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Isabel Curtin.

Artist. Mother. Teacher. Relentless worker. Born April 21, 1921, in Bangalore, India; died Feb. 24, 2017, in Toronto, of cardiac arrest; aged 95.

"Bite off more than you can chew. And chew it," is good advice for the ambitious. Our mother grasped that intuitively.

As a toddler, Isabel looked up at a painting she loved and wanted to become an accomplished artist. It would take her 60 years to achieve this goal, eventually selling out multiple one-man shows in Toronto at an age when many people are retired.

An "Isabel Kann" (her maiden name) was typically a beautiful interior adorned with flowers and patterned cloth, radiating light and life. Perhaps her finest canvasses were done in her 70s. Some were acquired by major buyers such as Imperial Oil, Dupont and the Bronfman's Claridge Collection.

Isabel's talent was obvious early. She went to the School of Art in Bournemouth and won a scholarship to the Edinburgh College of Art. But soon after graduating, she put her career on hold determined to have seven children. It was a long project. Her first fiancé was killed in a plane crash, her second was refused an annulment from Rome for his divorce.

She finally wed Viennese photographer and Holocaust survivor Walter Curtin. Marrying a Jew wasn't well accepted by the Catholic Church of the time. So the priest who performed the ceremony, one misty London morning in 1949, penned an explanatory note in the register: "Getting on in her years." Isabel was 28.

The couple's first-born died when he was three days old. Isabel was too sick to leave hospital, so Walter took the casket to the cemetery in a taxi and buried their son alone.

Happier years were to come. In 1951, with baby daughter Katie in tow, they left England for Canada, where Isabel gave birth to Joseph, John, Mary, Caroline and Philippa. Painting gave way to cooking, cleaning, laundry and the kids' homework.

In her early 50s, just when she was starting a comeback as an artist, financial trouble forced Isabel to get a teaching job and work on an academic degree. I still remember her 18-hour days and the relentlessness with which she plowed through them. While working full-time, painting weekends and evenings and caring for six teenagers, she completed a bachelor's degree in English at the University of Toronto with some stunning marks.

Isabel's later life was almost totally dedicated to art. With Walter stretching her canvasses, she painted in her third-floor studio in Toronto and worked many happy months each year in the South of France, Tuscany or New Mexico.

At 85, afflicted with a trembling hand, she reluctantly put her brushes away having completed some 300 paintings.

She moved in with her youngest daughter Philippa and son-in-law Kerry and continued to read, take long walks with her dog and dine with friends.

Isabel's last dream was to live to 96 like her husband, whom she'd lost 10 years earlier. She'd made up her mind to ignore her suffering and stick it out so she could keep donating part of her pension to the poor. Our mother had a big heart and a will of steel.

A devout Catholic, she died peacefully a few weeks shy of her 96th birthday with Philippa by her bedside. In the final months of her life, we sang to her again and again words from the Welsh folk song: "Guardian angels God will send thee, all through the night."

John Curtin is one of Isabel's sons.

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