Calm serenity surrounds you like a comforting blanket the instant you step over the threshold of Elsie Nolan's serene and beautiful home.

A trained psychotherapist, counselling is just one of her many pursuits. Elsie is an extremely talented artist -- and also ran the very successful Ballyvass Cookery School.

Elsie studied art in Limerick. She adored painting, and rates it as her first love.

During her college years, she got a summer job in a hotel and, by pure chance, ended up in the kitchens. She went on to train as a chef, and after time in London, she came back to Ireland and settled in Dublin.

"I started to teach in CERT, became an instructor and worked there for four years. We were working with a group of long-term unemployed men, and back-to-work mothers, and it was there that I studied psychotherapy.

"I really had to learn it for the job. They were coming to learn different skills but they had so much other stuff going on, it was a barrier to their progress. We weren't equipped to deal with people dropping the bombshells they were. So I did a psychotherapy degree with Middlesex university. I got an honours degree and became a counsellor -- and that's what I do now."

When the long hours of commuting proved to be too much, Elsie made a life-changing decision: "I decided to take all my creativity and bring it to my house, to create a centre. My dream was that my paintings, my cookery, my psychotherapy, my reiki, and everything that I'm about as a person would be part of my day and that I would try and make a living from it."

She ran successful Ballyvass Cookery School from her home from 2001-2005. "I did it here, in the kitchen. I made Italian, Indian and Thai, hassle-free cooking for family and friends. I would do research on my travels -- when I was in Thailand, I went and worked in a kitchen."

Thai cuisine is her favourite, but Italian is what she's trained in. Her kitchen is amazing, with a dramatically-long counter running through the bright and airy room that she used for her demonstrations.

"I talk when I'm cooking. Even if you're cooking for someone, it's a place where you can heal yourself a bit." She almost apologises for this, but then defends it, saying "it's where everything comes from. It's nurturing." When you take into account the remoteness of Elsie's home in Castledermot, Co Kildare, what she achieved in a relatively short space of time -- envisioning a dream and then creating it -- is staggering.

But that dream was abruptly shattered in 2005 when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. "My practice was flying, my reiki was going well and the cookery school. And then I was diagnosed with cancer," remembers Elsie.

The shocking thing about her illness was how quickly it came on."It's known as the silent killer," she says wryly.

Everything happened before Elsie could account for it: "I was diagnosed on a Wednesday and was in having chemo on the Monday. That was the catalyst. My life changed completely that day. I'm only recovering from it now, coming back to myself."

Her life as she knew it was turned on its head -- everything was cancelled and the cookery school closed down.

She quickly reassessed her priorities: "I began to paint; and I painted my illness," she says. Elsie produced 31 pieces over the course of her illness, depicting the different stages, reflected through the seasons.

She painted constantly -- even after the birth of her daughter which also took place around this time. "I painted in recovery, I painted all the time," she says. "Every day, from when Clodagh was born, I had easels around. I'd paint when she slept -- I probably did my best work after she was born."

She finds motherhood amazing: "Having a baby is the most creative thing you can do and of course I've gone to a deeper level with my work since having a baby."

The series of paintings, called 'Healing through the seasons' was a complete sell-out. It is a potent mix of broody landscapes, bleak night-time scenes and torrential seas. But the sense of emerging from the dark into the light that Elsie went through is palpable.

"I likened the whole experience of cancer and the healing process to the seasons. The first one I did was the big, barren ploughed field, in the winter. When you've got no hair, eyebrows or eyelashes, you feel completely stripped of everything -- of your personality, your femininity. You're almost like a barren, ploughed field.

"As the chemo finished, I was so sick for a long time, it killed the good and the bad. It was kind of like in the spring, when the snowdrops start popping their head up for a look. You start to feel a bit better and conditions are ripe to start to come back to yourself.

"As each thing happened, I painted how I was feeling to get the emotion across. There was a lot of anger, grief and turbulence -- the calmness and enlightenment came after. I portrayed all those feelings through the seascapes."

When I comment on how completely vivid her seascapes are, how evocative of the sea, she concurs, and tells me "evocative" was a word that kept coming up at her exhibition.

"People connected with it. When I hung the show, it was my first solo exhibition. It was with a view to closure, to finish the illness and move on. I didn't think it would strike a chord like it did."

As we chat about the sea and the huge energy it gives off, Elsie tells me that she sends clients to it as a healing exercise: "People come to me and they might have lost their way. I tell them to go the ocean and listen to the sea."

Her work is based on colour and texture and she intends to focus on landscape and sea-scapes. "To me, you can express anything in them, say everything that can't be said verbally."

Refusing to give up her dreams in the face of such major life events, Elsie bent her struggles to her will and made use of them.

"It's difficult to shine," she says. "It's easier to shrink back and not put yourself out there. Like Nelson Mandela said, 'our biggest fear is that we are good enough.' We fear people would think that we think we're great.

"It takes a lot of courage to show your art, to sing, to run a cookery course, to stand up in front of people and talk about what you hold dear.

"Having cancer and chemotherapy and recovering from it, there's not much after that that's overly daunting. You're gone to a different place.

"The petty doesn't come into it any more. You get perspective on a lot of things. I can bring those strengths to counselling. As you dig deeper, you get less fearful, because your worst fears have been laid bare."

Is there a struggle between the painting and counselling? "God, no. My job is psychotherapy. My hobby is painting."

How does she manage to be so prolific? "I suppose when you create a space for something and invite it in, when you have a vision of how you want your life to be, throw it out there and walk into it."

Creating the space and then inhabiting it. If anyone was ever the living, breathing proof that such wonders are possible, that you can imagine a dream and make it happen, no matter what obstacles life presents, it is Elsie Nolan.

Counsellor, artist, mother -- and doubtless to those who meet her and know her, solid-gold inspiration.

Contact Elsie and view her paintings at elsienolan.com