IN A cramped, cold and cluttered caravan in a remote Durham wood 72-year-old Sheila Mackie shuffles about, surrounded by paints, bits of old wood, mouldy books and mounds of cigarette butts.

It is from this mess that Sheila creates magic, in this unlikely shack that she creates the arresting, vivid pictures that have won her acclaim the world over.

Yet it isn't the works that made her famous that occupy the mind of the former circus-worker and art teacher, of Shotley Bridge, near Consett.

What vexes her is the fate of three forgotten canvasses she gave to the children of the town of her birth, Chester-le-Street, more than 40 years ago.

Two of those paintings have gone missing, but she spotted the third for the first time since 1958 in the pages of The Advertiser's sister paper The Northern Echo a few weeks ago. To her dismay the article explained it was to be sold at auction on behalf of Northumberland County Council.

"Seeing my painting after all those years was a bolt from the blue, I can tell you. You could have knocked me down with a feather," she laughs. "But I wasn't very happy that it was going to be sold for a profit. I'm really disenchanted. I gave them to the children of the county and they were supposed to be for public display."

No-one knows what happened to the other two circus paintings or how the remaining one - the worst of the three, according to Sheila - came into the possession of Northumberland County Council, although the old children's library in Chester-le-Street closed down in 1973.

But there was some good news when it was decided to withdraw the painting - worth little when first painted, worth thousands now - from the sale to allow it to be shown at a major exhibition of some of Sheila's latest work at Durham City this month. What happens to her work afterwards has not yet been decided by Northumberland County Council.

Sheila, a grandmother, hopes her gift to the children of the county will ultimately be returned to them. But talk to her and you come to realise that they also represent memories of a time when, as a young art mistress at the former Consett Grammar School, now Blackfyne Comprehensive, she would run away to the old Bertram Mills circus for several months of every year.

"It was the happiest time of my life," she said. "I would go there every spare minute I could for 12 years. I even got engaged three times while I was there. I would paint and do some promotional work but I would also do a lot of ordinary labour. You had to.

"I loved the elephants and big tigers best. And it was through the circus that I got to meet actors who are still some of my best friends."

Sheila looks younger when she remembers some of the good times and the characters she met travelling the country with the circus. Like the time she was picked up by an elephant she was painting in the dead of night and was unable to escape. Or characters like the lion tamer who had incredible rapport with the cats but ended up being mauled during a performance. Not that he was cruel to any animal. In fact Sheila only remembers one incident of cruelty to animals in all her time at the circus and the perpetrator was immediately sacked.

Her work at the circus, as well as having a growing number of major exhibitions to her credit, meant she met a number of actors like Charlton Heston and Donald Sinden, with whom she is still in touch.

That, in turn, led to her meeting and then working with some famous intellectuals to produce important books.

She has worked with Magnus Magnusson on an illustrated history of Lindisfarne, with David Bellamy on two works and she has illustrated an edition of the classic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. She also has some of her work in the Queen's Royal Collection. But, of all the famous people she knows, it is North-East actor Alun Armstrong who she has known the longest - ever since she taught the Annfield Plain lad at Consett Grammar School.

Not that her own fame or that of anyone else is of any real importance to her. "I just love painting," she says. "It is an obsession with me and I can't stop doing it. I no longer take commissions. I think doing that prostitutes my art. I think real painters know they just have to paint."

That obsession has led to an extraordinary, glamorous life. But watch Sheila at work, and you can't help feeling she's happiest in her tiny caravan in that small, remote County Durham wood.

l Sheila Mackie's exhibition called Through the Eyes of a Dragon, a reference to the fact she was born in the Chinese year of the dragon, runs at the Durham Art Gallery at the DLI Museum in Durham City from May 4 to June 10.