14/09/2026
Last night I dreamed I was taking a drawing class. I had to complete a painting using one colour and find a pattern of my own. At some point, the teacher came to look at what I was doing and told me how passionate my work was, and how interesting it was to see me developing my own way of creating the pattern.
I woke up thinking about the Yayoi Kusama exhibition.
Because I don’t draw, I don’t paint, and for most of my life I have believed that I am terrible at both.
When I was around six years old, an art teacher asked us to draw something. Mine was a disaster and I started crying.
She tried to comfort me by explaining that some people are born to do certain things and others are born to do something else. Drawing and painting were simply not my things. We would find what I was good at.
And we did as I became good at theatre. I directed plays at school. Eventually, creativity became a huge part of my life. But I never tried drawing again.
Maybe I am terrible at it. I genuinely don’t know, because I never gave myself the opportunity to find out.
Walking through Kusama’s exhibition, I kept thinking about how much our surroundings shape what we create: the things we see, the places where we grow up, the opportunities we are given, but also the things people tell us about ourselves.
Some ideas open doors and others close them.
Encouragement gives us the chance to do something badly, do it again, practise and eventually discover what might be there.
Maybe I would never have become a painter. That isn’t the point.
The point is that I believed I couldn’t be one before I had really tried.
How many things have we decided we are “not good at” when perhaps we simply haven’t practised them enough?
Sometimes you have to do something badly, then again, and again, and perhaps a thousand times, before you discover your own way of doing it.
All pictures taken during the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
