People are so limited. They expect you to narrow down your skills. Are you a writer or a painter, then? they say. If you're creative, you're creative, I say; it doesn’t just run in one restricted little channel, it flows, it surges, it pours out in poetry, in dance, in painting, cooking, writing, sketching, dreaming, in singing and in love. I have always been creative, absolutely bursting with ideas, so many sometimes that my head spins and I don't know where to start. I know I'm very fortunate, I have always been exceptional.

But right now I do need to be focussed. I need to paint. When you're creative it's something you just can't resist. I know I must paint, there'll be no peace for me until I've painted. I need to be alone, I need to be uninterrupted. So I have taken a house on the moors. It will be rather wonderful, when the weather improves. Well, it is rather wonderful now, of course, with the mist clinging to the tops and that soft grey light which so intensifies the green, and the dampness that distils to droplets on your hair.

I've rented the house for 3 weeks, ample time; when I've finished the picture I shall probably write some poems.

It's the last house in the valley; the track turns into a footpath here, and winds on up to the moor at the top. From the front window I overlook the whole valley. Marvellous, like a bird in its eyrie.

Rain today. I didn’t sleep very well, there seem to be a lot of scratching and scuttling noises. Mice, I suppose. It's just a question of getting used to it really. I mean, they're nowhere near as loud as the traffic outside Tim's, or the bloody birds at Barrow Lane. It's just the erratic nature of the noise, really. The way it starts and goes into a kind of frenzied crescendo, then stops. You find yourself listening for it to start again.

But I must say I'm glad to be here, surrounded by all this space. I feel so sorry for those people who find it hard to be alone. I love my own company, I love to fill the house with my imagination. I've already set up my easel by the front window. It would be ridiculous to waste time dithering over what to paint when that glorious view is there – already framed by wood and stone. I think I'll use that framing device, by the way, it places the viewer. Which I feel is important.

This has been a holiday house for a while, I'd say. The usual dismal collection of half-used packets of damp salt in the kitchen; and an ugly little bookcase with Readers Digests, Catherine Cooksons and Agatha Christies. How sad and pinched it is. But I have let my imagination roam; whose was this house in the past? I imagine it housing a sturdy shepherd and his family; I can almost see the wooden cradle by the flickering fireside, the wife's spinning wheel, the black pot steaming on the fire. A mob of children playing on the floor, and the shepherd entering from the storm with a frail new lamb under his arm. They cluster round him, begging him to let them feed it. There are other ghosts here too, perhaps sad ones - a poor old woman who dies alone; a miser, with his wealth hidden under a flagstone. I can feel the atmosphere and history of the house seeping into me.

The annoying thing is, the light is poor. With there only being one window in the room, and me needing to look from my easel to the view – well I can't sit with my back to the view. And so I haven't got full light on the canvas. There's a dingy ceiling bulb (all of 60 watts) and a hapless little bedside lamp that casts about as much light as a glow-worm. I suppose I'll have to make the trek down the valley to a shop. Which is irritating, because I'd planned it all so well, picking up three weeks' provisions from the supermarket near the station then bringing the lot on up here by taxi. I didn’t want to be wasting time with shopping, I even persuaded myself into vile UHT milk for that reason.

But there you go. I can't paint in the dark. And the exercise and fresh air will be good, I can plan my picture as I walk.

I put on my kagoul and set off down the track. The rain really was lashing down – driven at a slant by the wind, so that it stung my face, and ran down my chin and neck, and under my clothes. It must be about three miles down the valley to the village, I suppose I was about a third of the way down when I realised how ridiculous it would be to get utterly soaked – better to return and wait for it to stop.

And I was wet enough already when I got back; my jeans sticking to my legs, where all the rain had run off the kagoul. I hung them over a chair to dry, and turned on the little convector heater. After I'd changed I went back into the living room which was still suspiciously chilly. I fiddled with the knobs on the heater for a while – it's one of those thermostatically controlled things that clicks and goes off if the room temperature is high enough, and it had an ambiguous 'manual/auto' switch. But nothing happened, apart from a series of clicks, and a fraudulent little red light which insisted that the wretched machine was on.

