Isabella Ducrot doesn’t fit into your image of a young, struggling artist. In fact it wasn’t until 2019, at the age of 88, did her works become internationally recognized. Today this Italian widow is still discovering the joy of painting at the age of ninety-three. This summer a prestigious museum in France is hosting her first international solo museum show, calling her “a young artist with a young career”. Despite her late start, Ducrot is experiencing a full blossom of artistic productivity. Collectors of her works remark that her paintings exude this intense sense of play and discovery that one will never guess that it’s created by a ninety-one year old. Besides painting, she has also flourished as a writer of essays and short stories. Every morning between eight-thirty and ten-thirty she writes because that’s when she writes most intelligently. She began to study philosophy in earnest in her sixties by taking philosophy classes at a local university and working privately with scholars. Being very old has intensified her sense of present. If she has wisdom to offer, it has to do with living fully, even without a future. She said, “ because we are like prisoners in a jail, we know that there’s no tomorrow. This is an experience, to be so old.”