IRIS COMPIET

Aged seven, Iris read a “forbidden” book and dreamt of becoming an artist. Making that dream a reality took 30 years, discovers Gary Evans

- Gary Evans

Seven-year-old Iris Compiet is in the local library, and she’s going to do something she’s never dared do before. She going to wander into the “forbidden section.”

Iris lives in a one-street town called Zandstraat in the south of the Netherlands. There’s a lot of nature, a lot of playing outdoors. Iris’s two brother are much older, so there’s also a lot of time spent by herself. She paints, she draws, she reads. She likes fantasy. She likes history, but history with an element of mystery to it.

The forbidden section is how seven-year-old Iris sees the local library’s grown-up books. She wanders into this section and pulls from the bookshelves a beautifully illustrated book about faeries and faerie folklore. Now Iris now knows exactly what she wants to do when she grows up: “Somebody does this for a job? That’s what I want to do!”

ART SCHOOL DOUBTS