Oh Deborah, your sentiments so resonated with me. I was a late bloomer, in that I didn't go to uni until I was 50 to study Fine Art, and have been pottering along ever since. Self doubt is a constant companion - but I remind myself that it's better to have tried, and yes, perhaps failed, than to regret not having a go at all! Keep painting!!
I wrote a reply, and it seems to have disappeared, so I will try to remember what I wrote!
Than you very much for reading it and I am so pleased it struck a chord. I hadn't realised that you started painting later in life and I think that voice can be even louder as a consequence. When I am playing with new materials with no outcome in mind, I hear, "What on earth do you think you are doing?" It can feel slightly ridiculous producing less pieces of paper, but it is how we learn and get better, and I am trying to be very firm in my reply!
Yes, we need to keep painting! Thank you too for restacking it, I greatly appeciate it.
I loved reading this Deborah. Your old garden looked beautiful and I can see why it was such an inspiration to your work. It is exactly the space I would want my garden to be, full of colour and wildlife.
I think it is always hard starting again and putting yourself out there. Imposter syndrome and the fear of failure are emotions that are always present. But then if we never try we will never succeed.
My ethos is that if we want something enough we will win through eventually. I had no idea what I was doing when I started my photography career, but I had a passion and I think that is what has carried me though.
Thank you very much, Gill. That nagging voice is hard to quell, but I am getting better at it. It has taken me ages to find the courage to return to what I loved doing and have skirted around it for too long, but at least I now will have tried! You are right, persistence and perseverance really matters.
Having only just discovered you and your writings it was astonishing how much I agreed with you. I feel that time is running out and there are so many arty things I want to try!
Thank you for very much for reading it and I am so pleased to welcome you here. I feel time pressing more and more, it is as though suddenly I have woken up to the importance of making the most of life, which perhaps is no bad thing!
This has been such a wonderful read Deborah. I do think that your Substack has become my favourite, with all your brilliant recommendations (which I always search out and they are always fantastic). I need to catch up on them all.
I have loved reading about your first proper garden, it sounds idyllic.
I would love my own garden though I make do with some outside space that I have fashioned into my own version of a garden, and it does surprisingly well. There are fruit trees in big pots, roses, peonies and lavender to name a few. I’ve just started growing a grape vine up the wall too.
All of what you have written really does resonate. I’ve been having the same conversations recently about if I’ve left things too late. I’m 51 now and teaching did take up most of my time at the expense of my printmaking. I thought that being part time would change things dramatically, and though it has really helped me create more work, I’m finding it hard to still balance both. I can’t afford not to earn a regular wage from the teaching so I’ve been feeling really frustrated of late.
I think mentally I’ve reached a full stop with teaching-maybe it’s burn out. But then when other colleagues tell me how lucky I am to only work three days, I tell myself I need to stop being silly and get on with it.
It is really heartening to read of how so many others hit their strides creatively at an older age. It gives me hope! Xx
Dear Cally, thank you so much for reading it and saying such lovely things, that means a great deal. I am so glad it struck a chord. Before leaving teaching completely, I too went 3 days a week, but found that the work still overspilled and I had to attend meetings on my days off, so really it didn't make a huge difference, except the drop in income! I took a huge financial risk, but though it is still a struggle I don't regret it.
But what I now realise is that because of that financial leap, I found myself doing work that I felt would keep me afloat, instead of doing what I love. And, while, it is important to keep afloat, that is not the best way of proceeding. Constantly thinking about whether something will sell, while doing something, is not what I intended! Looking back to those pictures brought that home. I still feel fearful, but at least I have recognised it. I am 60 later this year that that too has brought things into sharp focus!
Teaching is so tiring and I hope you can find a way that you can find a way through xx
Beautiful photos, paintings and words! Thank you so much for sharing. Your first garden looks gorgeous, and I love those roses. 🌹 I’m just about to start reading “Second Act” by Henry Oliver which is about late bloomers and reinventing your life, and looks very interesting...
Thank you, Amy, I am pleased you liked it. I do love my roses! There is so much rain at the moment and they have taken quite a battering, but I am cutting some to bring indoors. I have seen the book and think it might just be the encouragement I need. Do let me know what you think!
