Barley's winning of the prestigious Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award whilst still at College meant he spent the first year of his professional career on a joyous residency in Derby, which culminated in a large solo exhibition at Derby Art Gallery and Museum. During that time he was involved with a number of community projects, as well as teaching sessions at the university, but he immersed himself in the history and culture of the Derwent Valley as he worked towards his show. This area was well documented by English landscape and portrait painter, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797). Although mindful of Joseph Wright's legacy and keen to honour it, Barley made the focus of his research working-class people of the industrial age, especially those memorialised in song and folklore. The final pieces were richly-varied, depicting bloodied boxers, clowns, vagrants, street hawkers and eccentric almost-forgotten characters from the past yet giving them a vivid, theatrical grandeur. His residency culminated in the show, ‘Saint Mondays and thereby hangs a tale’.

The commercial success of this show and others in London during the same year (2012) meant The Fine Art Society (FAS) offered him the opportunity to exhibit in their New Bond Street premises. He was the youngest person to have a solo show there since their founding in 1876. Always having had an interest in literature, especially drama and poetry, Barley enthusiastically set to work on a new group of paintings, drawing much of his inspiration from T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land, written in the desolate aftermath of The First World War. This resulted in a show, ‘A Heap of Broken Images’, that exhibited a complex series of dramatic images, some of which, characteristically moving away from his source material, reflected other influences both artistic and personal.

He was to go on to develop two more solo shows for the FAS. ‘This Great Stage of Fools’ built on his intimate knowledge of Shakespeare's King Lear to explore types of folly, blindness both physical and moral and the plight of those marginalised by society. The other, ‘Drive Out West’, drew on his reading of the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney and examined some aspects of a rural way of life against a backdrop of political conflict. It also celebrated a sense of renewal. His paintings always seem to burst with life: green shoots or large plant-like forms in unexpected places are part of his personal iconography. By 2016 he had met and fallen in love with young Irish playwright Erica Murray and her image became intertwined with his response to Heaney's love poetry.

Barley always made light of his medical condition and his warmth, wit and charm meant many of his professional associates were completely unaware of it. He felt lucky to be successful enough to devote himself to his art full-time though he sometimes found it difficult to keep pace with requests for commissions. He took painting seriously and many of his works bear the hallmarks of much rethinking and reworking as he refined the narratives he sought to depict. He sometimes chose to leave the ghosts of early workings visible in his finished images.

Barley's last solo exhibition in the UK, ‘Field of Vision’ with Trinity House Gallery, was still on show when he died unexpectedly on Boxing Day 2019 and the gallery became a place of pilgrimage for many of his friends and admirers. The paintings in it, stimulated this time by Imagist poetry, were as confident, mysterious and luminous as any in his all-too-short career.

Photograph: Wil Coban