Before my first canvas
there was a hidden cupboard.
A summer in France.
And a little girl with oil paints.
A post about the journey from that first painting to pursuing art.
Read the story of my first oil painting ⤵
From a hidden cupboard to my canvas
My first painting wasn’t on canvas but within a hidden cupboard carved into the 400-year-old stone wall that surrounded my grandfather’s courtyard in France.
I was 7, restless with summer boredom, when he handed me all his late wife’s oil paints and told me I could paint whatever I wanted.
This cupboard that was carved into the stone wall served as an oversized mailbox, 10 times the size of any regular mailbox.
I spent days filling that hidden space with a prehistoric landscape of imagined dinosaurs - losing myself in the process, and making the door like a hatch to another world.
Looking back, I realize that was the first time I truly felt the magic of creating something from nothing.
My grandfather kept that painting in his mailbox for another 15 years until he passed, he told me it made him smile every time he got the mail.
And who knows? Maybe the new owners of the house still see it everyday.
Creativity boxed in
The creativity I discovered in that hidden cupboard has evolved over the years, gradually conforming to what the world showed me as “acceptable.”
A decline in creativity. I didn’t lose my creativity overnight. I kept making art.
But I was repeatedly told it wasn’t something I could live on. That I should be more practical in the long run.
So I became a French pâtissière – because French pâtisserie felt like edible art. Then I became a self-employed consultant within marketing and design.
I choose the more acceptable paths. Because living on what you create was framed as a one-in-a-million pipe dream, the familiar story of the struggling artist.
But creativity doesn’t disappear.
It waits.
Until you find it again. Until you’re ready to go all in on that thing that lights you up.
So here I am, having found it again. I'm making art - again.
