After graduating from Haverhill High School in 1978, Linda Germain pursued a career in law. For 10 years she worked as a lawyer until she came to a disheartening realization — doing what you love and being happy is far more important than a cushy paycheck.

“I don’t like conflict, so that wasn’t going to work,” Germain said with a chuckle.

Germain is now back in Haverhill working as an artist. She has studio space in her father’s machine shop on Essex Street and pays the bills by working on her parents’ farm. She studies art at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly and Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill.

Germain, now 47, has had two solo shows of her photography, several pieces published in the NECC art and literary magazine Parnassus, and was the mayor’s artist of the month last February. She has also been a part of several group shows at the Newburyport Art Association.

But Germain didn’t go straight from law into the art world. For more than six years, she was in the outdoors of Maine — north of Augusta — teaching rock climbing, skiing and rafting.

“That got tiring because it really was a party scene and I was the oldest one there. It wasn’t really where I wanted to be,” she explained. So Germain left the isolation of the north for her beloved hometown of Haverhill.

Her first artistic seeds were planted when she was just a 6-year-old painting with her grandmother.

“I remember oil painting with her — landscapes and still lifes. I really didn’t do a whole heck of a lot of art in high school, although I did take a photography class.”

Germain works in printmaking, screenprinting and collage as well as in photography. She also loves monotyping, a painting technique using gel slabs and found objects to create unique prints, and encaustic, which is painting with wax.

“I try to experiment rather than fitting into a mold,” she said. “That way you’re developing a style that’s unique. You have an identifiable style. I’m so flattered when people say they haven’t seen (what I’ve made) before.”

Lindsay McCulloch, the visual arts program coordinator at NECC, had Germain in a class last semester and was incredibly impressed by her skills.

“She’s an amazing student,” McCulloch said. “Nothing I could say about her would do her justice. She’s always coming in with 20, 30 new things to show me. She’s incredibly self-motivated. She works really hard. She’s very innovative. The way she works with her mediums and tries to push herself in different directions is very unique.”

And Germain was recently recognized for that uniqueness. World renowned New York sculptor Ed Smith reviewed her work at NECC after her Printmaking III class, and his words of encouragement, as well as those from Boston University art professor Jen Caine, inspired her to take her artwork to the next level.

From August 20 to 25, she’ll be attending classes at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, N.Y. She received a scholarship to take a course called Cross-Pollination: Monoprints and Encaustic. After that she plans to apply for an artist residency with the Women’s Studio Workshop next year.

This summer, Germain will be teaching the digital photography class at for the NECC College for Kids summer program.

“I can’t wait to see what the kids come up with,” she said.

In the future, Germain hopes to translate her photography to printmaking, teach out of a studio while creating and selling art, and work on a series of collages. One of her ideas is to do a whole group of collages based on “F” words — like fun, faith, fear and flowers.

She also hopes to become more a part of the art community in Haverhill, because “as an artist, you’re pretty much on your own.”

Germain said teachers and classmates she has met at NECC have given her a sense of community, and she hopes that it will continue to grow.

For more information about NECC’s College for Kids summer program, call Deirdre Budzyna at 978-556-3456. For more information on Linda Germain’s artwork, visit www.linda-germain.com.