A Winter Day, a Discovery, and What Followed
What, for a grandmother in her sixties, began as a quiet sequence of events would, by January 7, become an unexpected turning point. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes
There is something subtly providential about January 7—arriving a day after the feast of Epiphany, yet itself marking a moment of recognition. For Eunice Olarenwaju Sanyaolu, hitherto known for her work in floral design, it marked a decisive turning point: the surfacing of an unexpected creative faculty, unannounced and entirely unforeseen. She had left Nigeria for the US on June 12 of the previous year, already 62, and now lives with her daughter and son-in-law in Bowie, Maryland, a modest city of some 57,000 residents in Prince George’s County.
A curious weaving of fate saw her UK-based younger daughter, Iyunoluwa, visit the home along Dalebrooke Drive in December for two weeks. A promise made three years earlier weighed on her conscience: a painting for an elder sister, deferred but not forgotten. Bound, as she is, to the protocols of gallery representation, Iyunoluwa could not simply hand over an existing work. A painting had to be made afresh within the narrow span of her stay. And so, between departures and the rhythms of domestic life, painting was quietly accommodated.
By the time she flew back to the UK on January 4, the promise had been fulfilled. What remained were the incidental traces of her practice—tubes of paint, brushes, the small, portable remnants of artistic labour. Most of these were passed on to a nephew, less a bequest than an afterthought. Predictably, they lay unused while he returned to his computer screen.
It took three days for Sanyaolu, patently averse to wastefulness, to recognise their latent potential—not as sudden clarity, but as a gradual awareness that came without drama. So she asked herself: why not put them to use? Outside, winter continued to unleash its chill, discouraging any inclination towards the city. Inside, a more contemplative disposition took hold, shaped as much by habit as by faith. “At the appropriate time, I will be shown,” she mused, part declaration, part acknowledgement of a Higher Hand.
Alone in the house on January 7, she turned to the canvas and took up the brush. What emerged bore little resemblance to experiment or tentative groping. There was, instead, an unaccountable fluency—as though the gesture had been rehearsed elsewhere, in another realm of experience, now taking form as something visibly real. The ease of its emergence resisted intellectual explanation, measured neither in effort nor in prior knowledge.
She describes the experience as beautiful, though even that feels understated. It was less an act of production than of recognition: a quiet convergence between hand and medium, in which something long unarticulated finally found expression.
If the moment of beginning carried the weight of revelation, what followed, in retrospect, seems less a deviation than a return along a path long prepared. Her life, in its various phases, has been shaped by acts of making—floral design, landscape work, decoration, farming—none formally trained, yet all guided by an instinctive discipline. She learnt early that arranging flowers was not simply about assembling colour; it was about keeping things alive in space, allowing them to breathe without excess. That sensibility moves easily across mediums. On canvas, as with foliage, balance becomes less theory than habit—colour against colour, texture against stillness, form against restraint.
Seen this way, painting does not arrive as rupture but as continuity. The languages differ, but the syntax remains recognisable. What she once achieved with petals and stems now finds its equivalent in pigment and stroke. The eye, trained over years to detect imbalance or excess, carries its knowledge forward, quietly guiding the hand.
Yet there is also, unmistakably, a shift in intensity. What begins as curiosity gathers into something more insistent, less easily set aside. She speaks of joy—repeated almost as invocation—but beneath it lies a kind of compulsion, as though the act of painting answers to a demand she did not herself formulate. Earlier occupations—sewing, knitting, indoor gardening—had filled time, even satisfied it to a degree, but none had quite settled into necessity. Painting, encountered at 63, alters that equilibrium. The days begin to organise themselves around it. Three canvases, sometimes five, completed in succession. The difficulty is no longer how to begin, but how to stop.
Significantly, she does not claim full authorship of what appears. Many of the images, she suggests, come already formed—received rather than constructed. There is, in this, a subtle displacement of agency: the painter as conduit rather than origin. It lends her sudden fluency a different character—not the product of belated training, but of an alignment that resists easy explanation.
That sense of unfolding, however, is not how it appears to those around her. A small and attentive audience gathers. The grandson—initially the intended recipient of the abandoned paints—returns each day from school to inspect what has been made in his absence. His assessments are brief, unvarnished, but carry a certain authority. “Grandma, you are doing great,” he says on one occasion . Sometimes, simply, “You are getting better by the day.” Her daughter, meanwhile, expresses astonishment at the ease with which birds emerge on the canvas, as though summoned rather than studied. Her son-in-law, ordinarily sceptical about reincarnation, allows himself a momentary concession: perhaps, he suggests, this facility belongs to another time, another life. The remark lingers, half in jest, half in recognition of something not entirely explained.
Evenings settle into a routine of viewing. Her daughter and son-in-law return from work and, before anything else, turn to the day’s production. The paintings, in their growing number, begin to structure the domestic space they inhabit. It is here that Sanyaolu articulates the principle that now governs her practice: whatever cannot be lived with—cannot be granted a place on the wall—ought not to be made. It is, at once, an aesthetic and moral position, one that resists indulgence in favour of endurance.
Between January 7 and the end of February, she produced over 120 paintings, each arriving with a swiftness that leaves little room for interruption or doubt.
And yet, the work is not an end in itself. Beneath it lies something that extends beyond the immediate act of painting. There are older histories pressing quietly against the present—years marked by absence and the labour of raising children alone after the death of their father, when the youngest was scarcely more than an infant. The memory of that period, with its accumulations of need and endurance, does not recede. Instead, it informs what comes next.
Then, the idea of a foundation begins to gather substance, directed towards children and widows navigating their own precarious circumstances. The proceeds from her work, she suggests, will be channelled towards this purpose. It is a gesture that folds past hardship into present action, translating private resilience into a more public offering.
So the painting continues, not as diversion but as extension. What began in the quiet contingency of unused materials now assumes a steadier, more deliberate course. And if January 7 marked the moment of emergence, what follows carries the slower, more demanding task of giving that emergence a place in the world.
