THERE is no doubt it is an artist's kitchen. The fitted units, even the fridge and the microwave, are daubed in bright yellows, reds and oranges, with seafood motifs of crabs and prawns.

With a rare beam of summer sun streaming through the windows, it was the sort of room to make you feel happy. But both my hostess, Kitty North, and I were in sombre mood.

Reason: propped up against the wall was a large painting of a man, stooped in distress, walking up towards his hilltop farm as the sun goes down over the ridge.

The fields around him - painted in an angry blue - are empty. This is a farmer whose flocks have just been culled for foot and mouth. The title of the picture says it all: The Sad Man.

I suspect few people have ever met artist Kitty North - otherwise, Mrs Roger Tempest, wife of the dynamic entrepreneur at Broughton Hall, near Skipton - in such a sad mood.

Normally, she is bright-eyed, laughing and chatty, a personality as vivid as the hues she lays on canvas. But like so many of us in Craven these awful few weeks, she had been profoundly moved by the plight of the farmers who have lost their lives' work - and as often as not, the lives' work of their fathers and grandfathers - to the killing machine.

A country girl who mixes in some of the art world's most sophisticated circles - her paintings sell like hot cakes in London and elsewhere - she painted this gloomy canvas in a mood approaching despair.

"I know there will be people who will ask what I have to worry about - living in the grounds of a stately home with a highly successful husband," she says. "But I have lived amongst farming folk all my life and I really do understand the sense of loss, of bewilderment, of helplessness that many of my friends are feeling now.

"I always paint my feelings - that is the way I can express myself best - and I hope this painting conveys some of the desperation all around us."

Kitty, 37, could easily have lived the comfortable, cushioned life of a country lady. But there is something of a rebellious streak in her, which took her off to art college and to teaching jobs all around the world: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Australia.

The daughter of landowners in the lush Lune Valley near Kirkby Lonsdale, she and Roger - scion of the Tempest family who have owned land at Broughton since the 13th Century - were due to have a lavish society wedding with champagne, a band and marquees on the lawn when they married 10 years ago.

But she decided she could not face all the fuss so, on New Year's Eve, they decided to elope. Roger spent the holiday thumbing through Yellow Pages looking for someone to marry them - only to find that places like Gretna Green were closed!

After a futile four days, they finally tied the knot at Skipton Register Office before driving back to Kirkby to explain to a tearful mum.

"It was like my paintings, really, very much spontaneous, letting my feelings take over," she says.

She sold her first two paintings - for £60 each, she thinks - to a posh London art dealer when she was just 16: "I am not quite sure exactly how much but it seemed a huge amount at the time - I just took it in cash and blew the lot in a matter of days."

After studying at the Chelsea College of Art and taking a postgraduate degree in fine art at Manchester, she began painting in earnest and now sells all her pictures except a few she keeps for sentimental reasons.

These include a semi-representational canvas called The Kiss, which shows she and Roger embracing on the summit of Ingleborough, the hill she overlooked from her childhood bedroom.

Others include pictures of exotic fish brought to her by local fishermen in Northern Australia - "I had to get them that way because, unfortunately, Roger does not seem to have the knack of catching anything when he goes fishing."

And then there are the pure abstracts, which she calls deprecatingly "my spotty, dotty pictures" - literally thousands of multi-coloured dots on very big canvasses.

"I only realised recently where the spotty, dotties came from," she confessed. "I love meadows, always have done. I visit them two or three times a week in summer and suddenly it dawned on me: my dots represent the wild flowers growing among the long grass."

Sadly, there will be many more wild meadows in the Dales this summer, with no sheep or cattle to keep them trimmed down. This, however, is no consolation to Kitty North/Tempest.

When The Sad man has had its few finishing touches, it will be sold at auction and the money donated to charities helping foot and mouth farmers.

"At this time, I think we should all do our bit to help farming families," she said forcefully. "This is my bit - I just hope it will be of some use."

A lesson to us all, methinks.