The spark for the shift away from Shifts was a gift of some temptingly thick artist’s paper and a trip to Scotland, in 1980

I just loved the big open spaces, the wildness and the isolation of the Hebrides. I cycled all the way there from Edinburgh. I only spent one week sketching but it set off two years’ work. There are these little sources that have.

I was given this pile of thick, hard-surfaced paper a bit like what you used to call Whatman paper for water colours. I started to try and free up. I got quite interested in making marks with the brush and putting more energy into the work. So I started to work freely referring to landscape, painting from my imagination and from my memory of experiences of places I had been to, like the Hebrides, showing that sense of things coming through in the atmosphere.

Loker had pinned up four of these oil sketches on a grid on the wall, when the Financial Times art critic Bill Packer came for a studio visit. He was curating work for the British Art Show and he liked what he saw.

Bill said to me “It’s not a thing I’ve ever seen in frames” I said: “They’re just workings, like a giant sketchbook on the wall really.” And Bill said, “Put them in a frame, just like that, and I will put them in the show.”

This was the transitional work Four Sections 2 (1980). The colours still have the washed out pastel palette of the Shifts. The stronger-hued brushstrokes at the bottom of the images indicate foreground, again recalling Shifts. There is a minimalism in the colourlessness and emptiness of the four images. But we can see, at least in retrospect, where Loker is heading. The strategy of selecting motifs from the landscape and displaying their changing relationship from a moving point-of-view has developed into a grid of distinct scenes, which are soon to become discrete images of landscape motifs. Loker’s interest will change from catching a glimpsed relationship represented by.a few carefully-placed by spontaneous-looking strokes to creating almost hieroglyphic simplified signs of various landscape features. Once again it is the joins in Loker’s career, the motivations of change, that are most fascinating

Loker was still living in London at this time but he began to make trips to Norfolk. On walks and cycle rides there, he began to fill notebooks with sketches of motifs he came across in the landscape, and to think of a new way of seeing

When I came up here I went out into the fields and things away from here, and I began to discover these routes through the forest.. They were firebreaks in the forest or ways in. They felt like roads to nowhere.

Traversing Norfolk on foot or bike, Loker might find an unploughed field, a copse, footprints in the snow, a track

I might see something, like some bales of hay or different configurations and textures of tree trunks just in a small part of a wood, like the ways the trees had fallen. Than that triggered something and I would make a drawing. I wasn’t like sitting down and observing a particular thing. I remember I became fascinated by five-bar gates. I looked at a lot of five bar gates.I just liked the way they had been made and structured

You like the geometry, or…?

I just like the idea. You just think a five bar gate is a five bar gate, you never realise that there are so many different patterns of them. They’ve all got a different kind of method of strengthening the gate.

Loker began to work on a new series of paintings in this style which he called variously Related, Sections and Green Lanes. Most were executed in 1982. Loker abandoned the acrylic, with which he had executed his Shifts and Extracts and, for the first time turned to oils, making sketches with loose strokes. The muted, bi-chromatically structured palette of the seventies gradually gave way to a flood of strong colours whose shapes clearly depict valleys, fields, clouds and other landscape motifs. Now his brushstrokes are varied in their direction, size and breadth, but as we shall see, however painterly he had become, there were still traces of the Minimalist spirit at work.

It was like a diary, in that the images were triggered by things I came across and one memory related to another memory. I started to respond to different images, almost like different parts of a same landscape or different parts of my memory, like an avenue [what does this mean?]. You might see a green lane in one, or a dark heavy forest in the distance. But they weren’t literal. I was responding almost musically, to myself and my images. That was the first time I began to feel I could work out of London and live in the countryside, and actually produce something that was not just becoming pastoralised or ruralised. I found I was producing quite strong images.

A painting like Related 3 is divided into four distinct compositions, with a high shot of an avenue of trees. Below it some fallen tree trunks, perhaps in dappled light. On the top right a ploughed field with a dark forest behind, and below the swish of a path through the landscape. One can’t always be sure what one is seeing – Loker is keeping the edge-of-perception feel of a decade earlier here, involving the eye in a puzzle beyond the many formal pleasures of his balanced compositions, rhythmic strokes and colour harmonies.

A painting like Related [image 60] overwhelms us with its luminous colours and the contrasts in the brushwork of each quadrant. From here the austere greyness of the Horizons look very far away. After a decade in which Loker carefully made muted colour fuse with shape, he now took it back and made it part of the act of painting, part and parcel of all those movements of the brush. Little squiggles of paint applied wet on wet in swirl around a circle in one part of this picture, while blocks of triangles and hexagonals build up the surface of another. The exhuberant passages of paint are a feast for the eye.

It was like a diary, maybe, in that it was triggered by things happening and one memory relates to another memory. So I started to respond to different images, almost like different parts of a same landscape or different parts of my memory, like an avenue. You might see a green lane in one, or a dark heavy forest in the distance. But they weren’t literal. I was responding almost musically, to myself and my images. That was the first time I began to feel I could work out of London and live in the countryside, and actually produce something that was not just becoming pastoralised or ruralised. Because I found I was producing quite strong images.

The were a handful of other works from this time called Field Incidents

At one point and I met this farmer who I knew and he said to me, “Have you been up here in the last couple of weeks”? No, I’ve been away for a bit up in London, and he said, “The whole of Devil’s Dyke was on fire. Now Devil’s Dyke is an ancient earthwork. It’s a ditch. It’s on maps but you don’t really see it unless you go looking for it, because it’s got overgrown. The whole of it was on fire. It was a very deserted area and suddenly what was totally tranquil, quiet and overgrown, had become full of fire engines and firemen working to protect this ancient earthwork and stop the fire spreading. And then when this thing happened in the field, I thought, wow, this road to nowhere had led to this amazing incident.

What makes this series so striking is not the liberated painterliness on its own, but the way Loker has integrated that within the minimalist geometric dynamic of his practice.The link to Conceptual approaches to photography is preserved, too, by Loker’s layouts of two or more of his sketches as grids in single art works, presenting an aspiring typology of motifs of the Norfolk countryside, which are simultaneously abstract and figurative.

Loker’s geometric impulse is now being carried by the brushstrokes. In Four Sections (1982) we see a sunken circular shape, perhaps a former well or dip in the ground. The palette remains the austere but harmonious pastel pink and blue of earlier work. The brushstrokes have two distinct geometric shapes – a curve and an inverted V shape. This is a painting made with gestural loose brushstrokes, and yet it still seeks to depict its landscape subject through simple geometric forms. In other paintings, swishes of green and long strips of brown and blue carry the eye across the images, amidst blotchy ovals and circles of ochre, tan and turquoise.

This was a fascinating and wholly original artistic undertaking at the time, which defied conventional categorisation. Loker borrowed the format of conceptual photography, producing a typology of manmade local landscape forms (see Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies of industrial structures), with the occasional dangerous event that fascinated him (see Warhol), realised not with a lens but as vivid abstract paintings, as bold as they were simple. What an inventive fusion of photography, gestural painting and British artists’ deep engagement with our landscape! Soon however the typology of landscape pictograms would segue into a symbolism (or iconography), as Loker searched for basic forms with easily accessible (if not universal) psychological and political connotations.