suffered from ‘middle child’ syndrome. “You have to define yourself. You’re jealous of your younger siblings,” he says. But his mother and father praised his artwork. Though they hoped he would turn his talent for drawing – and his love of cartoon characters like Gus the Gorilla and Chalky from the comic Cor!! and later the characters of the teen comic MAD – into being an illustrator or a cartoonist, something that had a regular pay packet. “My family weren’t gallery goers, but they noticed films and books and music, they were interested in culture. They are from Derbyshire and Yorkshire, working people,” says Bob. Bob’s mother was a church-going Catholic and as a child he was taken to Mass. The transubstantiation is a piece of magic to a child, surely, but Bob says he rarely went along, and he is not religious. “I wanted to be an artist. I saw that lifestyle, that way of expressing yourself, and I wanted it.”

Encouraged by his father, he went to Brighton School of Art, where he revered the work of Ken Kiff and Picasso. He spent a year as Artist in Residence at Michelham Priory, where he painted landscapes and fell in love with the Sussex Downs. But then he stopped making. “I could see I wasn’t going to make a million,” he says. He ended up in London working in graphics and computer animation. He and Lucy have made a living and a life from this work, which both pleases and frustrates Bob. Now, he only wants to make his own art. “You start off imitating people you admire, but really the thing is to be you. You only have what you have to offer.”

He and Lucy never had children – “it just didn’t happen” – and now the house is habitable and the garden established, after 15 years, they have time to really explore their work. For two years Bob has been working on a series of prints which he makes by hand, cutting them in lino and, preferably, using an oil-based paint, which he applies with the back of a spoon, for a greater depth and richness. The oil-based print is almost like a painting. It’s been something of a revelation. “I went to art school, but I’m only just learning about colour.”

If windmills and trains are symbols of power, what then are these discarded apple cores and bottles on their sides, leaking liquid? The birds sing louder as we ponder this question. Bob shows me a cow barn, an ancient A-frame at the back of the garden. Recently restored, it was originally full of old cans and tins, discarded logs and pieces of brick. Visually, the debris appealed to Bob. The sacred everyday things. “I began to think about placing them in prints, colouring, the spaces in between. I added libations, placed bottles on walls, tins as containers, cans lying on their side.” The birds have turned up the volume, I can hardly hear him. After a long pause, he says: “I suppose it is phallic.” Bob is just past 60. “You are looking at your subconscious and wondering what is going on,” he says. “Time for the knacker’s yard,” he jokes. “For an older gentleman…” His waning power is the end of the world too. “The way we live is crazy,” he says. “The waste, the dying planet.” But he and Lucy try to live in a way that is light, respectful, frugal. He continues: “There is a loss of energy at this age, but at the same time, something new has taken its place.” His love affair with colour is only just taking hold. There is hope.

Every September, he and Lucy arrange an Artists’ Open House – called MUD – here in their garden, inviting half a dozen other Sussex artists to show with them. Why are artists drawn to Sussex, I wonder. Bob denies this, saying: “Scratch the surface of any county and you’ll find thousands of people making work. They all contribute to the shape of things.” Why do some stand out from the crowd? They must be good of course, says Bob. “Even if people sigh and say he’s had too much exposure, Ravilious is good,” he says, by way of example. “He really gets the Downs. So many people have painted the Downs but he gets that chalkiness.” So there’s good, but there’s also the story, he says: the Charleston story; the war artists; the ‘school of…’; Picasso’s mistresses. Then there is resilience and stamina. “You just have to keep at it.” Like Auerbach? “Yes.”

I leave him to return to his studio. Has it been so terrible being interviewed? He says: “well you want to say something interesting, but how do you talk about the art you make, it just is what it is.” I speak to my sister later that day. She’s a painter who also dislikes being interviewed. She says, “If you make work, your desires, your fears, your essence is in your work. That is how you express yourself.” She adds: “Your work is more you than you.”

Bob Dixon’s work is more him than him. In his playful compositions, there is both humour and a deep seriousness. It feels as if his urban drawings are moving. Where others ‘capture’ an image, Bob sets it free. His drawing is scarcely a ‘setting down’, more an igniting. Likewise, in his prints, nominally still lifes, there is energy between the objects.

For Baudelaire’s flaneur , ‘it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.’ Bob Dixon may live in Glynde, settled in a cottage at the foot of Mount Caburn, where he serves on the swimming pool committee and organises the Friday night village social, but there is a restless energy to his work and in his garden and in his very being, that places him permanently between the fugitive and the infinite. If making art is about finding your source, Bob Dixon is right on track.

To find out more about the next MUD exhibition follow @art_show_mud on Instagram.