Independent people non waters

It’s thousands of miles away from places like Pakistan, Japan and Greece to the shores of Lough Ree, but that’s just part of an eventful life journey to date taken by local artist Non Waters.

Christened Rhiannon, an old Welsh name, which is well known to music fans as the title of a famed Fleetwood Mac song, she laughs that her sister shortened her name in their youth and it just stuck.

“I was born in Pakistan so I spent most of my life in the Middle East and Far East because my folks were in the diplomatic service so we moved around quite a lot. t was two year postings here and there,” she recalls, listing Kuwait, Laos, Thailand, Japan and Greece as just a flavour of the places she spent her early life. Of all of those, Japan was the place that really struck a chord with her.

“There was such a stark contrast from the cities like Tokyo and then when you went into the countryside you could have gone back hundreds of years.

“It was just incredible to see the contrast of the very fast Tokyo culture to that very slow, graceful old Japanese culture. Even at seven to nine I was very aware of that,” she explains, adding that most of her childhood was in the Far East, rather than Middle East, where the peaceful Buddhist culture was something that also resonated with her.

“I look back and I think how lucky were we,” Non says, of meeting so many people in her childhood with her brother and two sisters, the youngest of which was adopted in Laos.

“There was an amazing place in Laos, it was coffee shop cum restaurant and you’d see people from all over the world gather there to chat, you wouldn’t know where they were from.”

However, with so much moving, it was not without difficulties too and this is where art was her saviour and she rarely went anywhere with her trusty notebook.

“Art was always that nice, secure bubble in life growing up because you’d go to different schools and you were adapting all the time and having to get used to a new syllabus, new people whereas art always remained the same so it was the only constant thing. I just naturally gravitated towards it because it was expressive.”

After attending international schools in Japan, Laos and finally Greece, where she completed her O-levels Non and her family returned to the UK, where her parents settled. With her A-Levels complete in Oxfordshire, she opted to take time out to decide what to next, working for a time in Boots and travelling to Australia and New Zealand where her older brother and sister had married.

Non explained she knew she wanted to do art, but was worried if she could earn a living.

“The draw was too strong though and I ended up going to the Winchester School of Art,” she said.

Over three years she completed her degree in History of Art and Design, Marxist History of Art, a course which drew really drew on art in history, a link to the past that still fascinates Non today.

Following art school her life took another diverting twist, working full-time in marketing DIY components, a part-time post that she had worked at during college. By chance Non was asked to do a commission some time later for a young offenders’ prison, an opening which started a whole new chapter for her.

“A friend’s mother-in-law had asked me because her daughter who used to work in the prison as a teacher had passed away and they wanted a painting in memory of this lady.

“Anyway I went in with the painting completed and the education manager asked: ‘You don’t happen to teach art, do you?’ I had no teaching experience but they got me onto a teaching programme and I went from there,” Non remembers.

“We ended  up doing murals in these very murky corridors going up to each of the units and different wings in the remand centre.

“We just covered it in artwork and it was like legalised graffiti for a lot of these young men, some of whom were uber talented. That was brilliant, so that’s how I got into the teaching, pretty much by accident.”

Although challenging work, Non enjoyed it thoroughly. “It was such chequered backgrounds. It wasn’t just the boys on the wrong side of town.

“One in particular was just about to go to university and had been caught in possession of something illegal and that was it,” she states of her two years working in the remand centre.

“They loved the fact that they could leave their units, go out into a corridor and have a bit of freedom, the space.”
Deciding to spend some time nurturing her own artistic talent, Non later did some supply teaching and worked with some local councils on various art projects.

She describes her own pieces in enthusiastic detail: “The artwork I love doing are my Guinness men, I love old faces and you are capturing that kind of nostalgia so I do a lot of what they call chiaroscuro, the light and the dark in a painting.”

“I portray these old fellas and a lot of time they are these memories of people I’ve seen in the past. The rest of the stuff I do is quirky stuff, kind of caricatures,” adds Non, whose pieces can be seen hanging in Grogan’s Restaurant in Glasson and the Glasson Golf and Country House Hotel among others. They are also for sale in Glasson Craft Gallery, she says, paying tribute to owner Stephen Mitchell who is hugely supportive of local artists and talent.

Non ended up settling in the Glasson area after meeting her husband John, a cousin of her art school friend, at a party in England. Two years later they married and now have two children Conor (12) and Annie (7).

“John always wanted to come back and I could understand that completely, whereas I, Miss Tumbleweed, had never settled anywhere,” she laughs, explaining that her husband had spent summers here in his youth with his cousins, the Reids of Fernhill, even though he grew up and works in Dublin.

His grandfather was Frank Waters, a former Chairperson of Athlone Town Council in the 1950s.
“I loved it because this is the absolute opposite to anything that I had grown up with. It was settled, my kids go to Tubberclair school. To come to a lovely environment like this, it’s so safe and everybody acknowledges you. It’s completely different to what I’m used to,” she outlines of the relocation.

A friend later suggested she try children’s art classes which she duly did, getting a great response. That led to some teaching in Athlone Community Training Centre and the Irish Wheelchair Association and more recently, with Athlone IT as oil painting tutor which she has just concluded with a successful exhibition in Glasson.

 She loves the variety of the work with people of all ages and absolutely delights in someone finding a creative outlet that they may never had a chance or time to nurture.

“Children are an absolute joy because the confidence they have is boundless when they come in. In the training centre you have teenagers who hadn’t got great experiences in school and to get them to have confidence and to say this is a different way of looking at things, its not academic.
 
“Then adults when they come in, you can almost see them become the child within a little afraid of what they are doing there”.

However, Non is very much of view that everyone has the capacity to be creative, saying that she believes there is an innate part of us that is made to create, where it is visual art, dance, writing etc. For her, the most rewarding thing is seeing that blossom, recalling one woman on her oil painting course who was just producing beautiful work, so much so that she has since had her own exhibition and sold every single piece.

With the advent of the Luan Gallery, the artist’s studios and various art groups, she says the town is “bursting with talent”. However, she would love to see art valued more at secondary school level.

In between all of her varied teaching posts and her own artwork, the affable artist likes nothing more than spending time on the tranquil river with her family, both of which will be subject of a solo exhibition she hopes to mount in the future.