It’s not long since the artist William Turner had to store up dozens of his unsold paintings under his house-stairs. The pile fell on the gasman trying to read the meter. Turner smiles as he tells me this. Having grown up in inner Manchester, he still speaks with strong Lancashire undertones.

Everything about Turner’s life is a tale of the unexpected — and a triumph of persistence. In a fortnight, the first big retrospective of his astonishingly individual paintings opens at a Greater Manchester art gallery. The 80 vivid, hallucinatory images depict northern industrial scenes, mostly in and around Manchester or Stockport. Like a firecracker or a sunburst, they swirl with incandescent reds, deep orange, pitch-black.

Spry and welcoming, Turner, 85, doesn’t look his age as he lets me into his converted cottage on the fringes of Congleton in Cheshire. He has strong, painterly hands; his eyes are bright behind gold-rimmed glasses. On the pocket of his open-necked blue shirt is a five-pointed Star of David, in memory of his Jewish mother, who died when he was five.

“All I was ever good at was painting,” he says. He left school at 14, in 1934, and went into dead-end jobs. “My painting comes out of the 1930s,” he says, “when there was no work, but high expectations.” But he also draws on experiences of the Blitz. Drafted into the Army, he saw Portsmouth “bombed to bits”. On home leave, from the family’s council house, he watched Manchester ablaze. One picture in the exhibition shows the night that Bannerman’s, a factory “where I’d worked for the stock-keeper”, went up in flames. Turner’s pictures are loveable but they’re not cosy.

His aunt Clara nurtured his childhood love of drawing and painting. Convinced the family was related to J. W. M. Turner (there’s no documentary evidence), she “always had a book of his reproductions handy”.

At school his art master refused to recommend him for art school, because “my lines wobbled”. But Turner didn’t change. In his canvases, houses and mills don’t stand rigidly to attention. They dance.

After the war, he went briefly to art school. Then, for 11 years, he was a “picture faker” in Manchester: the old craft of hand-colouring black-and-white portrait photographs. Turner moved on to teach art but he always kept on painting — albeit with little commercial success.

Then, in 2000, his life and reputation were transformed. He was traced by David Gunning, joint owner of a small art gallery in the Pennines, who thought Turner was dead. The paintings, some dating back to the 1950s, immediately attracted buyers. Gunning has sold more than 2,500: current prices up to £4,000.

He doesn’t believe in God, but he does believe in spiritualism. At a medium’s house he received a message from a painter who apparently died 200 or so years ago in Vienna.

“I don’t know who he was,” Turner says. “But I think I know what he painted. I saw it in a vision and sketched it. It was a big hall, with people. Just like one of my pictures.”

Will Turner is at Gallery Oldham, May 14-June 25 (0161-911 4653; www.galleryoldham.org.uk)