COMOX, B.C. — Bean Holden lifts a rug in her laundry room to reveal a door in the floor. Before she shows what’s on the other side—and what she’s been doing down there—you need to know how Bean had been feeling up here. “I felt like I was missing something,” she says. It’s something the now-70-something first discovered as a child posing for black-and-white photos—drawing. “It’s great to be able to do that,” Bean says with a smile, sketching a horse on paper. “There’s nothing like it.” But after life got in the way of pursuing her passion for art, Bean felt like she was living in a black-and-white world. “And I thought, ‘Where’s my heart?’” she says. She answered that question decades later when she found the courage to take a painting class. “It was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz, when they change from black and white to colour,” she says, smiling. Bean was so inspired, she painted more than 80 canvases in countless colours. “Once I turned on that side of my brain again, I couldn’t stop,” she says, showing her eclectic work ranging from animals to abstracts. Even better, people started buying her paintings. So Bean decided to go pro. But gallery owners she contacted said they were looking for different subject matter. “It was disappointing,” she says. “But I don’t let things like that stop me.” It wasn’t until the day she descended below the laundry room to store her paintings in the crawlspace, that she came up with a creative solution. “Hey, this is a really cool thing to do,” she recalls thinking as she crawled toward the far corner under her home. “What a crazy idea.” Instead of following a yellow brick road, Bean invites you to crawl along a path covered in knee-cushioning foam, before arriving in her wonderful world of art. “It’s the crawlspace art gallery,” she says with a smile. The gallery includes an eclectic display of dozens of bold paintings, tables for art aficionados to socialize around, and all sorts of lights to illuminate it all. “That idea of strange went away,” Bean says, showing photos of dozens of visitors sitting in the crawlspace smiling. “And it was this really fun thing to do.” Like that scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy clicked the heels of her ruby slippers, Bean has discovered that when it comes to realizing your art gallery dreams, there really is no place like home. “Your dreams are attainable,” Bean smiles. “You should keep going until you reach them.”
