CUERNAVACA ? Dark-faced Madonnas draped in Mexican cloth recline in gilded frames or gaze demurely downward on the way to market. Angels in Celtic garb leap to an ancient beat, colorful ponies toss their heads in wild abandon, a golden lizard crawls across a canvas.

The painting is pure Malcolmson, but the influences are Florentine, Native American, Japanese, Celtic, Siennese and Mexican. Seated in her Cuernavaca home, on the eve of a series of exhibits at Las Quintas Hotel, Malcolmson reflects on the upbringing that shaped her work.

?I wasn't raised, I was cultivated,? Malcolmson recalls. ?My father, who was 48 when I was born, took me to the Chicago Art Institute where we would do a room a day. When you're a child, and you're encouraged to follow family tradition, you pick up the torch and carry it. I started painting when I was four.?

Malcolmson's parents immigrated to Chicago from Ireland in 1947. Her father, a visionary Dublin architect, studied a Master of Architecture under Mies Van der Rohe, a member of the Bauhaus group. When Van der Rohe died, he assumed directorship of the Illinois Institute of Technology's School of Architecture, but was later appointed dean of the University of Michigan's School of Art and Architecture in Ann Arbor.

Saturdays were spent studying paintings, while her father described the period the artist lived in, and its effect on technique. Sundays were spent at the opera, the ballet or taking in a play.

Malcolmson's mother, a painter with a sociology degree from Queen's University, Belfast, helped migrants adapt to life in America until age 50, when she returned to school for an accounting degree. During the Vietnam war she worked as an accountant for the federal government, adopting the Quaker faith to protest the war, and working with returning veterans. Summers were spent on art history and archeology trips, or in Taos, New Mexico.

Malcolmson, who spent time on Hopi and Navajo reservations, observing ritual ceremonies and eagle dances, says she still feels the beat of the drums reverberate in her heart.

Her impressions of the Taos marketplace, where indigenous women worked with babies strapped to their backs, later merged with her perceptions of Mexican women carrying their children in colorful rebozos or shawls.

In the sixties, when Malcolmson's father took the family to Ecuador on a Fullbright scholarship, she developed juvenile diabetes that later affected her sight.

Once out of high school she pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and figure drawing, followed by a year of study at the Boston School of Fine Arts, a course in French at the Sorbonne, and a diploma in Spanish literature and art from Santander, Spain. After completing a Master of Architecture at The Illinois Institute of Art and Architecture, she went on to post graduate study in Florence with Izza Petrozani, the last of the Italian futurists.

Malcolmson moved to Mexico in 1985 to teach drawing at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. In 1987, after seven surgeries to restore an almost total loss of sight, her painting career was suspended for a year.

The series of Madonnas she painted after her son, Colum, was born, marked a return to the art world that would typify her future work.

?I believe each brush stroke is the sum total of my experiences,? Malcolmson said. ?After my son's birth I began to paint Madonnas. It reflected my reality, and it helped other people see theirs.?

Malcolmson's painting appears Mexican baroque, but isn't, she explains. The brilliant colors are derived from Japanese water colors made in Kyoto, Japan. The bright greens, startling reds, and vibrant pinks and purples of the Japanese palette are closer to Mexican colors than English watercolors, which are painted in tenuous earth tones. The antique gold frames and gold backgrounds come from the Irish tradition of illuminated manuscripts found in the Book of Kells, a 5th century source book written by Saint Columba, her son Colum's patron saint. Christian symbols that appear in Malcolmson's work can be traced back to her ancestors, the first Irish tribe to embrace Christianity.

Her figures, whether animal or human, are flat, a style used in Italian 15th century Quatrocento painting. Every painting, executed on grainy beige paper made of 100 percent Mexican rag, is inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian papyrus scrolls. Pre-Hispanic motifs reflect a fascination with ancient symbols found in Mexican bead work and embroidery.

?You really have to like what you do,? Malcolmson concluded. ?My painting comes from deep inside, I don't have to think about it, it's about passion.?

Malcomson's work is on display every weekend in April, at Hosteria Las Quintas in Cuernavaca.

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