Legal Cheek sits down with Maria Vitiello to hear how she followed her passion and left the corporate world behind
A former City law lawyer has spoken to Legal Cheek about why she decided to swap billable hours for brushstrokes, after leaving City law to pursue a new life as a classical painter.
Maria Vitiello studied law at SOAS before training at Hogan Lovells, qualifying in early 2022 into the firm’s litigation, fraud and investigations practice, where she worked across commercial litigation, white collar crime and cross-border fraud. But after years spent building a legal career, with earlier stints as a paralegal at Norton Rose Fulbright and Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, she found herself confronting a question she had never properly asked before: what was her real passion? When she was finally honest with herself, she says, “the answer pointed somewhere entirely different.”
She resigned from her associate role in 2023 and is now based in Barcelona, where she is studying at the Barcelona Academy of Art. She describes it as “one of the most rigorous classical figurative painting programmes in Europe.” The decision was not triggered by a single dramatic moment, but by “an accumulation of quiet ones.” As she puts it: “I was good at law. But being good at something and being called to it are different things, and I had spent years confusing them.”
Like many during the lockdown era, Vitiello began exploring new passions while at home. “I was in my flat in London, working full time as a lawyer, and suddenly the noise of ordinary life went quiet. Without the usual distractions, I found myself looking inward.”
That was when she remembered an old gift from childhood: an easel and a set of oil paints she had never used. “There had always been something more urgent,” she says, “such as studying, then working, then building a career. Suddenly, I had no excuse.” She picked up a brush, followed online tutorials, and started from scratch. The interest deepened when she spent time in Milan, where she says she reconnected with and “fell in love” with the paintings and traditions of the Old Masters, including Caravaggio, Michelangelo and Rembrandt.
Leaving the law behind was far from an easy decision. “I was walking away from financial security, from an identity I had built over more than a decade, from a world that had given me status, structure, and a very clear answer to the question: who are you?” Further complicating matters were family, friends and colleagues questioning whether she was making the right choice. But she warmly recalls the encouragement she received from a partner when she told him of her plans. “He told me it was an act of courage, and that he had enormous respect for it,” she says. “I have never forgotten that.”
Since leaving legal practice, Vitiello has split her time between painting and training as a counsellor, describing the latter as “a natural extension of the self-inquiry I had already begun.” She notes the obvious differences between legal practice and life as an artist. In law, discipline is built into the environment through client demands, court timelines and transaction deadlines. In art, that discipline must come entirely from within.
She also points out that “in the art world there are no billable hours!”
As for what comes next, Vitiello says there is “a great deal ahead” and that she is approaching the future with “both ambition and patience.” Alongside her studies, she is building a body of work exploring identity, power, gender and the contradictory forces that shape who we become, through classical oil painting. Her first original work, a self-portrait titled ‘Cummuojete’, has been selected for exhibition in Athens.
And while she does not rule out returning to law entirely (“I never say never”), it is only recently that she has fully shed her former professional label. “Up until quite recently, I was still introducing myself as a lawyer,” she says. “It is only now, as the work develops and the results begin to show, that I find myself, perhaps for the first time, answering that question with something close to certainty: I am an artist.”