“I like color, you know,” Maria Teresa Rafferty explains, pointing at the “little houses”she painted. “I try to make some grays or something (but) … Ilike my Italian colors. … The bright ones.”

Someone once told the painter and photographer that she used too many of the primary colors.

“But I’m just fascinated by what I see,”she replies.

All that she sees, all that is fascinating, is revealed to her in dazzling color:a little cluster of buildings in Spencer, the grace of a steed, the silhouette of a human body.

Rafferty, originally from Rome, began painting in 1980, said she was captivated by the art “before kindergarten,” probably inheriting the talent from her grandfather and mother. Her only formal instruction came while she lived in Saudi Arabia, when she earned a certificate from the Famous Artists School of Westport, Conn., via correspondence.

She works in oils, watercolor, acrylic and pencil, but says her favorite medium is pastels.

“Because it is easy,” she admits. But she doesn’t like it when things get too simple, so she wants to improve on other things like working with a palette knife — and working with a paintbrush. She likes to paint with her hands and fingers “because I read someplace when your fingers get closer to the painting, it gets easier. … And brushes have been a complication for me for a while, because if I’m not agreeing with (where they want to go) that’s when it is a mess. But I’m learning to agree with what the brush tells me. That’s when you know your inner part is really coming out.”

Her techniques might have evolved since her first painting, but her influences have not changed.

“Ilike people,” she says, “and if I could paint people (all the time), then Iwould just love it.”

Rafferty was visiting a friend in Rome who’d been diagnosed with cancer — a friend she’d “met when I was born because the mothers were friends in elementary school.” She was at the top of a hill from which could see the entire city. She saw umbrella pines, but that’s not what she felt.

“It’s probably not my best one, but certainly there are all my feelings in it,” she says. “ … The sorrow to see this girl dying, it’s all there.”

Rafferty says she has the “power to go under (people’s) skin. I can see (their) character.”

Last year she did a five-minute life drawing of a woman who “was really nice. … We were at the end of the hour … and I said, ‘Well, OK, I’ll think of how I see her.’ Then (Rafferty makes painting motions). That is a good one.”

But she won’t limit herself to painting people.

“My head is all over the place,”Rafferty admits. “That’s my style.”

She used to sell china she would paint on in Saudi Arabia and recently her daughter-in-law wanted some of Rafferty’s original art on her own espresso cups.

“I did a set of eight:two with butterflies, two with kitty cats, two with birds and two with ladybugs. She wanted ladybugs!” Rafferty says, laughing. “So I told her there is a story in each ladybug that Ipainted.”

It was suggested to her by Ron Crusan, former director of the Waterworks Visual Arts Center, to do a series after she was inspired by some traffic lights.

“I was stopped near the (North Carolina License Plate Agency)at the traffic light and I looked up and there I saw all these electric lines, so Itook a photo — I always have my camera with me — and I went home and drew it,”she remembers. “Then we got together with Ron Crusan and he said, ‘Why don’t you make a series?’ So I put people in it, and the traffic light colors were contrary; they were not green, yellow and red anymore.”

She is fascinated with abstract art, which she says is hard to describe to people. Her painting titled “Colors”is an abstract life drawing, for example, and “Quattro”features images of trees caught in a spirited, swaying motion. “Quattro” is one painting that was helped along by the music she listens to while she works.

Rafferty is 64 now and knows that, one day, creating with her hands might not be as easy or possible. If arthritis ever sets in, “I’ll go get people … and talk things over.”

“My husband knows that Ineed to (paint), … butI want people to remember me for who I am.”