A Story of an Old Sketch

This morning, I found an old journal in the studio. On one of the pages-a simple sketch, almost forgotten. I had titled it Rediscovery. And just like that, I was brought back…

Five years ago, in the middle of my own healing, I returned to my childhood home. Surrounded by family, I painted a piece about a heart that cannot exist inside something too small for it. A heart that breaks when confined… and only begins to live when the cage opens. I named it: “That’s Not the Shape of My Heart.”

Months later, in the quiet hours of the night, around 2 am, I received an email… A couple had walked past the gallery on Magazine Steet, saw the painting in the window, and couldn’t look away. They wrote to me about their mothers, about family, about something deeper that spoke to them through the piece.

We met at the gallery the next day. We talked, laughed, cried a little. Strangers… and then not strangers at all.

A few days later, the painting left New Orleans and found its home in Austin- placed high, where it could watch over their lives.

And I remember thinking… this is what art does when it’s honest.

It arrives as a message.

As memory.

As healing.

As something we don’t always have words for-until we do.

With love from my art studio in New Orleans,

Zana