The other option was to make a fire. It was still pouring outside and although I wouldn’t have called it cold (it was June, after all) it certainly wasn’t warm. There's a kind of chill that comes off old stone, isn't there, that you don't get with brick. A chill damp sort of feeling, atmospheric certainly, but cold, even on the nicest of days.

There was a sack of coal next to the fireplace - one of those plastic supermarket sacks and a packet of fire-lighters, and I'd brought a newspaper with me. So I made a little pyramid of twisted paper and fire-lighters, ready to balance some coal on top. For some reason the coal sack wouldn’t tear open so I had to hunt for scissors (couldn't find any) and ended up attacking it with the bread-knife. I don’t know how this happened, because I am usually very skilful and careful (you have to be when you work with your hands) but I must have used more force than I needed. I was holding the top of the bag up, you see, to keep it taut while the knife sliced through it – and when the blade went through so easily, it slashed into my left arm at the other end. It hit the bony bit at the side of the wrist and a red line of blood appeared immediately, but it certainly wasn't gushing – it wasn’t deep. Just annoying. I held it under the cold tap for a while and puzzled over what to bandage it with. Nothing useful in the bathroom cabinet, and I hadn't brought any plasters – I don’t like to court disaster. It wasn’t that bad but it was bleeding, it needed something wrapping round it at the very least, to stop it dripping on the floor. In the end I had to use a t shirt, there just wasn’t anything else around. I pulled it through and tied it with my teeth and my right hand, it was effective but a little unwieldy.

The sack of coal was wet inside. Someone must have bought it from a garage or somewhere where the sacks were stored outside, wet had got into it. Which made it very difficult to light. In the end I decided to leave it for a while. Let it dry out a bit.

I knew that none of this would matter, these stupid little inconveniences, the rain, the dim light, the lack of heat, my cut arm, if I could at least make some progress with my picture. I was longing to get started, and I decided to do a preparatory sketch. I realised that the solution to the light problem was to simply abandon the easel and work on the flat. So that's what I did, I dragged the table over to beneath the window, and got out my sketch-pad and made a start.

Interesting how deceptive a first impression can be. The view down the valley had looked quite attractive, from my initial glance through the window. But once I sat down to it and started really looking at the tiny proportion of sky to hill, and at the jarring straightness of the valley, it didn’t take me long to realise that this view, far from being pleasant and composed, was quite strangely brutal. The effect of the valley was foreshortened, it would have been impossible to paint it without it looking as if there was something wrong with the perspective. Not that I'm after a Sunday painter's little attempt at photographic realism. I'm an artist, not a copyist. Nevertheless, the initial subject must be pleasing in some way – in its proportions, in the slabs of colour it offers to the eye, in what it says to the eye about form and texture. And I realised very rapidly that this view was really very displeasing; vertiginous, claustrophobic, ill-proportioned. The colour, which I must admit had attracted me initially, began to strike me as quite frighteningly monotonous – that lurid, looming insistent green, and the sooty grey of the stone.

I was glad I had realised the deficiencies of the view before I'd wasted too much time, in fact, because in the past I've been less confident about my own instincts, and spent too long trying to make the best of unpromising subjects. About this I was perfectly clear, it would have been a disaster to invest my creative energy and time in it, and I put my sketchbook away with a sense of a lucky escape.

The rain had lessened slightly, and my arm was beginning to throb a little. I felt that some antiseptic would probably be a wise precaution, and the problem with the light was pertinent no matter what my subject matter, so after some figs and goats' cheese I put on my wet kagoul again and set off down the hill.

The shops in the village are rather basic; the results of my wet but nevertheless exhilarating walk yesterday are a one hundred watt bulb, a long strip of elastoplast, plus some nail scissors I bought for cutting it to length, and a small tube of germolene. In fact I needn't have bothered with the elastoplast because it is impossible to rip off the backing and stick it precisely over the wound with only one hand. The cut isn't really a problem now it's stopped bleeding, it's just irritating the way the little hairs of wool from my jumper keep sticking to the wound.

Both my pairs of jeans are wet now, which is inconvenient, but thank goodness I had the foresight to pack a long skirt. I'm wearing it over my pyjamas and walking socks, and really there's no need for any heating at all. Another plus, the rain has stopped today, and the cloud does seem to be thinning a little, although it would not be prudent to hang my jeans outside to dry.