I loved reading this. What a beautiful garden! After art college, I spent many years teaching creativity (art, drams and stories)to young children whilst always wishing that I could be an artist instead. When I retired I drew and experimented with different media but never felt I was getting anywhere. More recently I have worked more with textiles which I’ve always loved and met a group of very supportive artist who have encouraged me to believe that I really am an artist. This August will be taking part in a group exhibition for the first time ever and finally, at sixty nine, I’m beginning to believe I can be an artist. There is still a tug of war between art and gardening though!
Tamsin, I feel so heartened to read this. I love your work, especially the latest pieces with textiles, and having followed your work on IG for a long while now, I never thought you as anything other than an artist! isn't it extraordinary how we can tell ourselves the opposite and believe it? I am delighted that you have found a group you can work with ( and confess I wish I could do the same) and wish you every success with it. It is enormously exciting and it is not too late for us! As to the pull with the garden, it is very tricky at this time of year...
Lovely article Deborah..I too fell in love with my house when I saw the neglected garden; fruit orchard with overgrown trees, neglected vineyard and one solitary cactus, pot bound on a balcony. Eight years on and after a lot of hard work, we are blessed every year with wonderful yields. Now I'd like to rediscover my love of drawing and painting. Our old woodshed is ready for renovation. Art studio perhaps? 🤣🤣 Thank you for your inspiration. 😁
Thank you very much, I am so pleased you liked it. My old shed also had an old cactus, you have reminded me, but I don't think it survived! That woodshed sounds perfect. Mine was only tiny, but it was enough to just sit and paint!
Having a substack catch-up session and what a joy it was to read this post and see your gorgeous artwork...and that garden.
The older we get the more we leave areas of the garden to do their own thing with a path mowed through. The trend for ‘rewilding’ offers the perfect excuse, and surrounded by farm land as we are the Battle of the Weeds is one we no longer feel we want to waste time and energy on. But through the ‘wild’ up pop little reminders of the garden that was...this year a superb show of Coral Reef poppies and with it the memories of those years of growing from seed and nursing them along. The story of those plants lives on and in a way that’s now part of the magic.
Trying to cultivate a garden next to farmland, or wild areas, is very hard and like you I now have a very different garden with areas that are allowed to break free! How wonderful to have a rising up of Coral poppies. If I sow and tend to poppies, I never see them again, and the best are always those that spring up in unexpected places. I am so pleased you liked it and thank you very much for reading it and saying hello.
I enjoyed your post. I retired 6 months ago. Although I have caring responsibilities and health issues, I feel my life has restarted on a new path and I love it. My garden is going through change so that I do work less and enjoy more. I did a writing course in December 2021 with @BethKempton. I have done several more courses with Beth and started my substack in December 2022. The same year I learnt to embroider using a kit producing a stitched mug of snowdrops. I didn't think I would be able to do 'proper' embroidery with satin stitches and french notes but I can. I have done lots more embroidery since then using my garden as inspiration. I hope you find your way and can continue with your lovely painting. Good luck.
Dear Gill, thank you very much. I am so pleased to hear about your new path and how new creative avenues are opening up. By coincidence I am just about the read Beth Kempton's "Wabi Sabi," as I was drawn to this notion of imperfection, and will look at her writing courses too. The response to this post has made me feel much more positively about the prospect of being 60, which to be frank, I have been dreading! It seems it really is never too late to live the life you want to live.
I am glad it has helped Deborah. I am 66 on 17 June, I feel very optimistic about the future. Incidentally Beth sometimes does free writing courses. It is worth following her on substack or Instagram for updates.
Magical, I love this, the gorgeous paintings and the rumination on time, (which is also forefront in my mind right now!). Incredible how you woke up that garden ✨ Also I am reading The Secret Garden to my kids, we are reading the last chapter tomorrow. It is such a great book. Thank you for this beautiful post ❤️
We are enjoying our first garden and this year have seen our flowerbeds of 3 years blooming into something full and wild for the first time this June. It is as though that effort we started 3 years previous was now paying us back with a personality and a voice of its own. Foxgloves reaching up behind peonies and the cornflowers popping up everywhere it can!
