And while the dictum that there is a good woman behind every successful man may be true, it is essential that there is some man, woman, manager, agent, gallery or interested party in some shape or form behind every artist.

In a Catch-22 scenario, it is difficult to find one of the above unless you already have an interested party. Galleries will often ask where an artist has exhibited and who has bought their work before they even consider putting him or her on their books.

Two artists who have overcome the obstacles are Carmel Murphy from Waterford and Galina Reshetka from St Petersburg. They were both born in the early 1960s, have built up a body of work, have distinctive individual styles and are now emerging to become sought-after artists.

They will both exhibit their work next weekend.

Carmel Murphy acknowledges the difficulties in trying to get established in Ireland.

After studying art at Waterford Institute of Technology, she set up her own studio in the city and continued to study with various tutors while at the same time building up a body of work before she set about knocking on doors to further her artistic career.

She honed her skills with drawing lessons before she ever set brush to canvas and apprenticed herself to Wexford sculptor Seamus Furlong, renowned for his heads of politicians, including that of Sean Lemass. Indeed, Furlong's influence is often reflected in her work, which sometimes has a sculptural 3D dimension. It is evident in her early work, in the oil stained canvases with their textured paper technique.

Her flat mates often found primed and painted nylon stockings hanging in the kitchen by clothes pegs to make them stiff. The cliffs and sea shores in her more recent Algarve series still have sculptured edges.

Furlong was a great tutor and a mentor, she says. "He made me sketch a skeleton.

He made me draw it out bone by bone."

Such perfectionism is Murphy's trademark. She dislikes everything to do with paperwork, and the commercial aspects of the lead-up to a show and just prefers to paint.

And yet she did most of her own PR with a little help from a friend.

It was tough work, she says, slowly building up confidence with art galleries and art centres. Tougher still were the costs in trying to market herself. For instance, sending slides to galleries for assessment for exhibition was expensive and doubly so when the galleries never bothered to return them or, worse still, lost them.

"There was often no acknowledgement at all of letters or slides sent."

Murphy chooses to work alone rather than share one of the many studio complexes available to artists. She works better that way and gleans the illusion of solidarity by joining groups such as Visual Artists Ireland. Her hard work and knocking on doors paid off. South Eastern Radio commissioned a large canvas, which is now hanging on the walls of their offices in Wexford. Other commissions followed that. And she has numerous solo exhibitions under her belt.

She has a stand at Art Ireland in the RDS next weekend, a high-profile event which thousands of people are expected to visit. And although it is a good chance to show her work to a broad section of the public, her stand hire is expensive and the competition is tough . . . she is up against large galleries such as Gormleys from Omagh, who obviously have a much larger exhibition space. The stand hire, including lighting, costs somewhere around 2,500 . . . 3,000 for 15 square metres of space. She also has to pay substantial fees for framing. Nevertheless, she hopes to more than recover her costs.

Around about the same time as Murphy's career was taking shape in Waterford, Galina Reshetka's career was developing in Russia. And while Reshetka is established in her own country, she is just becoming so here.

Reshetka's career took shape from a very young age.

Her parents were professors in the Forestry department at the University in St Petersburg. The family lived in one of the city's old parks, where birds and animals also made their home.

Living in the depths of what amounted to a small forest surrounded by trees, she became fascinated by the variety of birds around her so from childhood began to paint them.

Becoming almost a veritable ornithologist, she studied their behaviour and captured their nesting, feeding, preening, flight and song patterns in both watercolour and oil. Slowly she built up a portfolio and became one of Russia's renowned bird painters.

Her style is reminiscent of the Dutch School by which she was influenced. Her collectors in Russia and her growing numbers of admirers in Ireland refer to her affectionately as the 'Bird Lady'.

Bernadette Murphy at Magil Fine Art, who has become her mentor in Ireland and regularly brings her work here, is curious as to why people buy bird paintings, but since her website for the exhibition went up it has been hopping with demands.

Reshetka herself may have the answer. "The more I paint them, the deeper I feel for my subject, " she says. "They seem to be mysterious singing creatures. And I sing myself. I am part of the Domostroi choir.

More and more I am drawn back to the woods in St Petersburg to study them and make more sketches." And there's no doubt that Reshetka captures the magical, knowing, humorous qualities that birds, particularly small song birds, just seem to innately possess.

Like Carmel Murphy, Galina Reshetka too, is a perfectionist right down to the detail in the tiny ruffled feathers and the glint in the eye. "I spent years wandering through the Hermitage and other museums in St Petersburg just absorbing the beauty of the paintings before me and often sketching them."

DIARY Today: The 7th Irish International Antiques & Contemporary Art Fair, Main Hall Complex, RDS, Dublin 29 March: Adam's Irish Art Sale, 26, St.Stephen's Green, Dublin 2 30 March - 1 April: Magil Fine Art's exhibition and sale of Russian Art, Conrad Hotel, Dublin 2 31 March . . . 2 April: Art Ireland, Main Hall, RDS, Dublin 4A 27 March - 9 April: Dublin Painting & Sketching Club annual exhibition, Dun Laoghaire County Hall, Marine Road, Dun Laoghaire 4 April: De Vere's art sale, RHA, Ely Place, Dublin 1