ART / The artist in his element: Len Tabner believes the only way you can paint the sea is to get wet. Dalya Alberge talks to the artist about painting the great outdoors, with random thoughts from masters en plein air

Len Tabner has joined the Royal Navy twice in the last two years, and hopes to join again. Not, that is, as a seaman; but as an artist. So far, he has sailed with them to the Falklands, South Georgia and the South Atlantic. Sometimes, while waves and winds lashed the ship, he remained on deck to battle the elements with his brush, frantically trying to contain something of the ocean's terrifying immensity on paper. 'I was carried along almost like a cork,' he says, 'in a small grey ship lost in the vastness and timelessness of the ocean. I was awed by the power and might of nature. What we do in comparison is so feeble and weak.'

That small grey ship was HMS Exeter, a guided missile destroyer. Although Tabner would lash his easels to steel rings and rails on deck during storms, his materials were occasionally lost at sea, wrenched out of his hands by a gust of wind or a freak wave. He took with him half a ton of equipment: on a voyage of 12,000 miles, he knew he'd be travelling 8,000 miles with no sight of land, let alone artists' supply shops.

He returned home in time to organise his retrospective exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and Agnew's in London this month. Among some 75 paintings are those turbulent seascapes, pictures that capture the violence of the sea, the almost solid form of tidal waves and the white froth that he saw dancing high above the ship. But there are landscapes too, around his Teesside home: some are desolate, raw and rugged, others softened by vaporous mist and dusky light. He uses watercolours and gouaches, pencils and pastels on hand-made paper as rough-textured as those landscapes.

The one thing his paintings have in common is that all were painted outside. Tabner cannot work in the stifling confines of a studio. 'I feel a lot more comfortable outside,' he says. 'It's not that I'm 'putting up' with discomfort. I am concerned with the experience of being 'in', rather than looking 'at', the landscape . . . fascinated as much by the tactile aspects of the landscape as those that are visual - I am trying to draw the wind and the weather as much as the forms of the land itself . . . In a studio, I'd be spending half an hour deciding on which green colour to use . . . Outside, I'm looking for something that equals the power and beauty of nature - which, of course, I can never do.'

His passion for the sea and land is so overwhelming that he does not think of his painterly response to nature in terms of art. In a harsh world, it is good to find a true Romantic.

On land, he is inseparable from Teesside. His father worked on the river and the North-east coast, on dredgers, tugs and fishing-boats. When Tabner wasn't on those vessels, he was playing by the river, exploring its mudflats and creeks. From the age of 10, he and a friend used to skip school three or four times a week, not to play but to paint there. 'Until I was 13, our teacher was only too pleased to let us go as the classes were too crowded,' he recalls.

Yet today any sight of the river is obscured by a metropolis of iron- and steelworks, chemical plants and refineries, that has sprung up since the 1950s. In the midst of barren Middlesbrough marshlands, awesome constructions spewing billows of ominous black and white smoke are silhouetted against the sky. To a stranger's eyes it is a hell on earth. But Tabner has a complex love-hate relationship with it. 'Words like beautiful and ugly are inappropriate. There is so much you don't like about it . . . but it is awe-inspiring.' This is a strange world indeed: often it is shrouded in mist, so much so that its harsh chimneys, canisters and cranes are softened. It can look as beautiful as a Victorian bridge in a hazy Monet painting. From a distance, its strange outlines look like the skyscrapers of a sprawling futuristic city.

Turn your back on it and the surrounding marshlands are teeming with bird-life, and waves are lapping up against the sandy shore. But there is something sinister: the salty smell of the sea is missing, entirely suffocated by industrial fumes. 'Air pollution in this area is one of the worst in Europe,' he says. 'We have the worst bronchial problems in the country.' But the thought of leaving the area is unbearable. He is too much part of the landscape.