There is something in that feeling that the flowers have themselves grown up and spoken back to us now. When you ask, is it not too late? I think absolutely not, because every effort put in is something that will grow and compound and exceed your expectations in 1 week, 1 year, 1 decade from now... The garden you inherited at that cottage was someone else's investment and you left yours to the next lucky owners.
Hopefully in your art you see that too. Surely its worth it when you look back just a year or two.. those paintings of the garden are speaking to you now. All grown up. Working in the city and making whoever has them on their wall happier in their world. What a thing!
Gardens do repay you and your choice of plants sounds wonderful. Is there a better blue than a cornflower? Each year it will bring you fresh joys.
The approach of the big birthday has certainly galvanised my thoughts and, you likening the ageing process to the developement of a garden, is such a hopeful and poignant one.
By the strangest coincidence I was contacted a few years ago by someone on Instagram asking if I was the artist who lived in Norwich and had a garden with a walnut tree? It seems that they purchased the cottage a couple of years after I moved and had continued to tend the garden. I brought me great cheer!
Thank you very much for your kind words about my paintings, they mean a great deal.T
Such wonderful recollections & comforting & inspiring words. I love those early paintings, but equally what you do now is wonderful. Don't let that doubting voice (or any other) hold you back.
I so relate to what you say about time being squeezed, and that sense of urgency and time diminishing. I'm so thankful for this nudge you have given. I started a creative writing masters degree this year (I've wanted to do it for a very long time), and it feels so right.
Congratulations on the course, that must be very exciting! That "squeeze" has happened only recently but it is very present. I am trying hard not to let it affect what I do, but it is hard. Thank you very much for reading it, Carri.
I will add a small note here. The Pandemic had one saving grace. It compelled people to rethink their life path. Some left their deadening jobs to pursue their Passions. Your paintings are lovely, as is your prose. Carry on, Deborah. Carry on!
Thank you, dear Perry! Yes, that is very true, it did allow people to have a space in which they could explore what they wanted and prompted so many to reassess. I realise that having written this, I had better be as good as my word!
I have so enjoyed reading this post, thank you very much. I have a garden which I love, but which is always on the brink of getting away from me, specially this year after all the rain! However I love it and find Christopher Lloyd and Great Dixter a great inspiration.
Wasn't he wonderful? I loved how outspoken he was and how he did exactly what he liked, such as when he dug up the rose garden and planted exotics. I can barely walk down the paths at the moment (and get soaked when I do!) as everything is spilling over...
Deborah: Thank you for writing of this kindness to yourself in the face of perilous procrastination and nagging doubts. Having just reluctantly left work I loved, yet was having difficulty returning to - you are an inspiration!
Oh Deborah, your sentiments so resonated with me. I was a late bloomer, in that I didn't go to uni until I was 50 to study Fine Art, and have been pottering along ever since. Self doubt is a constant companion - but I remind myself that it's better to have tried, and yes, perhaps failed, than to regret not having a go at all! Keep painting!!
I wrote a reply, and it seems to have disappeared, so I will try to remember what I wrote!
Than you very much for reading it and I am so pleased it struck a chord. I hadn't realised that you started painting later in life and I think that voice can be even louder as a consequence. When I am playing with new materials with no outcome in mind, I hear, "What on earth do you think you are doing?" It can feel slightly ridiculous producing less pieces of paper, but it is how we learn and get better, and I am trying to be very firm in my reply!
Yes, we need to keep painting! Thank you too for restacking it, I greatly appeciate it.
Oh, not sure what happened! The mysteries of technology!!
It was very odd and I am glad I spotted it!
I loved reading this Deborah. Your old garden looked beautiful and I can see why it was such an inspiration to your work. It is exactly the space I would want my garden to be, full of colour and wildlife.
I think it is always hard starting again and putting yourself out there. Imposter syndrome and the fear of failure are emotions that are always present. But then if we never try we will never succeed.
My ethos is that if we want something enough we will win through eventually. I had no idea what I was doing when I started my photography career, but I had a passion and I think that is what has carried me though.
