Gloria Vanderbilt — the American heiress, artist, and writer — is 89 years old. Recently in town for the opening of her first Canadian solo show at Toronto’s De Luca Fine Art Gallery, she begins this interview by praising the “not too close together” hanging of her works, and is remarkably endearing in her enthusiasm for the show’s modest and slender catalogue. “Have you seen it? Oooh! The texture of the paper is extraordinary. It’s like suede.” (This is coming from a self-taught artist who had her first one-woman show of paintings in 1952, and lent the use of her works in a collector’s edition of Susan Miller’s “The Year Ahead 2014 Astrological Wall Calendar.”)

The painted canvases — think vivid colors of a Fauvist bent — are undeniably sensitive and even naïve. (“All my work is of a very feminine impulse,” she surmises.) Brushstrokes of seemingly disharmonic pink, red, and cobalt violet dominate, as do representations of doll-like angels, girls in white dresses, and full-bodied women. As she admits in her artist statement, the works are biographical sketches of dreams and memories containing a self-described “narrative quality.”

Indeed, Gloria Vanderbilt has lived a gilded life across headlines and tabloids. At the age of ten, she was “the Poor Little Rich Girl” of a nasty Depression-era custody battle that left her an orphaned inheritor of a five-million dollar trust fund (just over $60 million in contemporary currency). Despite living with her aunt and guardian Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney — a sculptor and philanthropist who founded the Whitney Museum of American Art — she came into her creative authorship with very little support. As she admitted to “Gotham Magazine,” her “very reserved” aunt shockingly “never, ever discussed art” with Vanderbilt.

“I’m never satisfied,” she says of her quiet dedication to arts and letters, which also includes the publication of memoirs, short stories, poetry, and even a novel of erotica. “In talking of this, I think about a story I wrote once about Michelangelo — not that I’m comparing myself to Michelangelo — on his death bed, and his last words were, ‘that’s not what I meant.’”

Vanderbilt’s dedication is especially admirable when you consider her greater legacy as an iconic American beauty. She was 15 when she first appeared in the pages of “Harper’s Bazaar” at the request of its then-fashion editor, Diana Vreeland. Through the years, she has been the muse for some of fashion’s great photographers, winding up on many a Pinterest “ladies who lunch” mood board: there she is at 17, shot by Horst P. Horst, or striking an early 1960s pose in a Mainbocher column dress for Richard Avedon.