Adrift on a Painted Sea

"In this slender volume, a middle-aged man grieves the loss of his mother. Sue Bird was a librarian and painter who filled her life with artmaking even as she never fully pursued life as an artist. Here, her son, a U.K.-based illustrator and cartoonist, intersperses his own memories of his mother over time – captured in beautifully rendered, simply adorned comics – with close reproductions of some of her intricate oil paintings. This gentle memoir offers glimpses of a mother-son pair fiercely devoted to the sea, to family, and to capturing – through art – the hardest and best that life throws at them."