It is never too late to do what you love. 🙂
Thank you very much, Gill. That nagging voice is hard to quell, but I am getting better at it. It has taken me ages to find the courage to return to what I loved doing and have skirted around it for too long, but at least I now will have tried! You are right, persistence and perseverance really matters.
Having only just discovered you and your writings it was astonishing how much I agreed with you. I feel that time is running out and there are so many arty things I want to try!
Thank you for very much for reading it and I am so pleased to welcome you here. I feel time pressing more and more, it is as though suddenly I have woken up to the importance of making the most of life, which perhaps is no bad thing!
Learn and thrive! There's no end to what we can do
Absolutely!
This has been such a wonderful read Deborah. I do think that your Substack has become my favourite, with all your brilliant recommendations (which I always search out and they are always fantastic). I need to catch up on them all.
I have loved reading about your first proper garden, it sounds idyllic.
I would love my own garden though I make do with some outside space that I have fashioned into my own version of a garden, and it does surprisingly well. There are fruit trees in big pots, roses, peonies and lavender to name a few. I’ve just started growing a grape vine up the wall too.
All of what you have written really does resonate. I’ve been having the same conversations recently about if I’ve left things too late. I’m 51 now and teaching did take up most of my time at the expense of my printmaking. I thought that being part time would change things dramatically, and though it has really helped me create more work, I’m finding it hard to still balance both. I can’t afford not to earn a regular wage from the teaching so I’ve been feeling really frustrated of late.
I think mentally I’ve reached a full stop with teaching-maybe it’s burn out. But then when other colleagues tell me how lucky I am to only work three days, I tell myself I need to stop being silly and get on with it.
It is really heartening to read of how so many others hit their strides creatively at an older age. It gives me hope! Xx
Dear Cally, thank you so much for reading it and saying such lovely things, that means a great deal. I am so glad it struck a chord. Before leaving teaching completely, I too went 3 days a week, but found that the work still overspilled and I had to attend meetings on my days off, so really it didn't make a huge difference, except the drop in income! I took a huge financial risk, but though it is still a struggle I don't regret it.
But what I now realise is that because of that financial leap, I found myself doing work that I felt would keep me afloat, instead of doing what I love. And, while, it is important to keep afloat, that is not the best way of proceeding. Constantly thinking about whether something will sell, while doing something, is not what I intended! Looking back to those pictures brought that home. I still feel fearful, but at least I have recognised it. I am 60 later this year that that too has brought things into sharp focus!
Teaching is so tiring and I hope you can find a way that you can find a way through xx
Beautiful photos, paintings and words! Thank you so much for sharing. Your first garden looks gorgeous, and I love those roses. 🌹 I’m just about to start reading “Second Act” by Henry Oliver which is about late bloomers and reinventing your life, and looks very interesting...
Thank you, Amy, I am pleased you liked it. I do love my roses! There is so much rain at the moment and they have taken quite a battering, but I am cutting some to bring indoors. I have seen the book and think it might just be the encouragement I need. Do let me know what you think!
Will keep you posted regarding the book!
Thank you!
I loved reading this. What a beautiful garden! After art college, I spent many years teaching creativity (art, drams and stories)to young children whilst always wishing that I could be an artist instead. When I retired I drew and experimented with different media but never felt I was getting anywhere. More recently I have worked more with textiles which I’ve always loved and met a group of very supportive artist who have encouraged me to believe that I really am an artist. This August will be taking part in a group exhibition for the first time ever and finally, at sixty nine, I’m beginning to believe I can be an artist. There is still a tug of war between art and gardening though!
Tamsin, I feel so heartened to read this. I love your work, especially the latest pieces with textiles, and having followed your work on IG for a long while now, I never thought you as anything other than an artist! isn't it extraordinary how we can tell ourselves the opposite and believe it? I am delighted that you have found a group you can work with ( and confess I wish I could do the same) and wish you every success with it. It is enormously exciting and it is not too late for us! As to the pull with the garden, it is very tricky at this time of year...
