Time for a midlife renaissance 

Posted on 12 March, 2019

Finding an unexpected passion at 45 has Emma Grey intrigued to know what else she might have missed.

The last time I tried to draw a face in any detail was in Year 7 Art in 1986. We had to find a headshot in a magazine, rip it out, cut it in half vertically, stick that to a bit of paper and draw the missing half of the face. I chose Victoria Principal from Dallas. She was one of the few in the magazine who didn’t have a perm, and surely straight hair would be easier to draw than curly?

The mediocre result marked the official end of my short-lived art career, at 12. The notion that ‘I am not artistic in that way’ burrowed deep, and was cemented for the next three decades — a period during which I would barely attempt a stick figure.

Fast forward to January this year, and someone mentioned a thing called ‘Zentangling’. I’d never heard of it, but was in the market for a bit more zen, so looked it up and found it was a twist on those elaborate doodles you do in boring meetings to keep yourself awake.

It’s hard to explain what happened next, suffice to say everything got out of control.

I now own loyalty cards at two different art shops, a drawing board, Tombow markers, a kneadable eraser and a blending stub. My eye is on perspective and light source and a part-time Diploma in Visual Art next year if I can wrangle the babysitting.

I haven’t been to bed on the same day that I woke up in well over a month, and received odd looks from some builders I walked past while on the phone earlier, when I said, ‘I really got into those nudes last night’, because sketching naked women at midnight is apparently what I do now.

Somewhere, between all the zentangling and YouTube tutorialling and copying of haute couture fashion illustrations at 2 am, I remembered Victoria Principal’s face and the fact that I can’t do this…

Then I followed a 52-minute video on how to draw a human eye, because after three decades of failure, including 17 book rejections, I’ve learnt that the key to becoming accomplished at anything isn’t technical skill.

I spend more time erasing graphite from the page than I do planting it there, and the finished products are improving every day but fall a long way short of my hopes. It’s what Ira Glass termed the ‘Taste Gap’, where you know how you want your creation to look but what you’re able to produce as a beginner simply doesn’t measure up.

We slam into that Taste Gap countless times. It’s frustrating. There’s a moment when you become so disheartened and overwhelmed, you feel like giving up altogether and leaving this to ‘the experts’ because you’re at such a helplessly far distance from your goal.

Our choice in that moment is crucial. Pushing past self-criticism and doubt and continuing to strive for something means accepting a lot of failure. Now, each new attempt to draw a face spotlights another area that needs a lot of work, so I turn to another tutorial at another ungodly hour (current creative nemesis: how to draw realistic teeth).

This new hobby is dishing up joy akin to the rush of falling in love. In my article a fortnight ago, I described emerging from grief into a clearing in the sunshine, where a new chapter begins. I didn’t expect to discover art in this clearing when I’m the type to nod at paintings in galleries and think, ‘What the heck am I looking at?’

A friend shared with me that he has been placed on some medication that has changed his life. He’s sad he lost three decades to a condition that might have transformed his path much earlier. While not serious like that, it’s a bit similar, discovering late in the piece something that was under your nose all along. Where was this creative outlet in high school? Where was it in early motherhood? Through divorce? Through parenting in the teen years?

Where was art, two and a half years ago when I needed this to help me through devastating grief? Or is art emerging from those ashes? Is this the product of that grief? Is it the regrowth of a soul craving ways to articulate itself beyond words?

This is a side of me that my husband never knew. The more it entrenches itself, the harder that gets, and I imagine him walking in now, seeing minimalist nudes scattered across the kitchen table and scratching his head.

When they tell you to ‘move on’, they don’t necessarily mean with another person. Every step in your evolution feels like a step away from the person you were at your crossroads. But each step is also a sign of life. You can’t keep yourself untouched by change, in an attempt to feel closer to the one who will no longer grow with you.

So if my Jamie Fraser looks like Ed Sheeran and everyone’s eyes are too big and the shading is too dark and they all have their mouths shut and their hands behind their backs because teeth and hands are currently beyond me, it doesn’t matter. Finding an unexpected passion at 45 has me intrigued to know what else I might have missed.

It’s ‘Paint and Sip’ class tonight, with two of the girls I sat beside in high school. We’re in our forties now, and maybe it took a few decades, but nobody puts us in the non-artistic corner any more.