Finding the Artist in You After 50: The Beautiful Art of Beginning Again

Somewhere between building careers, raising children, tending relationships, paying bills, and remembering who needed to be where on Tuesday afternoon, we became remarkably good at being needed.

We learned to organize our days around responsibilities. We became the person who knew where the spare batteries were, who remembered the dentist appointment, who finished one more thing before sitting down. There can be enormous love and satisfaction in those years. They were not years wasted. They were simply years in which other things often came first.

And tucked away somewhere might be a person who once loved drawing in school notebooks, arranging flowers in jam jars, taking photographs, writing stories, or wandering through craft shops just to look.

We don't necessarily lose that person. Sometimes we just stop asking what she would like to do.

Then life begins to change its rhythm. Not all at once, and not for everyone in the same way. Children grow up, work changes, relationships shift. We may still have full-time jobs or people who depend on us. Yet our perspective begins to stretch beyond the familiar list of things that must be done.

And a question that once seemed almost indulgent starts to feel important: What would I like to make? Honestly, it is my dream question. I love going into my studio and asking myself what’s next?

We Played for Hours, a mounted art print with the original inspired by playing in the river next to my grandmother’s house for hours. 

We talk about reinventing ourselves after 50 as though we need to throw out everything we've been and begin again with an entirely different personality.

But perhaps reinvention is a gentler thing.

Perhaps it is remembering what interested us before we began measuring our days by how much we accomplished. Perhaps it is discovering that a love of color, texture, words, or beautiful little objects has been following us quietly all along.

Think about the things you notice when nobody is asking you to notice them. The soft blue of a house on an old street. A handmade quilt in an antique shop. The illustrations in a children's book. Wildflowers growing through a fence. The way sunlight falls across a kitchen table.

We often dismiss these observations as nothing more than personal taste. But taste is a kind of curiosity. It tells us what makes us pause.

And curiosity is a lovely place for an artist to begin.

I love creating wallet cards out of my original art, and adding them to Bee Notes. You can actually create a lot of things from one piece of art. 

Before buying expensive paints or committing to a class, try something smaller. Sit somewhere comfortable, make a cup of tea, and ask yourself a few questions.

Not about what you are good at. Not about what might earn money or impress anyone. Just about the things that have always made you feel interested, delighted, or wonderfully absorbed.

1. What did I love making when I was young? Did I draw, sew, write stories, press flowers, build tiny houses, or make things from scraps?
2. What beautiful things always catch my attention? Old houses, illustrated books, pottery, fabric patterns, gardens, photographs, handwriting?
3. If I could learn one artistic skill without worrying about being good at it, what would it be? Watercolor, ceramics, photography, embroidery, collage, printmaking, creative writing?
4. When did I last make something simply because I wanted to? Not for a birthday, an assignment, or a practical purpose.
5. What do I admire in other people's art? Loose brushstrokes, bright colors, tiny details, imperfect handmade objects?
6. What have I quietly told myself I'm not talented enough to try? Where did that belief come from?
7. What would I create if nobody ever had to see it? No audience, no comparisons, no need to explain.

You don't need seven answers. One is enough. Perhaps it will bring back a childhood sketchbook. Perhaps you'll realize you've always wanted to make pottery. Perhaps something entirely new will surprise you.

The purpose isn't to uncover a hidden genius. It is to remember that you are still allowed to discover new things about yourself.

There is something wonderfully humbling about trying to paint a flower and discovering that your flower looks rather like a confused cabbage. I am going to tell you a secret. There is no innate secret to being talented at painting, pottery, drawing or any other endeavor. You start off with no skills, and you build on them, with practice, and learning, and patience. You watch tutorials, or take a class, starting off small and building on your learning. 

When we've spent decades becoming capable adults, we can forget how uncomfortable it feels to be new at something. We know how to do our jobs. We know how to solve problems. People ask us for advice.

And suddenly here we are, holding a paintbrush and wondering how on earth everyone else makes a leaf look like a leaf.

It's tempting to decide that we're simply not artistic. But being inexperienced is not the same as being untalented. A first painting is supposed to look like a first painting. A crooked bowl made in a pottery class is still a bowl you made with your own hands. Personally I love crooked bowls and first paintings. You will find me on social media cheering new artists on. I was also a beginner once. 

This is a beginner painting created by me, and I am still proud of it. Even though some time has passed, my skills have grown, there are parts of this I love. 

Children rarely need permission to make things. They choose the purple crayon for the sky because they like purple, and they don't apologize for it.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to ask whether something was good before we asked whether it was fun.

Maybe beginning again is an opportunity to reverse that order. Have some fun. Be creative. 

