If you had to revisit the experiences and encounters that have shaped your view of and place in the world, which would you choose?

It is in this question that David Atherton's new Castle Park Arts Centre exhibition, Drawing Aside the Journey, begins.

Flowing from pencil drawings to painted landscapes, from mixed-media portraits to a lino print of Anderton Boat Lift, the July exhibition will chart 20 years of a life in this world, picking out the seemingly everyday experiences that have sparked interest and inspiration along the way.

Although they touch on people and places from all over the globe, the moments captured in Drawing Aside the Journey are in some way shaped by the years David spent growing up in Cheshire, a time towards which he returned while collating the pieces on display.

"I was born and brought up in Northwich," he explains, "so spent a lot of the formative years of my life there. Then I studied in Manchester and eventually in London, where I lived for 10 years before moving to work in the arts in Scotland.

"A few years ago, when my mother was in the last months of her life in Northwich, my siblings and I took it in turns to travel there and look after her. While I was in the town, having long conversations with her and wandering round the Cheshire countryside, it occurred to me that I was returning to my roots.

"I'd been on this long journey through myriad experiences and countries, and I'd come back home. I thought about all the influences on my work which emanated from the North West, and began to view them through the complex filter of everything that came afterwards; I wanted to take examples of my work from the different periods and genres and see how they might fit together.

"The industrial landscape of the North West has always been present my work. I love that landscape but I've never really worked out how to, or indeed if I can, record it."

This Cheshire memories are evident in pieces such as 'Anderton Lift – Lino cut', which is part of a series produced with Hard Ground Printmakers for a collaborative project and exhibition with artists from South Africa.

In the piece, strong grey lines carve the towering boat lift into a black background, creating the effect of a brooding photo negative, a hulking vestige of industrialism stamped onto its more fluid surroundings.

David notes that motifs of towers and brutalist twentieth-century facades, of Cheshire's industrial past, resurface often in his work, always bound up with a certain wistful emotion.

"One of the things that I am still fascinated by is the idea of yearning," he says. "While I wander around, I can almost sense that I am walking where other people have walked before. I always think back to their lives and their time, and that idea comes through in my industrial pieces – and the wilder natural landscapes."

The feeling of modern-day landscapes teeming with the echoes of stilled machinery, silenced voices and expended purpose is also present in paintings like 'The Lighthouse – Arbroath Harbour', where the proud structures of an industrious past appear muted and dulled by the forgetfulness of today.

"One of the things that intrigues me - on my travels - is how there never seems to be anything going on in these once-crucial wee Scottish towns," David says. "The juxtaposition between a meaningful and active past and somnambulant present taps away at my thoughts continually."

While these paintings and prints never contain any people, David's work also explores the rich expression of portraiture, honing in on the friends and loved ones whose stories interweave with his own.

In these pieces, the plains and hollows, the light and shade of the subject's face are often rendered in delicate touches of blue or yellow, creating a feeling of movement and depth.

"I like the notion that everything emanates from the three primary colours and that theoretically you can make anything from them," David explains.

"One of my portraits is of 'Walter', a friend with whom I have climbed many mountains and to whom I am indebted for training me well enough to get up the biggest challenges in Scotland," David says.

Another mixed-media piece, which combines acrylic paint and collage, shows David's friend and colleague, MC, gazing pensively into a space beyond the frame.

"MC is a very interesting person," David says. "He was born in New York but brought up in Glasgow. He went to the New York school of choreography and is consequently a very good dancer, as well as a rap recording artist. He's also one of the best intuitive teachers I've ever known, and he runs about five hip hop schools in the north east of Scotland. And on top of all that he also has a pharmacy degree!

"This year I worked closely with him and got to know him well. While I was painting M.C. I wanted to share aspects of his story, so I built local press reports about the work we had done together into a collage forming the portrait background."

In pieces like 'MC', the subject's background is often peppered with such clippings, badges, maps, photographs or printed words, whispered messages which nod to a comment or story waiting to be told.

"When I was living in London, I found it strange that artists who were very adept at creating beautiful images never included any political or sociological comment," David says.

"I used to create more overtly political works, but now I introduce these feelings into the work more subtly. They're still there for people to recognise or not as the case may be. I've always liked the idea of the artist as a social guerrilla. Somebody might see a piece, really like it and want it on their wall, only noticing the comment it contains within it several years later!

"One artist that I really admire in that regard is Henri 'Le Douanier' Rousseau. In one of his paintings, you see two people holding hands, standing in front of a forest at night.

"At first you think: "What a nice little picture," but if you look carefully you see that there is a hut in the forest, and if you look even more carefully you see a lighted window in that hut. And then you see that there is a face in the window, staring out with an incredibly malevolent expression.

"So suddenly, having zoomed right into the fine details, your gaze is shocked and zooms back out again to view the whole piece in a different light."

It is this desire to paint and print deeper meaning into each piece which makes Drawing Aside the Journey such a rich and expressive collection of artworks.

Drawing Aside the Journey will open at Castle Park Arts Centre on July 7. If Covid restrictions allow by then, David is also planning on organising a 'meet the artist' event, where he will discuss his work with interested visitors.

Further details will appear on the Castle Park Arts Centre website in due course.

Before then, if you would like to discuss any of David's pieces with him, he is very happy to be contacted at [email protected]