Anita (Make It Your Own)

When Anita started with us, she was friendly but quiet. She arrived with a simple and fixed idea of what she could do on our project: buying paint, repainting her front door, and repainting her dining table and chairs all white.

Her desire was to get her flat feeling spotless, bright and monochrome. At first, she wasn’t interested in adding personal touches to her home. She just wanted it to feel new. She said, “I want to give my home a good energy with the things I put in it.”

Painting her chairs and table took a long time, requiring lots of patience. Over these first weeks of sanding and painting, Anita became more comfortable in the workshop and increasingly talkative. She enjoyed the process and said it was very calming and stress-relieving, often saying, “This is like therapy for me. I feel better after painting.” She achieved exactly what she set out to make – a full white suite of dining furniture, which she dressed with grey and white settings.

With some newly gained confidence, Anita decided to go in a completely new direction from painting her furniture white. She decided she wanted to paint a canvas portrait – half figurative, half abstract. This was a big change from her initial reluctance to make anything decorative. She seemed unsure if she’d manage but after some encouragement she was amazed by her results and excited to show her daughter.

It was nice to hear her reflect on the symbols in her painting, with abstract shapes around the head. “These are like thoughts, like my thoughts!” she laughed.

By the time that she had finished the dining set, Anita had caught the bug for painting and creative DIY. She was evidently having so much fun chatting in workshops that it caused her to have the turning point in her plans, mentioned previously. She suddenly opened up to increasing the ambition of her projects – reupholstering the seats of her dining chairs, even creating her own seat pads out of waste foam, and she started talking about canvas painting for the first time.

Part of this enthusiasm was generated through the hours of conversations in the workshop about her passions and her life back in Ukraine.

She was so thrilled to practise speaking English while she was painting, and so the workshop time doubled as rare language practice time for her. She wasn’t finding many opportunities to chat in English with local people outside of our workshops as a lot of the people she was talking to on a day-to-day basis were speaking in Ukrainian. She quickly grew a bond with participants and tutors, which spurred her on to dream up new ideas.

Anita loved her time here and was sad to leave the project. She’d told her friends and daughter about Make It Your Own and all of the people working on it, proudly showing them photos of what she made. She was keen to continue painting after finishing the project – she hopes to continue engaging with activities in the local area. 

Anita now knows that she can paint too, and can share in this passion with her daughter who has been painting for a long time. 

She looks forward to getting back into teaching when she has her language qualifications. In the meantime, she continues to enjoy the cultural differences between Ukraine and Scotland, and the surprising new experiences Scotland brings to her.  

This project took place in 2024 and was made possible by Renfrewshire Council and the Glasgow Flighpath Fund. If you’d like to learn more about Make It Your Own or make a donation to Impact Arts to support more projects like this, explore the links below.