One day in 2005 it struck me that the face emerging from the mess of pigments which I kept scraping down was an image not of my studio model but my 18 year old daughter Kathryn-Jane whom I’d never seen (not even a photo) and whose whereabouts were unknown, driven purely by emotion and instinct and my memories of her mother whom I knew briefly in 1987 during the seven years I was living in a Cambridge bedsit after returning from Sudan struggling to write my novel “Red over Blue”.