Artist Rochelle Richards is opening her first solo show, "Unfinished Business", this evening at Rock Island Coffee.

Over the years, she has worked as a summer art facilitator at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art and given away her works of art, but most people know her today as Ms Richards', the art teacher.

She teaches art at both Port Royal and Somerset Primary Schools and has found time to create a mixed media collection for this show.

"I've been doing art since high school and then I left it for a while," she said.

"Then there was a period in my life when I was looking for a change and I decided to go abroad. I figured since I was pretty good at it, I might as well go and learn how to teach it."

She studied for a Bachelor's in Fine Arts and Education degree and was one of 22 students accepted at the famed Pratt Institute in New York City.

"After I finished my degree I did a year at Pratt studying for a Master's degree in Art Therapy," she said.

"But due to circumstances, I had to come back, but my goal is to return. In August I will start a distance learning programme, so that I can finish off my last year."

Every time she came back from school, she would bring back some of her work, but it never hung around to collect dust.

"A friend would come over and want to know what I had brought back this time and I would just give it away, so I have tons of family and friends who have my work.

"So over the summer, I did some painting and a friend of my said, 'you need to get out there'.

"And I am a little timid, because I feel that your friends and family would always say that they like your work, and it has never been a time when they said that they didn't like it, so I was like, if I showed it to other people, perhaps they wouldn't like it either. I was always timid, but this time I said, 'let me step outside of my comfort zone and see what happens'."

Since which, she has created numerous pieces.

"I have been doing a lot of work and some of the work I have been creating for years," said Ms Richards. "And some has taken me an hour."

For one of her pieces, she used coloured pencils.

"I always hated coloured pencils," she laughed. "That is until I had to teach it to a class when I was studying. But it gave off a certain presence and I was like, wow, I like this, but it just takes longer than painting and I like the gratification of painting, charcoals and pastels because it is pretty much instant.

"But that one took me about four days, but it came out really well and I liked it."

As the mother of two, she explained that none of what she is achieving now would have been possible without family support.

"When I went back to school my mom kept my children," she said. "There were times when I wanted to come back because money was tight, but my mom said, 'don't you dare come back.'

"I know that they now know the importance of getting an education."

The work that she did at Pratt was more than she ever expected.

"When I was at Pratt, I did an internship in Brooklyn, it was with domestic violence victims.

"The women were calling the hotline and the police would take them out of their borough, so we had people from Buffalo, so I would do therapy with both the children and the mothers.

"We had children from babies to 18. The feeling when I used to leave there was amazing ¿ you know when you leave work and you think, 'I just can't wait to get home!' But when leaving, I would feel so good.

"It was not what they produced, it was about the process and what comes out of the process is what they end up working through.

"So I started a cooking group with two girls who had it out for their mother because they felt that they were in the shelter because of their mother and their father didn't do anything. So we ended up making a cook book and we found ways to accept the good and the bad in a mother and to find someone to take her place if it didn't work out. So the cookbook was a way for them to reach out to their mother and when I left their relationship had improved with their mother. So with the skills as an art educator, I am able to give them the tools to help them express what they want to say."

Ms Richards says that she carries some of this training in her class.

"I get them to think about the repercussions of their actions," she explained.

"I get them to think about where they are in their lives and how they should be treating people."

And she uses similar techniques within her own work.

"It is premeditated," she said. "I have another one, which is a lady with wings coming out of a flower, now when I go to do this, I will probably find a picture of a flower first, then get several pictures of a woman and then mix them up. The head might be in one place, the foot might be in another, and then I put it together like that.

"Once I start painting it, it becomes something else and I wonder whether I need a background or do I want to leave the figure by itself or is it strong enough by itself?

"It just comes and I used to think that it was silly when people would say that they used to dream about it first, but it has been happening to me and I am becoming one of those dreamers."

When thinking of a career, one often thinks that it is something that will be tough to achieve, so as art was innate for her, it wasn't something she immediately considered.

"When I was in grad school I had to do a paper and I called it 'My Love Affair With Art'," she said.

"I kind of wrote it as it art was my lover, how I betrayed him for years and ended up coming back to it. I always think about it a lot, because I think it is a love affair and it gets to a point were I do betray it, some things I start and I don't go. But once I get back to it, it gives me this comfort and euphoria.

"Sometimes I could be painting and people are talking to me and I don't hear them ¿ I realise that I have completely zoned them out.

"This is my time when I go into myself and I process a lot of things."

Ms Richards has been painting people in different colours.

"I think with my blue people, I have been doing them for four years now, although orange is my favourite colour, but I think that through the blue people ¿ blue being a nurturing colour ¿ it is soothing. When I began doing my blue people, it was a hard time for me and I did a series of them, and I felt good after, so I think it is my security blanket.

"It is just a wonderful feeling when I do my art and when I finish I step back and I am like, 'wow, I did that'."

Unfinished Business opens at Rock Island Coffee tonight.