Sophie Weyeneth

“Writing my feelings -I normally paint them”

is a collection of lessons learnt (failures included),

about a late pivot to painting, the entrepreneur years

that led to it and everything paint.

Art Is Taking Over ~ 30 March 2026

I am sitting in a room on Harley Street and my therapist has just asked me to paint my feelings.

It is 2011. I am 34 and running a luxury alterations business that I built from nothing — the kind of thing that takes over your life in the best possible way until suddenly it is your life entirely, and you are the sole decision maker, which is energising and occasionally very lonely. I have always tried to understand myself better — to untangle the inevitable mishaps of childhood that follow us whether we invite them or not. So I am in therapy. What I haven't realised until now is that she is an art therapist — someone who uses painting, drawing, whatever form helps, to reach feelings that words can't always touch.

As I splash in reds and blues, trying to convey my inner feelings, I remember my 18 year old self as an art foundation student in Paris. I had loved it completely — the learning, the looking, the making. I carried a sketchbook everywhere for years. I was drawing in trains, parks and cafés — the friends opposite me, the strangers beyond them, whatever the world put in front of me. My friends were studying politics, law, journalism. I was the odd one out, sketchbook permanently open on the table, the group's artiste. I loved it enough to have continued, but pursued another calling that was even stronger, I wanted to learn to make clothes. Drawing stayed as a pleasure, until it disappeared, because life has a way of making you forget your own true joys sometimes.

Six years passed without a sketchbook. And now I find myself in this therapy room. I have developed feelings for a woman. Not entirely for the first time — but for the first time I am taking it seriously, investigating it with rigour. Which naturally includes watching The L Word on repeat. And who better to obsess over, as a newly found lesbian, than beautiful, problematic, damaged Shane? Oh how I enjoy these many drawings that I make as soon as I have some time and proudly present to my therapist — who decides Shane is a very handsome boy. (I will never know whether to blame her lack of lesbian culture or my poor drawing skills for the misgendering.)

Besides generally sorting myself out and understanding my sexual orientation, something unexpected is also happening. I can't stop drawing.
By 2014 I am taking formal classes one day a week at The Art Academy in London. I want to make sure I can draw before allowing myself to paint. I don't trust myself to give drawing its rightful place once I touch paint. So I work through modules of drawing, term by term, with the patience of someone who knows where they're going and is making themselves take the long way round - enjoying every moment of it.

When I finally get to painting it is an immediate, uncomplicated joy. As counter intuitive as it sounds, the more I do it the harder it gets. I heard somewhere that knowledge is like a balloon — the more air you put in, the larger the surface becomes, and the more you realise how much you have left to explore.
The real shift comes with abstraction. When I let go of representation — when I stop trying to paint a thing and simply paint — something loosens in me that I didn't know was tight. I discover that what I love is to start from nothing. A mark on the canvas, and then another, feeling my way toward a composition I couldn't have described before I made it. No plan. No expectation of how it should look. Fully present. Fully in it.
Meanwhile, I am still directing the business. I am training one day a week and painting every other moment I can find. I am trying to keep everything going at the same time — and mostly succeeding, because my team is strong and I have learned to trust them.

But paint is taking over. The water is already at my knees.