None of this matters in the least; the point is, the picture. The picture I must paint. I've spent a considerable part of today contemplating the view from each window, and from the open door, in an attempt to find one that has more to offer. For a while I was tempted by the upstairs back. It looks directly onto the rising hillside, so there's no sky at all, but there is a rather delightful dry-stone wall, in an advanced state of ruin; the interlocking roundedness of the stones is pleasing, and even though it's crumbling, it gives a sense of ancient durability. I made a sketch but now I look at it again I'm less sure. It feels rather arbitrary, somehow, as if it could have been drawn from any wall, anywhere – rather than having that sense of inevitability, of thereness, that I demand of my subject matter.

In theory it would be possible to set up my easel outside. Indeed, that was my original intention, but given the weather I now consider it would be foolish to embark on a project which has every chance of being rained off two days out of three.

I am in fact beginning to turn my attention more towards the interior of the house. After all, moorlands, valleys, and stone, really are the cliches of painterly subject matter. How many dull views of dark green valleys and little grey houses hang on pub walls with optimistic stickers requesting '£28' or even '£50 with frame'? not that I'm setting out to paint that type of picture anyway, of course. But if one picks rather worn out, banal subject matter, the battle to make an interesting picture of it is that much harder.

I'm starting to think now that a more surprising subject, a less predictable subject, should come out of my moorland sojourn. Something in the house; some telling detail, some perfect little still life which will encapsulate the sombre mood and long history of the house, will give the sense of the ancient moorlands and crumbling walls which surround it. Something atmospheric. Half the skill of any painting is the choice of subject matter, and the emotional link between that and the artist's imagination. Anybody can paint cypress trees, but it took Van Gogh to make them writhe.

Somewhere in these dark rooms I can feel the perfect subject lurking – waiting, patiently, until I can make it visible. I don’t want to rush it, you can't rush these things, it takes as long as it takes. And the waiting is a kind of journey, I believe, an artist is always travelling.

I woke up this morning with an inspiration. No wonder I haven't found my picture. I've been fighting the subject matter, I've been blind to what's under my nose. Instead of embracing the chilly darkness of the house, I've been rejecting it, struggling to turn on heaters, light fires, dry coal, install bright bulbs. And the house, of course, in its patient ancient wisdom, has been rejecting me. No wonder the fire wouldn’t catch, the light wouldn’t shine. The point of this house is its darkness. It is history, it is secrets, it is hidden. Thank heavens I've had the patience and confidence to wait for my subject to announce itself to me. And sitting up in bed this morning I realised that it is all around me, in all the dark corners of the house; history, shadows, the unknown, the familiar but unreachable past just – tantalisingly – out of view.

When I'm inspired, I'm inspired. I flew downstairs for my easel and paints; set myself up at the end of the bed – and I've painted furiously all day long. The dark brown side of the wardrobe (wonderful, mysterious colour, brown glowing with tinges of blackness) framing the corner made by the two walls of the room. A deep mysterious cavernous corner, filled with black shadow. It's a place of mystery – heavy, freighted with symbolic meaning; the dark shadowy place in all our lives.

When I sat back and looked at my picture this evening I was filled with wonderful contentment. A calm – a kind of peace I can't describe to you , you have to feel it to know it, that wonderful satisfaction of work completed, of a vision captured.

I think that probably, like all really good art, it challenges the viewer; seeming at first nothing more than blackness, a simple canvas of black. The discriminating viewer must stare deep into the picture, deep into its darkness, to find the hidden and shadowy secrets there.

Now it's done I think I'll probably leave tomorrow. I can't wait to show it somebody else, to share what I've found here. And my left arm is beginning to throb a little. When I washed it this evening I noticed that the cut is a little swollen and livid looking, I rather fear it's infected. Not to worry, there's time for mundane matters like doctors and antibiotics now, now I've done what I came to do.

I think I'll call my picture INTERIOR. If could be the first of a series, of places that are waiting to yield up their secrets – dark places, hidden places, unknowable as the human heart – it is the most marvellous theme. Yes. INTERIOR 1. That's what I shall call it.