Midnight In The Garden.

A greeting card, Good Girls Go To Heaven. Another card states: Bad Girls Go Everywhere.

Wilson in her studio, which doubles as a laundry room, with some of her humorous work.

Experiment In Colour, acrylic and oil.

Her abundance of waist-length silver-grey hair is piled up into interesting turns and twists on the top of her head and anchored here and there with a variety of clips.

Wilson is clever, hilarious, intelligent and vibrant. She's a free spirit who builds a snowman every winter and rides her bicycle in red running shoes and socks. She is wonderfully alive with a mind that skips, dances and runs, as if charged, from one thought to the next -- her new ideas, her favourite writers, books she has been reading, quotations she admires and her concerns, opinions and philosophies. Spending time with her could be either exhausting or exhilarating.

Angus, her Wheaton terrier, barks from behind the gated door in the kitchen, a room bathed in daffodil yellow. Light pours in the undraped windows. Her artist's touch is on the glass table with the fat, yellow candles contrasted against a black wrought-iron candelabra and a vase of purple, red and yellow tulips springing forth in different directions.

The burgundy-coloured dining room is a delicious, contemporary affair with her collection of art glass, pottery and pieces swapped with other artists. Swirled, sculptured silver-back chairs are set against a table topped with four of artist/potter Colleen O'Reilly Lafferty's dinner plates awash with coloured squiggles and designs.

Wilson's collection of silver napkin rings hold napkins in shocking pink, Van Gogh yellow, bright green and lipstick red. She's having dinner guests and her daughter, Anne Sands, has brought back the napkins for her mother from a weekend in Niagara-on-the-Lake as a gift for keeping her son, James, 2 1/2. The food, of course, will be just as colourful -- pink-orange salmon that husband Jock will barbecue and serve with fresh green asparagus and bright-orange sweet potatoes. They have been married 47 years.

The living room, with its walls the shade of a fine old claret, is eclectic and interesting with antique furniture and Wilson's favourite things.

We move upstairs and head for her studio -- and laundry room -- the most intriguing laundry room you could ever find. A blue Buddhist prayer flag hangs from the chain of the ceiling fan. Her son, Michael, gave it to her from his travels to Tibet where prayer flags are hung on trees to blow in the wind.

Buddhism appeals to her. "It makes sense to me," says Wilson, who was raised an Anglican and describes herself as a spiritual person because, "I like to think that's where my art comes from." She thinks it is a terrible responsibility to have been given a gift. "You have to share, you have to give a lot, it's a great privilege." And then she ends this thought with: "It's too much about money now."

Overhead cabinets are taped with notes, sayings and quotations. Colourful pieces of her art and family pictures hang on the wall and there are racks of her favourite CDs.

Here, on her spacious work table overlooking North Shore Boulevard where cars are whizzing by, is where Wilson draws her notorious bad and good girls who always celebrate life. They come semi-nude or bare naked or fashionably and tastefully well-dressed, "definitely Armani," she says. One thing is a certainty -- they are always having fun. The bad-girl cards come with the ribald sayings of Mae West -- or from naughty Doreen Wilson. These provocative women with the voluptuous bodies are drawn, painted and mounted on high-quality rag paper, then sold as greeting cards. Priced at $10, these are her affordable art. There are gold and red hearts tattooed on shapely bottoms, fleshy hands with many rings hold a martini and ears are festooned with earrings -- some of which are quite naughty.

But there are many other sides to this multitalented artist who sold her first pieces after she turned 40. There are delicate and sweetly innocent cards celebrating the births of babies, there is the wildly funny God Is In Therapy series and her homage to Picasso, which psychiatrists seem to prefer. There are the haunted faces of young women, some with a light slash of paint across their eyes symbolizing a mask because they cannot bear to see the horrors in front of them; and there is the darker side -- her galaxy series in powdered graphite with angels and unsettling suggestions of obscure forces, the balance of good and evil.

This is a side that goes back to her earliest memory of horrors -- being shown films of the Holocaust after the Second World War ended. "I went home and went to bed for three days and contemplated the nature of good and evil." There is her poetry, published by Ryerson Press, and there are her painted tiles, some of which have an Old World frescoed look. And there are different techniques with which she is experimenting, such as acrylic transfer, lino cut, mono prints, etching on gold leaf, copper-point drawing, even dyeing patches of her wedding dress with tea and cutting up old linen pants for backgrounds.

Close to noon, her daughter, Anne, and grandson drop in for a visit. Anne is Wilson's youngest and lives in Hamilton with her partner. Wilson also has three sons. Michael is in Korea, Peter is in Peru and David, the oldest, lives in Burlington.

What's it like to have such an unorthodox, flamboyant mother? "I'm not not too surprised by anything she does. It's better than having a dull mother," says Anne, recalling her mother listening to Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones when Anne was a teen. She first noticed she had a different sort of mother when she was in Girl Guides.

"We had to bring in a decorated boxed lunch. Mom made the most incredible dollhouse. The other mothers sent in boxes from Eaton's." The lunch inside, though, wasn't as impressive.

Where did this colourful woman, who can appear formidable to some, come from?

She grew up as Doreen Sands with her father and brother, her grandparents and an aunt and uncle on Dunsmure Road in Hamilton. Her mother died of pneumonia when she was three.

"There was a lot of laughter. It was like a hotel because everyone came to our house. We had Saturday Night Magazine and from that we'd get our discussions going. It was a stimulating and intellectual experience."

Wilson had a keen eye even as a child. "I noticed that the men were always noisy and the women were quiet, but they quietly got their own way."

She watched her aunt Olive, now 85, getting ready to go out with her boyfriends and she watched all the tramps coming in to her grandmother's kitchen to have soup during the Depression of the 1930s. "I remember seeing this man in the kitchen and saying, 'Who is that man?' And my grandmother said, 'This man is hungry and we must feed him.' My grandfather made the soup."

Wilson thinks her love of colour came from living during the Depression. "We had no colour. The world was grey. The most colourful thing was a carrot and red apples. We had Victory gardens. We never saw an orange."

Living as a child in an adult world allowed Wilson to see the choices.

"I saw the homemaker and the career woman." And she admired the men she knew in her young life. "I'm a feminist for sure, but I'm not a crazy one because the men I knew were all good and kind. Every summer we canned our fruit and all these men pitted and peeled the fruit and the women boiled the syrup. Everyone, aunts and uncles, showed up to help." And she remembers drawing all the time. Her friends sat on her porch steps enthralled as she illustrated stories while she made them up. She went to Adelaide Hoodless Elementary School and then to Delta Secondary School, where she first encountered Jock -- and couldn't stand him.

"He played football and he was always the president of everything. Friends were always trying to get us to meet but I remember saying, 'I will never, ever meet him. I'm sure he doesn't know how to read.' But there was something about him." One night, friends pushed Jock up her front steps and into her house. "I think my heart stopped beating, I just fell apart. He seemed to have a golden glow around him." She went on to Hamilton Teachers College and married Jock when she was 22. They had four children by the time she was 30. They moved around Ontario with Jock's banking job. In London, she took art courses and philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. They moved to Toronto and finally to Burlington. And her art kept getting better and better.

She started turning to humour about five years ago. "People need humour more than ever. It makes everyone feel better."

Wilson wants to see more humour. Spontaneously, she authors another card -- one to come -- when she says, "I'm not just over the hill, I'm on my way down."