I have been asked recently about one of the pieces I painted for the CCL show. It’s the one that’s 14 inches wide and 60 inches long and is entitled ‘Light Shot with Birds’. The poem by Betty Adcock is entitled Topsail Island and the line is “For now, the island’s mine, talking a cold tongue blue, the light shot with birds.” Don’t you just love that poetry line? I would love to create a whole series of paintings just using that one line; to me it’s so extraordinary.

So I decided I would write about and show you how that painting came into being, once I had