PAINTING: Light Of The North opens today at According To McGee, in Tower Street, York, where Rosemary Abrahams, Janine Baldwin, Michael Bilton and Jo Brown are showing work of “slow-burning beauty”, in the words of gallery co-director Greg McGee.

Rosemary studied painting and printmaking at Leeds College of Art during the 1960s alongside John French, who was to become her husband and business partner in a design studio that developed a worldwide client base.

This led to work in many countries for Rosemary, designing home and fashion products, such as hand-made rugs in Nepal, jute products in Bangladesh, ceramics in Europe and carpets in USA. Meanwhile painting ran in parallel with her journeys abroad, which influenced her colours and textures. “I’d paint at night, after designing in the day,” she recalls.

After returning home to Yorkshire in the 1990s, Rosemary’s path led to Bridlington in early 2000.

“Living in the countryside has influenced my paintings, with the changing landscape and colours through the seasons. The varying colours and depth of texture are a great inspiration,” she says.

“I’ve always been intrigued by the differences in surface texture and how paint can be affected by it; beginning with a plaster ground which I can then incise to create line work. The application of metal foils and pearlescent paint then enriches the surfaces.”

Rosemary’s new work is her “luminous and intuitive” response to the northern landscape. “My principal love is abstract painting but my brief from Greg for this show was landscapes,” says Rosemary, whose passion for art blossomed in her college days. “School had passed by me in a bored blur, but when I got to art college, I thought ‘this is life’.”

Life bursts through her canvasses in this new exhibition of more experimental work. “As if lit from within, her paintings have a timeless quality, and there’s at times a forlorn wistfulness in the dying light and cooling surfaces,” says Greg.

Ever-busy Rosemary is the speaker secretary of the University of the Third Age’s Bridlington branch and was among the organisers of the East Riding Open Studios last September. “I’ve done a lot in 45 years since college: you can cram a lot into your life and all this creativity has not ended yet,” she says.

• Painting: Light Of the North will run from today until March 3.