ix years ago Frances Furbert revisited a childhood love of hers ? now the pastel artist is having her first solo show.

The show opens in the Edinburgh Gallery, while the un-juried Summer Members Show, which has the theme of ?Really Big or Really Small? opens in the Onions Gallery at the Bermuda Society of Arts on Friday evening.

Ms Furbert began taking lessons with Sharon Wilson in 2001 and exhibited for the first time in 2003 during a joint show of Just Pastels III, at the Bermuda Art Centre Dockyard. She had work accepted in the Bacardi Biennial Exhibition, which is now showing at the Bermuda National Gallery.

So far she has only exhibited pastels and charcoals.

?A lot of people don?t realise that the charcoal is the first layer when you are doing pastels and sometimes I get carried away on the charcoal layer,? she said

And while painting an earlier piece she found that it was ideal as a charcoal.

?I showed it to Sharon (Wilson) and she said leave it, it is done. I had put so much into that stage.?

Olga Simons taught her at Purvis Primary and at the Berkeley Institute she was instructed by none other than Charles Lloyd Tucker. But in spite of the excellent tuition, she did not follow her artistic calling until much later on in life.

?I never really got going with art early on in life,? she said. ?I did enter school exhibitions in primary school and I had an excellent teacher there.

?At Berkeley you had to make a choice between art and Latin and would you believe that I chose Latin and dropped art. I come from a family where my mother (Myrtle Furbert) is an artist, although she doesn?t paint very much. She has displayed once and I took one of her pieces and put it in the Bank of Butterfield Art Festival and she came third in the seniors category two years ago.

?But the way it was everyone in the house could draw or paint and it was no big deal and no one said, ?oh, this is wonderful!??

So instead of becoming an artist or an art teacher she became a maths teacher.

?I was in the school system until 1979 and I also taught in Ghana, West Africa for a year,? says Ms Furbert.

?Now when I think back on those days you were inundated with artistic expression... and that is now a resource that I have to draw on.?

In 2000 she decided that she had enough of the nine to five working lifestyle and decided instead to open a home school.

?I ended up with mainly teenaged boys and I felt that they should have some art in their curriculum,? she said.

?I then got in touch with Sharon Wilson to see if she could take a class with them once a week. I would then go along and sit in and draw along with them until one day when we were doing faces she (Ms Wilson) said, ?you need to get yourself into an adult class.?

?And that was a part of what got me going again. The other part was when my niece Rachel put together a nice little painting and gave it to my sister for her birthday and the whole family was like, ?that?s wonderful!?

?So when we got home my sons decided that I should be painting as well and my eldest son gave me a piece of scrap paper and asked me to draw him. I actually did it on scrap paper and I told him to watch TV and after, when I looked at what I had done I was really shocked because it really looked like him.

?So I got excited and I got a real drawing pad and a real pencil and I drew my other son. But it really wasn?t until I started the home school that I did something about it.?

Of her art teacher, Ms Wilson, she said she is not only a wonderful artist, but an excellent teacher as well.

?In fact as soon as her work became available in the 1970s I basically idolised her,? Ms Furbert added.

?I consider it a great privilege to have her as a teacher. I think it is rare to find someone who is that great as an artist and who still wants to share ? a lot of people don?t want to share, but I appreciate the amount that she shares with us.?

In this show she called on the flora and beautiful scenery that surrounds her.

?I seem to come back to florals and botanicals,? she said.

?In my garden, I like the fact that backbone are things that will come up no matter what. My father died in ?89 and his Easter lilies, amaryllis, calla lilies are still coming up.

?So it is more than just a flower to me, there are a lot of memories and a lot of importance. Also going out in the garden early in the morning is what keeps me centred.?

Asked how does painting make her feel, she said: ?Well a lot of people seem to think that it is a relaxing experience, but it is only a relaxing experience if the painting is working out.

?It can be frustrating if you have a vision of what you are trying to achieve and for some reason you just can?t get it to happen. But some paintings just flow out, like for instance ?The Baygrapes?, I had my vision that I wanted to get a little away from realism, while with the ?Easter Lily? I was trying to paint what I saw although I was a little liberal with the background.

?I wanted to be able to see what it would be like to play with various colours, textures and shapes and the baygrapes were really just an excuse to play with the colours and that was really a wonderful experience.

?It can be just a wonderful exploration and I can become very engrossed and completely involved with the painting.?

She has found that the arts has put her in touch with other artists that she would not have otherwise known. She has also found a lot of support in the art community, from fellow students and the Bermuda Arts Council who helped her with the cost of framing.

?They are wonderful people to be around,? she said.

The show opens on Friday from 5.30 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. and to the general public on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.