Paul Nugent graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 1990. Having left school early, he had already worked at panel-beating and spray-painting cars. Aidan Dunne writes

After attending night classes he assembled a portfolio and got into college. He enjoyed NCAD, citing the way the course was firmly centred on art practice, with relevant adjuncts including art history. Some people, he observes, hit the ground running after college.

He has consistently taken a slower approach. He went to London for a year and a half, taking casual jobs, absorbing the place, but became frustrated at not producing his own work. By the time he returned to Dublin at the start of the 1990s he looked at the city in a more positive way.

He got a place in Aungier Street Studios and then found a studio in James's Street, before moving into his current studio in Henrietta Street. "Unless you surround yourself with other artists you can tend to lose a sense of what you're doing. Art is part of a continual conversation and communication with other artists," he says.

Although he was on the dole, he was happy to have a studio and time to work. He put pieces in for open-submission exhibitions, but admits to finding them "a distraction" because he tends to work in series and groups rather than in individual pieces.

"I was striving to find connections in my own work," he says. "That took a while - it was three or four years before I even approached a gallery. That time was good for me, I liked the idea of working away but not being very present in the art world."

Artists usually gravitate towards galleries with a sympathetic artistic sensibility. Realistically, Nugent observes: "I wouldn't have approached the Kerlin, for example, because you need a lot of history before you'd do that. I looked for a gallery that could meet me at the same level, a gallery I could grow with."

He hooked up with Jo Rain, now the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Things were still tough financially, and he did some teaching in schools. "I wasn't thinking of lifestyle in terms of material things, more a sense of making the work, concentrating on studio practice, keeping contact with other artists. You can't make the mistake of comparing yours and other walks of life," Nugent says.

His work got a good response at the RHA's Academy Without Walls exhibition, then IMMA bought two paintings from his first solo show at Kevin Kavanagh, where every painting bar one was sold. He found giving a talk on his work at IMMA a surprisingly useful experience: "It clarified certain things for me."

His exhibition record is not prolific, partly because he has been exceptionally disciplined about it, partly because his work is extremely time-consuming to make. But every exhibition - solo shows at Kevin Kavanagh in 1999 and 2002, and Eurojet Futures 2002 - has been carefully considered and important for him. He has a strong schedule of upcoming commitments: a show at Turku in Finland, another at the Ormeau Baths in Belfast, and his IMMA pictures are incorporated in a group show travelling to the US.

He is currently lecturing at Cork's Crawford College and at NCAD. "It's good to be busy in several different areas, and it's good to reconnect with the ideas you had when you were in college," he says. "There's a different attitude in the students now - they're less patient, they want more action. I think that's good."