WHEN Chara Nagle decided that she wanted to go to NCAD, the National College of Art and Design, she was warned that it was really difficult to get into and that nobody from her all-girls, Cork school had ever been accepted there. Others might have been deterred but Nagle instead adopted a "Right, I'll show them!" approach and got in. It was the first time she realised that if you work really hard and you're really passionate about something, you'll get it. "I was just an average student but with art, it was just my thing, I was always best in the class and I kind of took it for granted, " the 33-year-old artist says looking back on her schooldays. "I suppose because art wasn't perceived as an academic subject, it was never taken very seriously but I just kept at it."

Now, some 14 years later, she's fresh from the success of her first solo show at No 15 St Stephen's Green, which was a sell-out, and is being heralded as one of the country's most exciting artistic talents. Nagle's work is big, bold and beautiful. Working with acrylics on massive canvases, her paintings are hyper-real, cataclysms of vivid colour that evoke an immediate, emotive response. This, of course, is exactly the effect she hopes to elicit.

"I ask my cleaning lady as well as my postman. 'What do you think of this now?

What do you think? What do you think?' It's always people's gut reaction that is the right reaction. You don't have to know anything about painting. It's not about fine art, it's about the 'moment'."

These 'moments' she refers to formed the basis of last week's exhibition, where the paintings capture a split second in time, leaving the viewer with many unanswered questions. Who is the topless woman striding into the sea? What's the story behind the jodhpur-clad duo in 'Riders'?

Nagle explains that she's always been into drama and intensity. During her first year in art college, she concentrated on fish and shellfish, making a beach installation in her studio, where the entire wall was covered in seaweed. It stank, she recalled. "I didn't really know why I was doing it or using the objects I was using but it was the start of playing with people's emotions."

NCAD proved to be a very different experience from her relatively sheltered schooldays. On her first day there, she was sent out to bring back four examples of different types of dust. "I suppose they were just trying to take us out of our comfort zone. What they do in there is strip you right back and build you up, " she says.

While painting was her first love, she didn't like the direction it was taking at NCAD at the time, which was quite abstract. "We did life drawing classes, and stuff, but the emphasis was on what's going on in your head and expressing your sexual issues, it was all about politics and I just wanted to paint, " she says. Instead, she opted for sculpture and for her degree show she created a 10ft X 7ft wall made of lollypop bricks (courtesy of three tonnes of sugar from Suicra), accompanied by a picture of a perfect family. Her tutors thought it was frivolous but the public loved it.

After graduating, she moved to London, where she worked in window display for large stores like Harvey Nichols.

"I just wanted bright lights and action. I just wanted an opportunity to create a make-believe world and to create stuff that would get reactions from people so I just thought in London there were lots of big stores with big window display opportunities, " she says, "and to me it was a way of making art and really colourful vibrant art, and there was quite a clear objective as well as to why you were doing it . . . to get people's attention to get them into the store and to buy it. I liked that kind of clarity."

She then spent some time working on pop videos for artists including Dave Stewart and Pulp and after four years, moved back to Dublin and set up a design company specialising in window displays, designing and building exhibition stands and product launches.

Clients included Diageo, Heineken and Marks and Spencer's and while she wasn't painting, she says she was subconsciously picking up ideas the whole time. But after ten years of designing, being in meetings with clients and working on campaigns with other designers, it reached the stage where all she really wanted to do was paint all day.

Leaving a successful day job for the uncertainty of being a fulltime artist didn't faze her because she knew she could make a living from it, having financed most of her way through college with painting commissions.

"I had made money out of it in the past and I knew I'd make money out of it again, " she says. "It would have been daunting to start painting when I'd come out of college because I hadn't lived life enough to know what I wanted to paint."

She likes spending time on her own and says that the one time she's truly at peace with herself is when she's painting. "Everytime I do a painting, I look back and think, 'Christ!' It's kind of like I'm the medium for some spirit or subconscious or something that has to get these desires or moments out onto the canvas. It's mad. I look back and go 'Did I really do that?'" If she finds the act of painting all consuming, getting started is not always as easy. The early stages of work can be torture, she says. "It's a battle. It's you against the canvas, and it's, 'Right, I'm going to win this'. But deep down you think 'maybe I won't', you're only as good as your last piece."

Avoidance tactics involve cleaning the bedroom, going for walks and it can take about a week and a half before she can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The actual painting itself can take up to a month to do, because the style is so realistic.

Nagle is never quite certain what she's going to paint next, but references Deepak Chopra: "When you just let the noise settle, it comes to the front. My husband will ask, what are you going to paint next?

And I don't know but I will know, but I don't know until I've painted the last painting but they seem to follow on from each other.

The one I'm looking at at the moment is called 'Behind Closed Doors' and it's getting me into quite a calm state and I think the next one might be calm as well because it's such a lovely feeling at the moment but it will be different colours."

Her husband, Jason McChesney, used to work with her in the design company but does not share his wife's artistic inclinations. "We used to laugh about how he was the suit and I was the fruit, " she says. "He's my rock. I couldn't have gone back into painting fulltime without him being there because he's very level headed, logical, stable."

And the implication being that she doesn't think that she is? "Well, I not totally hippie dippy but if you were to ask him am I a creative, he'd say, yes, definitely, " she says.

"I remember a few years ago just thinking, 'God, I'd love to be brilliant at business' I was talking to my dad about it and he was saying, 'Chara you've just got to work with the talent you have. Everyone has their gift.

You're a brilliant creative, just work with that.' And when I went back into it fulltime, the amount of people who said, 'We always knew you would, it would have been such a waste of a talent.' But you know, when something is under your nose, you just can't see it?"