An artist has said she predicted the Japanese earthquake and explosion at a nuclear plant more than a year before it happened.

Claire Fearon, of Henfield, normally paints cheery abstract pictures but felt strangely compelled to depict what she felt was a nuclear catastrophe.

Now Mrs Fearon, 44, thinks she may have a spooky sixth sense for predicting the future after seeing the spitting image of her painting on news footage of the Japanese disaster.

Mrs Fearon said: “I was in the middle of doing another painting and I just became overwhelmed with this feeling of depression.

“For the first and only time I printed off an image to use as reference. I really wanted to be sure I got the nuclear cloud right. I knew I wanted to depict a scene of devastation. I used the blue and the upsweeping brushstrokes to look like water flooding in. I put the large red gash in the blue to look like a crack in the earth and wanted the black brushstrokes on the skyline to look like a city about to fall into the cracks. I wanted to depict a nuclear reactor in trouble and its mushroom cloud. When it was finished I was really shocked, as were my family and friends.

“I really wanted to paint this destruction, which is totally unlike me.”

Mrs Fearon sold the painting at Tooveys art auction last year, but when the news footage of the Japan disaster started to pour in, Mrs Fearon felt the images looked familiar.

She said: “I was watching the news of the earthquake and when I saw the pictures I thought ‘that’s my painting’.