Here's something beautiful about discovering art later in life: you may be new to the materials, but you are not new to the world.

You have collected decades of colors and stories. The wallpaper in your grandmother's kitchen. The flowers outside your first home. A particular winter morning. The sound of children playing in another room. The ache of losing someone. The joy of finding an old photograph you thought was gone.

All those experiences influence what you notice, what you love, and what you want to express.

At twenty, you might have painted a garden because the flowers were pretty. At fifty-five, you might paint the same garden and find yourself thinking about every place you've ever called home.

Neither painting is better simply because of the age of its maker. They're different because the people holding the brushes are different.

There's no need to wish you had started thirty years earlier. The person beginning today has something worth bringing to the page, too.

If you've been wondering how to start painting after 50, or how to find your creativity again, I wouldn't begin with a shopping cart full of professional supplies.

Begin with a small sketchbook and a pencil. Or a modest set of watercolors. Or colored paper and scissors. Choose something that interests you enough to sit down with it for twenty minutes.

Paint the mug you drink your morning coffee from. Photograph the shadows on the wall. Make a collage from old magazines. Write a few lines about a childhood place you remember. Try drawing the same flower three times and notice what changes.

Take a beginner's class if that sounds enjoyable. Borrow a book from the library. Follow a tutorial, then put it aside and experiment on your own.

Most importantly, give yourself room to make things you don't like. You can learn a surprising amount from a painting that didn't turn out the way you imagined.

And you don't have to show anyone. Your creative life is allowed to belong to you.

There's a funny habit we have as adults: we discover something we enjoy and immediately begin wondering how to become excellent at it.

How often should I practice? Should I sell what I make? Should I open an account to share it? Do I need a better camera, better supplies, a proper studio?

Before long, the lovely thing we started for pleasure has acquired a deadline and a list of responsibilities.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve, share your work, or even build a business. But those possibilities don't need to arrive on the first day.

Maybe creativity begins as fifteen minutes at the kitchen table after work. Maybe it is Sunday afternoons with a box of pencils. Maybe your studio is a corner of the dining room that needs to be cleared before supper.

That counts. And here is another secret. In the beginning, keep your supplies simple, your colors limited, you will learn so much more. 

We don't need a dramatic new life to make room for art. Sometimes we need only to protect a small part of the life we already have.

Perhaps you've already decided the word artist belongs to other people.

People who went to art school. People who can draw faces accurately. People with beautiful studios and shelves of paint arranged by color.

But art isn't one single skill, and creativity isn't a prize handed only to the naturally gifted.

Some people tell stories with paint. Others do it with photographs, thread, clay, flowers, fabric, or words. Some love careful detail. Others love the happy accidents of loose color and unexpected shapes.

You might discover that painting isn't for you at all, but that you adore printmaking or arranging dried flowers. That isn't failure. That's discovery.

And you don't have to introduce yourself as an artist tomorrow. You can simply be someone who enjoys making things.

That's a perfectly wonderful place to start.

I would never want this conversation to suggest that the years spent raising families, working, or caring for other people were somehow less meaningful because we weren't making art.

Those years were full of creating, too. We created homes, traditions, birthday cakes, family stories, careers, friendships, and ways of making people feel safe and loved.

Sometimes we were so busy creating a life that we didn't have much time to create anything we could hang on a wall.

But our lives aren't divided neatly into a meaningful first half and an exciting second half. They are made of chapters that inform one another.

Perhaps the most interesting part of reinventing yourself after 50 is realizing that you don't have to reject who you've been in order to become who you're curious about being.

You can be a mother and a painter. A laboratory worker and a writer. A grandmother who takes a ceramics class. Someone with a perfectly ordinary job and a wonderfully imaginative world unfolding on the kitchen table.

There is room for more than one version of you.

I like to imagine creativity as a little garden that has been left untended for a while.

Not ruined. Not gone. Just waiting beneath the weeds and fallen leaves for someone to wander back through the gate.

Perhaps you won't recognize everything growing there. Some interests may have faded. Others might surprise you. You may find yourself drawn to colors you never used to like, stories you wouldn't have understood at twenty, or a kind of art you never noticed before.

That's part of the pleasure.

At fifty, sixty, or seventy, there are still things we haven't tried, places our imaginations haven't visited, and little discoveries waiting in ordinary afternoons.

So buy the small box of paints if it makes you happy. Take the class. Open the notebook. Make something peculiar and imperfect and entirely your own.

Not because you need to become a different person.

But because there may be another lovely part of yourself still waiting to be known.

And perhaps she's more interesting now than she would have been at twenty.