A New Life: Lorna Siggins meets a former nurse who quit her job and found her true calling as an artist
A chance book purchase in Dublin airport and a phone message with a difference - such was the combination of circumstances that led Charlotte Kelly to quit a challenging but constant career in nursing for the more fitful and fickle world of visual art just a year ago.
"I suppose it was no one event that influenced me - but when I made the decision, it was immediate," she says, speaking shortly after a highly successful solo exhibition at the Kenny Gallery in Galway.
Entitled Transcending Light, the exhibition was opened by writer John O'Donohue, who described how light became "an event" for him in her work.
"Landscapes are evoked with such subtlety and strangeness... as though they were creations of the light itself," he said in his introduction.
"Somehow, she manages to imbue them with an aura of true emergence; it is as if they were seeing themselves for the first time in light, pushing it and probing it until the painting becomes utterly haunting and memorable."
Had someone told her a year ago that she would have attracted such a tribute from someone she admired, she wouldn't have believed it. But then, she is still pinching herself over the events of the past few months, since she handed in her resignation.
Kelly, who was born in Galway in 1962, studied art to Leaving Certificate level at Salerno secondary school, but thought she had left it at that.
She enjoyed it, and believes she inherited some of that passion and creativity from her late parents, Michael and Tess Horan.
Her father taught speech and drama, but his first love was acting. During an amateur production of Macbeth in Galway, he had a heart attack on stage but continued in the lead role until a quick exit was organised (and an ambulance called) by fellow actor, Tom Kenny. "And he recovered!" she recalls.
"My mother made all her own clothes, embroidered, and took a night course in painting, but art wasn't seen to be a very certain career. They certainly wouldn't have been able to do what I can do now - and my parents always wanted a nurse in the family."
So after school, there was a brief interlude when she took a secretarial course and then she registered to train as a nurse at Portiuncula hospital in Ballinasloe.
On qualifying after three years, she got engaged and spent 18 months studying midwifery in Manchester before marrying.
The first of her three sons - Robert, now 20 - was born when she was back in Galway and working in what is now the Bon Secours hospital in Renmore. She took a career break until Robert was three, returned to work, and had two more boys, Stephen, now 18, and Brian, who is 15.
IT WAS WHILE DOING night duty that she found herself with pad and pencil, drawing patients while they were asleep.
Her husband Camillus, a sales representative with Kellogg's, was always supportive, and she decided to apply to study art and design at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT).
Somehow, she found a day a week for the part-time access course. Two years into the art and design diploma, and having hit 40, she decided to transfer to community nursing.
Looking back, it was part of the transition. "I had been one of a team, now I was out on my own a lot more and visiting people in their homes. It was very busy - I could make up to 15 house calls on a Friday, for instance - and I was taking my work home a lot, in the sense of worrying about patients on Christmas Day, for instance.
"It was very different to hospital, and I met some really lovely people during the three years that I did it. I think a strong link developed with my painting - I was meeting very wise people who had lived their lives and were preparing for the next."
And, in a sense, she was preparing for hers. Last summer, she was offered term time leave, and took three months.
At this stage, several galleries were selling her work. She had moved from traditional to abstract painting, mainly in oils, and was one of the participants in an exhibition organised by Tom Kenny at Mayo General Hospital in Castlebar. It was here that writer John O'Donohue saw her paintings and decided to track her down.
"I had first read him when I picked up one of his books in Dublin airport - and the book was the best part of the holiday," she says.
"I came home one day and there was a phone message from him. He came to see me, and while he was looking at some of my work, he mentioned that it was a pity I couldn't give up the nursing. I was able to tell him I already had."
That decision wasn't taken without some thought, discussions, and setbacks, however. "I loved nursing, but I knew I wasn't going to climb the career ladder there.
"Then in my final year at GMIT, I got a bad critique from one of my tutors. It was not that you ever received much praise, and perhaps tutors were also trying to prepare you for reality.
"But the day it happened, I was distraught. My youngest son asked me to draw a picture and said he would throw darts at it! It was a turning point - perhaps I was being tested."
Kelly had her first solo exhibition at the Tuar Ard Centre in Moate, Co Westmeath last year, and this was followed by the Kenny Gallery exhibition in June. Tom Kenny believes she has courage, conviction and great potential. "It took a while to detach," she says. "I felt guilty at letting patients down, and there was the fact that we need two incomes.
"It was a financial risk, an emotional risk, but I take every day now without looking too far ahead," she says. " I love my time on my own and I am at my best when it is pouring rain out there and I am inside painting. Otherwise, I get very cranky!