Serious painters have two main concerns: a loyalty to their own integrity and the need to please others well enough to sell enough work in order to live well enough. Many of us stumble between these in an effort to find a middle path that satisfies both. It's impossible, unless you are very lucky. I am not a lucky painter, neither is Rosheida Johnson. I might go further: good luck doesn't follow serious artists, bad luck, however, dogs them.

My bad luck concerns nothing more serious than a complete inability to market my work; whenever I try I fall flat on my face, so much so now that I've virtually given up. Rosh's bad luck follows and dogs her health. No way does she deserve her bad luck, but her good-natured triumph over it is a remarkable lesson, to me at least - blessed as I've been (so far) with extraordinary good health.

Rosh was born on the outskirts of Manchester but Lowestoft in Suffolk was where she spread herself as a child. Thereafter she travelled across Europe, funding this by whatever work came along. She says, "I married and settled in Lowestoft and was busy bringing up my two children when one sleepless night, I saw a vase of flowers with a piece of paper and pencil on the table. At that moment I was hooked and became completely absorbed in my drawing. I have been ever since. Slowly I began to dabble with colour and the excitement of the whole process grew and grew".

She moved to Sleaford, Lincolnshire in 1995, and began to experiment with different mediums. Pastels become her favourite. Having sold several paintings through local exhibitions, her confidence grew and she had a successful Solo Exhibition at the Swineshead Gallery in 2001. She met Dr Rob and moved to Westward Ho! in North Devon, which is where I got to know her. Serious health issues dog her still but you'd never know it. Yesterday she clambered onto the back of my big Ducati and we went to a favourite place for a cuppa before attending the life class at my studio.

At Fremington Quay Cafe we gazed at the estuary and discussed the difficulty of dealing with a fairly featureless flat landscape. She talked about seeing it though different eyes – eyes which can no longer discern colour accurately. And yet you look at her paintings and see it in abundance; it comes, she says, from a memory bank, "it's not like never having been able to see colour well".

Looking again at her work, I am aware of a violet haze which suffuses much of it (for an extreme example see Sweet Smoke). Is this a consequence of impaired vision or, as I prefer to believe, an example of virtue being made the slave of personal identity? The naiveness that seeps through her work is not that of an untutored eye but of a childlike vision that glories not in adversity but in still being able to see at all! – something which most of us, though we might wrestle with and curse spectacles, still rather take for granted. It is only Visual Artists who don't.

Rosh's work is an honest reaction to the beauty she still sees around her. She is not interested in pity or sympathy or faux intellectualism. What you see with her work is the real person – good, honest and true.