When I visited him, Martin Fuller assured me that he had wanted to tidy up, but his studio was still what one would politely call a 'working' studio, with paint pots cheek by jowl with cooking pots. His dress sense is rather tidier, though; the matching red socks and braces made him look more like a City gent than a painter. He has owned (and lived in) his Brixton Hill studio for 18 years, buying it on a 120-year lease.

As his attire (and Garrick membership) implies, Fuller is a traditionalist, though the striking use of colour and the fluid shapes and forms of his art suggest a modernist streak. He had a classical training, but his paintings are more jazz than opera - bright, unexpected, and imaginative. He is a great believer in learning one's trade before becoming more adventurous, "learning to walk before standing on your head", as he puts it, and so has little time for much of modern art: "One has to be a shock jock to get any publicity, so that art is only validated by how much publicity the artist gets and how shocking the work is, rather than the intrinsic quality of the work. We live in a culture where what matters is not what somebody does but how famous they are."

After seeing Fuller's painting The Encounter, the novelist Howard Jacobson wrote that "I am not sure that I have ever seen so much wine, women and song on a single wall," though this could be applied to much of Fuller's art, and his domestic life, too. Wine has always featured in his work - "wine is central to European culture, really," he reckons. His fiancée Margaret Rand is a distinguished wine writer, and he has even designed a wine label for the London wine merchants Morris & Verdin. A great opera fan - he likes to paint to music - he met Margaret at Glyndebourne during a production of Così fan tutte. His love of music led to an appearance on Radio 3's Private Passions.

Wine, women and song are obviously important to him, though he describes his own work as focusing on "opera, love, sex and something of the nightclub", and that it is "more like poetry than prose…the onlooker makes their own personal associations from their own personal experience." He is vague about the meaning of any particular canvas, but the titles of his paintings are deliberately epigrammatic, hinting at a story that the viewer doesn't necessarily see at first. Take The Encounter, for instance: a woman throwing a glass of wine at another woman in a bar. But why? And who? And where? He won't say. "I like a story," he says. "But a story that people can make their own, a bit like going to the opera and not understanding German but seeing this moral tableau and fitting on this story." He doesn't have a favourite painting: "It's like asking what's my favourite wine, it changes depending upon one's mood." He has been influenced by "lots and lots and lots" of artists in his career, too many and too diverse to name: "When you start off as a painter, you feel palpably as though somebody is sitting on your shoulder. I loved the Impressionists, but now my reaction to them is sentimental."

Martin Fuller was born in 1943 in Royal Leamington Spa and his initial studies were at the local Mid-Warwickshire College of Art, from 1960-62. "Mid-Warwickshire College was very good," he says. "They taught drawing, and I was a natural image maker, but I wasn't necessarily a natural drawer. They made me draw objectively. In a way it's quite beautiful to have gone through that rigour and not to have one's creativity made dead."

He moved to London in 1962 to attend Hornsey College of Art, where he became "more sybaritically cultured" then was awarded the Guggenheim-McKinley Scholarship to Italy in 1964. He was in Positano for just under a year and says that it changed his life: in those days there was a thriving artists and writers community, long before the tourist invasion: "Although it was the beginning of the supposed swinging sixties, London was still fairly dour, so then I went to Italy with its food culture and more emotional openness…I remember watching a traffic policeman in white jodhpurs and a white hat pinching a girl's bottom. It was a wonderful revelation of a different way of life." The Italian light, which was "very different from Camden Town," also influenced his art. When he returned from Italy he took a job at Hornsey, painted portraits, and then in 1968 had his first one-man show at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol, which he reckons at that time was probably the best provincial art gallery in Britain. He continued to exhibit widely throughout the 1970s and '80s.

In 1991 he spent a year as Artist in Residence at Santa Fe in New Mexico. Five years later he won the Discerning Eye Modern Painters Prize and also won first prize in the Hunting Art Prize in 1997. In 2001, Martin was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Leamington Art Gallery & Museum, and was alarmed when not a single person from his early days in Leamington came to the exhibition, bringing to mind John Betjeman's poem 'Death in Leamington Spa'. His most recent exhibition was in December 2005 at Adam Gallery in Mayfair, just up the road from the Royal Academy of Arts, where nowadays he occasionally teaches.

Martin's work may be found in many collections, including Trinity College, Oxford (1971), Bristol City Art Gallery and Museum (1971 and 1973), and the Sullivan Collection, New York (1995) - so many, in fact, that he admits: "I do wonder where some of my pictures are, whether they're still hanging on the wall or have been stolen!"

He also does watercolours, believing that "you can get saturated working in just one medium." How long does it take him to complete a painting? "As one progresses through one's career, there's a lot more thought and a lot less work…It might take a poet an hour to physically write down a poem but the composition and thinking behind it might take six months…I tend to do some things and then hide them." His paintings cost anywhere from £5,000 to £15,000, and he has regular commissions from collectors and other people.

In his review of Martin's 2001 retrospective, William Packer wrote that "he does what he does, is what he is, and has always taken his own path. He is something of an original, and as such yet to be recognised at his full critical worth." Amen.