Joanne Birdsey Linberg still remembers the day her father, artist Alfred Birdsey died.

“That morning a friend brought a lobster around,” the 78-year-old said. “My father was amazed at how big it was and told my sister to put it in the deep freeze.”

Mr Birdsey would never get to enjoy the lobster. That evening he died suddenly while watching television with his wife, Wilma.

“My mother called and said, you better come over here, I think your father just died,” Ms Linberg said.

Mrs Birdsey, a nurse, was correct. He was 84.

“I think he had a heart attack,” Ms Linberg said. “He had done so much with his life but never worried much at all about himself.”

Mr Birdsey was known worldwide for his oil paintings, watercolours and block prints. Today, some of his watercolours of Bermuda sell for as much as $2,500 on eBay.

Today, Ms Linberg keeps her father’s memory alive by maintaining his studio on Stowe Hill in Paget, pretty much as he left it. She regularly gives tours of the space, and talks with visitors about art and his legacy.

Some of her own work is for sale in the studio. “I have to give people something to look at or take home,” she said.

In her youth, Ms Linberg never intended to become a painter. Teaching was her dream.

At Warwick Academy, teacher Reggie Frewen, inspired a passion for Latin.

“Mr Frewen was a very serious man, but loved young people,” she said. “He had bushy eyebrows and could freeze a class with one look. I was fascinated by this man and how he could learn all of this stuff. I wanted to learn just like him, especially to translate. I loved trying to figure out what things said.”

Around the age of 14, she transferred to the Bermuda High School for Girls where Marjorie Hallett was the principal.

“It was very strict back then,” Ms Linberg said. “Dr Hallett was a very serious woman, and knew every student by name. Nobody messed with her. I loved BHS.”

After graduating from BHS, she studied Latin, Greek and archaeology at the University of Nottingham in Nottingham, England.

She met her future husband, Sjur Linberg in the university’s canteen The Buttery.

“He was from Norway and studying architecture,” she said.

One evening she was at a presentation and saw Mr Linberg coming down the stairs. She joked to a friend that Mr Linberg was the man she was going to marry.

“He overheard and almost fell down the stairs,” she said. “He was shy and it turned out he liked me a little bit.”

They became friends. “One day we were sitting in the school’s coffee lounge and I said I was thinking of going to Trinidad to teach after I graduated,” she said. “I wanted to go somewhere like Bermuda, but not Bermuda.

“I did not want to stay in England. It was so cold and foggy all the time. He said ‘you can’t’. I asked ‘why not?’. He said ‘you have to stay here with me; I have four more years of architecture to go’.”

Mr Linberg said to solve the problem they would have to get married.

“I said great, wonderful,” Ms Linberg said.

After getting married, she started teaching at the Loreto Grammar School, a catholic girl’s school in Nottingham run by the Sisters of Loreto Convent.

“I bought a Morris Minor with some money a relative left me,” she said. “When I went around a corner the seat would shift.”

She remembered how two nuns from the convent would often visit her and her husband, in secret.

“They would tell the sister at the convent that they had errands to run in Nottingham,” she said. “They would come into Nottingham, eat chocolate until it came out of their ears. Then they would come to our house. From the moment they walked in they exuded fun and warmth.”

There was just one problem; the Linberg’s white cat left telltale hairs all over the nuns’ habits.

“We got a clothes brush and had to brush them down before they left,” Ms Linberg said. “We had a great laugh with them.”

The Linbergs eventually returned to Bermuda where Ms Linberg found a job at Bermuda High School for Girls teaching Latin and art.

She loved teaching there, but some of her “progressive” teaching methods, with some of the older teachers.

“This one teacher would stand in the doorway and stare at me and my students,” Ms Linberg said. “I would stare right back. She wasn’t going to scare me. I was a good teacher.”

When she started teaching she had as many as 30 students in her class.

“They did not think anything of giving you that many children in those days,” she said.

One of her teaching tactics was to make her students laugh. “People can remember things better if you can make a joke of things,” she said.

She loved teaching, but eventually left because she wanted to paint with her father, whose profile was expanding.

Mr Birdsey started out running The Neighbourhood Grocery in Warwick, where Lindos is today.

“Everyone in the whole neighbourhood got their food from there,” she said. “He drove this dilapidated truck. One day it broke down and he pushed it up Trimingham Hill in Paget, by himself.”

He would paint as a way to relax. “He really did it to have another scene in his head,” she said.

When Ms Linberg was little, her father would often take her with him to get her out of the house. She would paint with him.

“He was a wonderful, caring father who was always trying to teach us something,” she said. “The best painting advice he ever gave me was ‘don’t over-do it’. You have to know when to stop painting.”

These days she does not paint as much as she would like, but some of her work appeared alongside her father’s in a recent Masterworks exhibition, Birdsey: Stories and Sentiments. In 2000, her paintings were also featured alongside her father’s work in an exhibition at the Union League Club in New York City.

Eighteen of her pieces were auctioned off to help The Robert Hampton Tapp foundation which provides 
scholarship assistance to deserving students.

But she finds exhibiting her work to be overwhelming.

“That type of thing makes me frozen,” she said. “To sit down and paint for a show is not how to do it, in my opinion.”

She and her husband, have one son, Kristen, and two grandsons.

• To inquire about a tour of the Birdsey Studio call 236-6658. Lifestyle profiles the island’s senior citizens every Wednesday. Contact Jessie Moniz Hardy on 278-0150 or jmhardy@royalgazette.com with the full name and contact details and the reason you are suggesting them