He points to the various spots on the beach where he sets up his easels. The right weather and conditions are crucial. He often spends weeks just walking, soaking up the scenery 'like a sponge', gradually framing an image of what to paint. Last week, though suitably misty - with sea and sky merging delicately into one - the sea was too calm and the light too dull. He needed an easterly wind to drive the water on to the shore and create the transient drama you see in his paintings. Sometimes he paints from a tiny mud-island, just off the shore and just high enough for him not to be engulfed by the rising tide. Sometimes he positions himself on a fishing-boat or a dredger.

His father's green wooden fishing shack, barely larger than a bathing- hut, today keeps his painting equipment, as well as some fishing tackle. Sometimes he sleeps overnight inside. He prefers to paint at dawn and dusk - 'a time of special mystery' - or at night, often at 3am. He rarely brings any artificial light with him. Part of the excitement lies in not knowing 'what colours I'm using, though I know where the paints are'. When he paints on the beach, the tide comes in and sometimes knocks his easel off balance. His painting is washed away. 'But somehow it washes back again, as does my brush or anything else that gets washed away . . .' If it begins to rain, he does not pack up and go home. He allows the rain to caress the picture, wash over it and create natural pools of water and colour - 'though sometimes it leaves a hell of mess' and the work has to be abandoned.

Often, perhaps out on the beach or in a field, he will lie down and sleep for a couple of hours. 'When you wake up, you are surprised by what you see,' he says. 'You see it freshly . . . The weather has changed, the sky has changed . . . the light, the colours . . .' He does this even in the depths of winter. Indeed, last week, when the rest of us were wrapped in layers of thermals, Tabner was wandering around in only a shirt and knitted tank-top. He rarely feels the cold, he says. He eschews central-heating at home; and newspapers too, so that in his Teesside stone cottage perched 650 feet up on a sandstone cliff, the highest in England, he lights his log fire with papers given him by friends.

Such is his love of the land that he bought 250 acres around his house, including three-quarters of a mile of coast, to protect it. To do so, he sold a few pictures, something he rarely does if he can help it. Letting any of them go is an emotional wrench for him. (Although, over some 30 years, Tabner has been in and out of fashion, his pictures can today sell for up to pounds 12,500.) But it was worth it. 'The land', he says, 'had been farmed so aggressively, with chemicals. I felt this was an opportunity to reverse it to a more pastoral way of farming.' He is returning the land to nature, planting hedges and trees, building walls and gateways, creating ponds and pastures for his flock of sheep. A neighbouring shepherd is training him to look after them. Doing so brings him closer to nature in all senses.

The work leaves him little time to paint. But he would not want to do so every day anyway: he prefers to paint in short bursts. 'I give everything to it . . . At the end of a week to 10 days, sometimes painting from six at night to six in the morning, I'm drained.' But when the urge returns, it's exhilarating. He straps his easels to the roof of his Land Rover, loads up his paint- box on the hay-covered car floor and disappears for days on end.

'I wished to show what such a scene was like; I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape . . .' JMW Turner on his 'Snow Storm-steam boat' of 1842

'The climate of Rome is unspeakable. It has rained since I arrived. But that does not affect me. I foresaw it . . . Fleury is here with me . . . We work from morning to night . . . That's the life.' Camille Corot, 1828

'The painter had specifically chosen a turbulent grey sky with big clouds chased by an angry wind . . . He kept watch for the favourable moment and ran out to work.' Henriet on Daubigny, 1864

'It was in the winter . . . We noticed a foot-warmer, then an easel, then a man, swathed in three coats, his hands in gloves, his face half frozen. It was M Monet studying a snow effect.' Billot on Monet, 1868

'The heath is sometimes far from attractive at that hot midday hour . . . It is aggravating, monotonous and wearying . . . Painting it in that blazing light . . . makes one dizzy.' Vincent van Gogh, 1883

Laing Art Gallery, Higham Pl, Newcastle upon Tyne (091-232 7734) To 17 Jan; Agnew's, 43 Old Bond St, London W1 (071-629 6176) 27 Jan-26 Feb

(Photograph omitted)