Richard Barnes’s exhibition, York: Shaken And Stirred, The ArtSpace, York, until September 5

“Night Traces involves digital intervention collage, drawing by hand and mouse and paint generally lobbed, splattered, rolled and dabbed,” it reads.

Put simply, “digital intervention” alters an artwork at the click of a mouse in a new form of collage work, in its own way as experimental as David Hockney’s multiple, overlapping Polaroid photographic images.

Richard’s third solo show at Greg and Ails McGee’s gallery in Tower Street, York, assembles frenzied studies of the Minster, Monkgate, the River Ouse and other iconic York reference points in oil, acrylic, collage and “a whole range of paint application”.

“I called it ‘Shaken And Stirred’, because of the techniques; Greg added ‘York’ because of the content,” he says.

“What’s new about it is the digital imaging: on some pieces, half the marks have been made digitally and half with sponges and brushes.

“So, standing beside the original painted version will be a digital version where even some brush strokes have been lifted and put in a different place.

“On the one hand, you have the ‘action’ side of it, which is direct, intuitive, physical painting; on the other, there is this almost opposite, digital process, which is calculated, with a lot of organisation and structure.”

The idea behind his latest ArtSpace show is to keep pushing his different approaches to creating art. “Some paintings are very organised and methodical with layer upon layer upon layer; very controlled, establishing a pattern, breaking it up and re-establishing it again,” Richard says. “Other paintings break with that entirely and become much more random.”

The digital works also reflect a city accumulating its history. “Peeled layers are something you get in an urban environment, and you can convey that with swatches of colour, train-ticket stubs etcetera,” he says.

He is relishing the freedom that digital intervention gives him. “If you muck it up, you can do another one, which is the kind of freedom painters don’t have, as the whole point of painting is that when you’ve been spending two years on a painting, you don’t want to ruin it!” says Richard.

“People often say that artists’ sketchbooks and drawings can be their most interesting thing, and the idea here is to allow that intuition and experimentation to happen in my final pieces.”

Richard continues to be drawn to portraying nocturnal York. “I suppose partly it’s the lighting at night that appeals; that fact that is this artificial, electronic experience, but also I’m trying to get away from a descriptive view of York, so whole passages of York disappear in my paintings and it becomes about abstract painting: a colour next to a colour, a shape next to a shape,” he says.

“What you want is for it to tap into the subconscious: it’s depicting the York you dream about when you’re not there, the York you have in your imagination.

“If you take a camera with you at night, it records things but it doesn’t usually capture the excitement, the passion, the depth, but when these paintings work, it’s not the Minster as captured that night but the Minster that’s been there for hundreds of years and is part of a millions of people’s subconscious state.”

Come September, Richard will reduce his art-teaching duties at Bootham School to one day a week, leaving with more time for experimenting further with his own art.

“Drawing must be one of the simplest forms of creativity, and what is fantastic in this digital age is that people may have thought painting would lose its interest to humanity, but in fact it’s the opposite,” he says.

“Most modern British art may be terrible but people like Damien Hirst are a godsend to education because not every child is interested in painting but they like entertainment, which is what Hirst is interested in.

“If your brain works, you should be interested in people like Hirst, people who illustrate ideas.”

• Richard Barnes’s exhibition, York: Shaken And Stirred, runs at The ArtSpace, York, until September 5.