For years she didn't speak, then she developed MS, but now Linda Graham has found a voice in her art, writes Anne Dempsey.

Linda Graham stopped talking at age four and remained virtually mute until she was 12 years old. Reared in west Dublin, the youngest of four for a decade before her brother was born, she now speaks carefully about those days.

"Family life was fairly unpredictable; you never knew what might happen. There were problems, fighting, few boundaries. I had landed in a world I didn't understand and it seemed impossible to get it right. I remember being in agony about how to respond, 'what do I say?' 'what do they want me to say?', so I finally stopped talking, though when I was quiet, it was still wrong. I now realise my parents loved each other very much. They were both extremely handsome, passionate, jealous, volatile. They thrived on drama, had huge rows and great reconciliations, a temperamental atmosphere that was very hard on children.

"Looking back, I must have put my mother under terrific stress. I think she believed I was educationally subnormal, a bit mad. I was probably a bit mad. I left physically and emotionally, wandered off on my own, went off in my head, I was away with the fairies a lot of the time. My sole ambition was to grow up and leave. I read constantly and had the unique honour of being the only child in school banned from reading!"

And all the time she drew and coloured. Anywhere and everywhere. Behind the sofa on the back of a cereal packet, outside stirring a puddle with a stick to see the patterns it made.

"I can't remember a time when I didn't draw. I experienced great delight in picking up a pencil, pen, making a mark that stayed, and feel the same today each time I pick up a brush. Back then I drew plants, animals, birds, grasses, landscapes, usually places without buildings or people. You could say I was talking visually all the time."

Today Graham's paintings sell all over the world, with works in private collections in Ireland, the UK, The Netherlands, the Vatican, the US, Portugal and Singapore. Pieces publicly displayed in Ireland include the large triptych in the lobby of the new breast check unit at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin. Her first solo exhibition sold out at the Origin Gallery last year, and her second, Time, Tide, Tempest, opens there tomorrow.

At the age of 12, she says she came out of her shell, first at school with the encouragement of a teacher, then gradually at home. "It happened overnight. From being totally fearful, I became totally fearless, it was as if everything flipped around in a split second and I knew it was time, I could go now."

Two years later, coming up to Inter Cert, she told her parents she was leaving school and leaving home. "I was going to Holland. My Dad had painting books and I had always adored the colour and the strength of Van Gogh's paintings. I wanted to see them."

So she saved up her baby-sitting money, persuaded her father to sign a passport consent form, packed a bag and left almost without a backward glance. "I was very sad to leave my little brother Andrew who had been the best thing that ever happened to me."

In The Netherlands she lied about her age and got a job as a domestic in the house of a diplomat. "The work was tough and the hours long, but I drew with the children and while my Dutch was never great, we played together through art."

Then fate took a hand. Her employer's brother, an art dealer, saw Graham's work, and introduced her to the Hague Academy of Art, where she was offered a scholarship.

"I negotiated time off for classes, and took on extra housework to make up. I learned a lot about technique in art school, though they were very good and didn't interfere too much. One of the best things was that as a student I had a cultural passport allowing admission to all the art galleries. I went to see Van Gogh paintings at the Rijksmuseum, standing there with the tears streaming down my face, a real unlocking. I returned there and to the Kroller-Muller gallery many times."

She lived and studied in The Netherlands for three years and had begun to sell some of her work as street art when she came home.

"I wasn't expecting a great welcome and didn't get it. I worked with a number of printing firms and began an arts and design diploma at night but didn't finish; it wasn't right for me. Family life was very difficult, so I left again and went to London."

There she supported herself with a variety of jobs and continued to paint. Then, at 22, she met David Lock.

"We met on a Sunday and he proposed on the Tuesday. For a long time, I held him off emotionally, but he wouldn't go away and he broke down my barriers. I don't know what he saw in me, still don't. He said I was different, I think he meant nice different! We're married nearly 30 years and he's totally the opposite of me. He's a rock."

She was to need his steadiness. At age 21 Linda had begun to experience what were the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis - numbness in her hands and feet and balance problems. After surgery she was symptom free until her early 30s when she had two bad relapses and needed a wheelchair for a number of years. As ever, painting was refuge - and purpose.

"I painted in the chair. When I'm painting, I lose sense of time, place, everything. Painting helps to take the focus off the pain, as I work from a deeper consciousness."

At age 33, she had a very healthy pregnancy and their son Robert, now 16, was born.

"Having Robert was like Andrew all over again, only better. He has always known me with MS and expects a lot of me. I remember one day sitting in the wheelchair feeling rotten and he came staggering in from the garden with lots of wood, plonked it on my lap and said 'make me a boat that I can sit in'. In ways he sees me more able than anyone else. I now walk with a crutch. You'll be out with Robert and he'll say 'Can you not hurry up, this is too slow'! He's brilliant."

Graham is now on the drug interferon which keeps her symptoms relatively at bay. "Having MS is not as negative as it sounds. Sometimes hanging over the cliffs, painting, I realise I'm incredibly robust in my way. Getting back to my childhood, bad things can overwhelm you, or you can hold on, keeping a part of you free. My mother died two years ago. We had spent time together in recent years, and got on well, rather like two people who had just met. When I asked her what I was like as a child, she said she couldn't remember and I wondered if she had blanked me out in rather the same way as I had done to her. Maybe we are two of a kind."

In 1993 the family moved to Listowel, Co Kerry, and Graham later found her way to Cill Rialaig, Ballinskelligs, the artist retreat set up by Noelle Campbell Sharp. "Cill Rialaig changed my life, and is now like a second home. I would never have been able to stop painting - it's like breathing - but I had reached a difficult place and was doubting the merit of my work. In Cill Rialaig I wrestled my demons, and came through to something quite simple and uncomplicated about the role of painting in my life and in society. I've landed in a place where my paintings are about accessing landscape and sea. Someone described my work as painting the psychology of the landscape, which says it well. The relationship I never had with people as a child took root in the landscape, wanting the landscape to speak for me. I'm still doing that today to a wider audience."

Would she have been a painter had her childhood been idyllic? "I'm always asking myself this. I think I would have painted but the work may have been different. The work comes out of the life experiences. Now when the painting hangs on the gallery wall, in a way it is not mine any more - it is the viewer's. They see it from their experience, their life story, so the picture becomes dialogue. I have always dialogued in my own way."

Time, Tide, Tempest by Linda Graham, is at the Origin Gallery, 83 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2, Dec 7-Jan 7