Mary Worden is comfortable being called a lot of things: a mother, a grandmother, a teacher, an adventurer. Yet with every wall of her house lined with her own artwork, she has a hard time thinking of herself as a painter.

“I never call myself an artist. I’ll become an artist when I’m dead,” said Worden. “I have to paint. I don’t have an option.”

Her compulsion to pick up a paintbrush didn’t come until the early 1990s, more than 40 years after she began a life of teaching and traveling.

Worden, a Mattapoisett resident, moved from Nantucket to New Bedford with her family in the 1930s and graduated from Emmanuel College in Boston in 1949.

A few years later she took a job teaching in Japan. Getting there took almost a month, with a three and a half day train to Seattle followed by a 21-day ocean voyage to Yokahama.

But Worden said, “I didn’t think the world was that big.”

While in Japan, Worden visited Hiroshima and saw the artwork of kids affected by the atomic bomb.

“It changed my life to see how children interpret happenings,” said Worden, who would later go on to teach art, music and theater.

In the meantime, Worden still had exploring to do. She visited Hong Kong, rode the Orient Express to Europe and made her way to Ireland. Worden came back to New Bedford for a year and was off again – this time to teach in Madrid.

“I wanted to be in a strange place. I took Spanish, had a Spanish boyfriend, went to bull fights every Sunday, skied in Austria, went to the Louvre in Paris,” she said.

After her year in Europe, Worden was “checking in” in New Bedford when she met and married her husband, Vincent.

The couple had five kids. Worden also kept teaching.

At Dunbar Elementary School for many years, she encouraged the arts, winning a national award for her program. She also loved introducing kids to the theater.

“I always did a musical, but I can’t sing a note,” said Worden. “The kids love to act because they can be somebody else.”

Worden and her family moved to Mattapoisett where she staged 15 years of performances in her front yard with folks from the neighborhood.

But seeing the culture, color and art of so many foreign lands stuck with Worden.

A few years after her husband passed away in 1991, she turned to painting.

“Finally I thought, this is stupid, I should do something. I would learn to be a painter.”

While continuing to teach, Worden took an art class at UMass Dartmouth in 1993 and then spent time in Brittany, France through a program funded by the Rhode Island School of Design. RISD asked to see the paintings after she returned and then asked her to send her 11 canvases to a show in New York City.

“I came back and alI I had was a check. I guess I’m a painter,” said Worden

Even with such success, Worden says she’s never been very interested in showing her paintings. As such, walking through the rooms of her oceanfront home is akin to a physical, spiritual and emotional retrospective of the past 20 years.

“When I look at all of these, I can tell the mood I had,” she said.

Worden’s painting and travel are definitely symbiotic. In addition to seascapes and images of her 15 grandchildren, Worden’s work includes the people and places she’s experienced in Mexico, Wales, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and other locales.

Paintings of churches, Mary and Jesus also reflect the strength Worden has found in God.

“We have to have faith. God is going to be on our side, and we’re going to do good things,” she said.

While paintings had taken prominence in Worden’s life over the past 20 years, it has not diminished her love of teaching or the theater and her desire to make a difference in the lives of kids.

Worden volunteers at Nativity Preparatory School in New Bedford, a middle school for underprivileged boys, where she teaches public speaking through theater and mock trial.

“We can change people’s lives. I think that’s what our job is in life, to make people feel that they are important,” said Worden.

She doesn’t at all regret the time she spent not painting.

“I always felt what I was doing was helping people to have dreams,” she said. “I don’t regret being late to painting.”

Though Mary Worden does not often show her work, a number of pieces are currently on display at the Mattapoisett Library. Worden will discuss her work there on Friday, July 18 at 3 p.m.