Mary Adeline Berry spent at least a quarter-century fulfilling one passion -- teaching -- before dedicating decades more to a long-submerged love of painting.

Her energy covered such a span that Mrs. Berry was still featured in an art exhibition of recent work after she turned 90. She was 100 when she died Aug. 26 at Masonic Village in Sewickley, where she had lived in recent years after being a longtime Oakmont resident.

Starting in the 1970s, she was a fixture on the arts scene around Oakmont and other eastern suburbs. She organized a group called the Monday Painters as part of the Penn Art Association in Penn Hills, and would join other artists each week in finding new outdoor settings to set up their easels. Mrs. Berry was best known for florals, which she both sold and gave away.

A mentor for both adults and children, she was happy to be doing what she loved best, though starting later in life than many.

"I always knew I would be a painter someday," she said in a 1997 interview, when her artwork was going on display at Penn State New Kensington.

Reared in Johnstown, with two aunts who were painters, Mrs. Berry was a 1927 graduate of Indiana Normal School, now Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She became an elementary school teacher in districts around Johnstown, Reading and Prince Georges County, Md.

It was after retirement from the latter district in 1973 that she became serious about painting. Her husband, Robert, had died in 1969, and she moved to the Pittsburgh area in 1977 to be near her sister, Sarah Schneeberger-Duffet of Wilkinsburg. In Oakmont and nearby, she was either taking classes, providing instruction herself or painting in the studio she converted from the second bedroom of her apartment.

Mrs. Berry painted in oils first, switched to acrylics and then favored watercolors, with dozens of paintings at a time stored at home waiting to be exhibited or sold.

As a volunteer docent at Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland, she became interested in the dinosaur exhibit nearby and won recognition for paintings of those prehistoric beasts, very different from her regular landscapes and flowers.

"She liked in general to bring beauty to other people's lives," said her son, James Berry of Covington, Ky. "That was always an important thing to her, and painting was one of the vehicles by which she could do that -- not only by painting pictures for other people to see, but encouraging people who showed talent to get actively involved with it."

Mrs. Berry supported various arts initiatives through the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Riverside Arts and Crafts Club and Pittsburgh Watercolor Society, among other organizations.

A service will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at Picking Treece-Bennett Mortuary, 921 Menoher Blvd., Westmont, Cambria County, with burial in Grandview Cemetery.