The painter Cherith McKinstry, who died last week, was born in 1928 in the village of Powick near Great Malvern in Worcestershire, one of three daughters of Lilian Goodwin and Arthur Boyd.
Her father was a doctor at the psychiatric hospital in Powick. When Cherith was three, he took up the post of superintendent of the mental hospital in Antrim and the family moved back to his native Ulster. Cherith and her sisters, the elder Dawn and the younger Anthea, were taught by a governess until the two older girls went to board at Ashleigh House in Belfast in 1938.
There she met and befriended Florence McKinstry, whose brother she would later marry. The following year Arthur Boyd died and Lilian, a qualified nurse, became assistant matron at Ashleigh. The school was evacuated to Learmount Castle in the Sperrin Mountains for the war years.
Cherith contracted polio and the resultant lameness in one leg freed her from games and allowed her to embark on solitary walks in the woods which she later recalled as idyllic.
Her art teacher, Romilly Seymour, recognised her talent and encouraged her to go on to study at the Belfast College of Art. Among her contemporaries there were Basil Blackshaw and Terence Flanagan, and she maintained a lifelong friendship with the former.
She first met the architect Robert McKinstry, her future husband, there as a tutor. They married in 1958 and had three sons, Simon, Leo and Jason. After leaving college, she was awarded a travel scholarship that enabled her to visit France and Italy, and Italian painting and cultural life became an enduring influence. Initially she and Robert lived on Rugby Road, Belfast. In 1968 they moved to Chrome Hill in Lisburn. The fact that her studio was part of her home meant that she was perpetually prey to domestic demands.
Though best known as a painter, early on Cherith also made sculpture, for which she had a natural facility, and a sculptural feeling for form is strongly evident in many of her earlier, figurative paintings. She worked within what could be described as a timeless, classical representational tradition, though late in her life she experimented with a more abstract idiom. Her mature work, consisting of carefully considered studies of landscape, figure and still-life subjects, as well as views of isolated objects, are characterised by a mellow, even light and pictorial harmony.
Earlier on she was, unusually for the time, drawn to explicitly Christian themes, including her painting Mary at Bethlehem (1962), which is in the Ulster Museum, though she generally approached these themes from an essentially humanist perspective.
Her abiding concern in her work throughout the 1960s and 1970s was with suffering, inhumanity and endurance. Perhaps her most direct comment in that regard was a painting inspired by a Life magazine cover depicting the maltreatment of a Viet Cong suspect by his captors in Vietnam, a subject with clear links to the iconography of the Crucifixion.
Such explicitness was relatively rare. Increasingly, quiet understatement, albeit infused with a poetic intensity, was more the norm. Even such workaday objects as oil drums were graced with a glowing, lyrical presence in her pictures. These paintings were undoubtedly influenced by the work of Charles Brady, a long-term friend and correspondent. He was one of two Dublin painter friends; the other was Patrick Pye, and perhaps her liking for both reflected the complementary sides of her painterly character.
She undertook several large-scale projects, including her largest work, a series of ceiling panels for the Belfast Opera House (1979). They were made without the benefit of scaffolding. Unlike the Sistine Chapel, they were painted on canvas, off-site, and subsequently installed. She also painted a large composition, Students, for the main staircase of Queen's (1986) and, earlier on, a series of Stations of the Cross for the church of St McNissi at Magherahoney (1967).
In 1987 she was awarded an Honorary MA from Queen's. She exhibited with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, with the group Figurative Image, and throughout the 1990s she became a regular exhibitor at the Royal Hibernian Academy's annual exhibitions.
She is survived by her husband Robert and her sons Simon, Leo and Jason.
Cherith McKinstry: born March 4th, 1928; died October 2004