Eleven years at a kitchen table

She painted after the household was asleep, on a table that had to be cleared again before breakfast. Eleven years of that, and nobody outside the house had seen a single canvas. What was missing was never the work. It was the ordinary apparatus a practice needs — somewhere to photograph a painting properly, a price that someone else had validated, a wall in a room where people who buy art actually stand. She set her own prices. That mattered more than anything the studio did: the first thing most people offer an artist in her position is a favour, and a favour is not a market. Nine days after the first collection was listed, it had gone.