“I spent a lot of time looking at bright lights and half blinding myself,” Dominic Bradnum explains of the way his painting started.

“I wanted to capture that effect where you look away and a bright image has been burned on your retina. At one point I was standing in a dark room pointing a flash gun at my face… it was all a little ill-advised really.”

Since those days, the Hove-based fine art graduate has found less painful ways of working, trawling seedy city back streets in search of inspiration for his striking oil paintings, which capture the texture and glow of neon, but on canvas. “I’ve been propositioned in several red light districts taking pictures of the signs," he laughs.

His first dedicated solo exhibition will see the walls of Blanch House illuminated with his work; offbeat slogans and abstract forms shimmering against blacker-than-black backgrounds. “A lot of it is about high contrast,” he says of the way he creates that authentic neon feel. “If you look closely there’s a blur in the boundaries between the lights and the glow. It takes a lot of building up of colour and glazes to get that shimmering effect. I just have a real thing about neon.”

The slogans and words – “Amour is love in French”; “cry for help”; “I think of you and I smile” – come “from my imagination mainly. I’ve only done one painting based on a real-life neon sign and that’s the red cat from a place called the Pussycat Club that used to be in Hove.”

Bradnum, who will also be familiar to Brighton folk as one-half of electro-shock/ performance art duo Miss Pain, claims he only paints on Wednesdays. Amazingly, this turns out to be (mainly) true.

“I’ve been putting in some extra hours for the exhibition, in all honesty – I don’t think I’d ever get it finished if I didn’t – but my studio space in Gatwick is only free on that day so I tend to go in there and work from noon to 5.30pm. I quite like it. It makes you more disciplined knowing you only have a certain time frame to get things done.”

As for the remainder of his time, “I spend my days making jigsaws and painting and breathing in turpentine in an airless loft and I often go to Hastings or Worthing if the weather’s dull. I’ve got quite a fondness for bleak seaside towns.”

* For more information on Dominic Bradnum visit www.wednesday painter.blogspot.com

* Monday to Sunday, noon-7pm, free, call 01273 603504