Lovely article Deborah..I too fell in love with my house when I saw the neglected garden; fruit orchard with overgrown trees, neglected vineyard and one solitary cactus, pot bound on a balcony. Eight years on and after a lot of hard work, we are blessed every year with wonderful yields. Now I'd like to rediscover my love of drawing and painting. Our old woodshed is ready for renovation. Art studio perhaps? 🤣🤣 Thank you for your inspiration. 😁
Thank you very much, I am so pleased you liked it. My old shed also had an old cactus, you have reminded me, but I don't think it survived! That woodshed sounds perfect. Mine was only tiny, but it was enough to just sit and paint!
Having a substack catch-up session and what a joy it was to read this post and see your gorgeous artwork...and that garden.
The older we get the more we leave areas of the garden to do their own thing with a path mowed through. The trend for ‘rewilding’ offers the perfect excuse, and surrounded by farm land as we are the Battle of the Weeds is one we no longer feel we want to waste time and energy on. But through the ‘wild’ up pop little reminders of the garden that was...this year a superb show of Coral Reef poppies and with it the memories of those years of growing from seed and nursing them along. The story of those plants lives on and in a way that’s now part of the magic.
Trying to cultivate a garden next to farmland, or wild areas, is very hard and like you I now have a very different garden with areas that are allowed to break free! How wonderful to have a rising up of Coral poppies. If I sow and tend to poppies, I never see them again, and the best are always those that spring up in unexpected places. I am so pleased you liked it and thank you very much for reading it and saying hello.
PS Lynne here( once dgr!) I’m catching up with you everywhere 🤗
I enjoyed your post. I retired 6 months ago. Although I have caring responsibilities and health issues, I feel my life has restarted on a new path and I love it. My garden is going through change so that I do work less and enjoy more. I did a writing course in December 2021 with @BethKempton. I have done several more courses with Beth and started my substack in December 2022. The same year I learnt to embroider using a kit producing a stitched mug of snowdrops. I didn't think I would be able to do 'proper' embroidery with satin stitches and french notes but I can. I have done lots more embroidery since then using my garden as inspiration. I hope you find your way and can continue with your lovely painting. Good luck.
Dear Gill, thank you very much. I am so pleased to hear about your new path and how new creative avenues are opening up. By coincidence I am just about the read Beth Kempton's "Wabi Sabi," as I was drawn to this notion of imperfection, and will look at her writing courses too. The response to this post has made me feel much more positively about the prospect of being 60, which to be frank, I have been dreading! It seems it really is never too late to live the life you want to live.
I am glad it has helped Deborah. I am 66 on 17 June, I feel very optimistic about the future. Incidentally Beth sometimes does free writing courses. It is worth following her on substack or Instagram for updates.
I shall certainly sign up, thank you very much.
Magical, I love this, the gorgeous paintings and the rumination on time, (which is also forefront in my mind right now!). Incredible how you woke up that garden ✨ Also I am reading The Secret Garden to my kids, we are reading the last chapter tomorrow. It is such a great book. Thank you for this beautiful post ❤️
What a great journey you're on.
We are enjoying our first garden and this year have seen our flowerbeds of 3 years blooming into something full and wild for the first time this June. It is as though that effort we started 3 years previous was now paying us back with a personality and a voice of its own. Foxgloves reaching up behind peonies and the cornflowers popping up everywhere it can!
There is something in that feeling that the flowers have themselves grown up and spoken back to us now. When you ask, is it not too late? I think absolutely not, because every effort put in is something that will grow and compound and exceed your expectations in 1 week, 1 year, 1 decade from now... The garden you inherited at that cottage was someone else's investment and you left yours to the next lucky owners.
Hopefully in your art you see that too. Surely its worth it when you look back just a year or two.. those paintings of the garden are speaking to you now. All grown up. Working in the city and making whoever has them on their wall happier in their world. What a thing!
Gardens do repay you and your choice of plants sounds wonderful. Is there a better blue than a cornflower? Each year it will bring you fresh joys.
The approach of the big birthday has certainly galvanised my thoughts and, you likening the ageing process to the developement of a garden, is such a hopeful and poignant one.
By the strangest coincidence I was contacted a few years ago by someone on Instagram asking if I was the artist who lived in Norwich and had a garden with a walnut tree? It seems that they purchased the cottage a couple of years after I moved and had continued to tend the garden. I brought me great cheer!
Thank you very much for your kind words about my paintings, they mean a great deal.T
Such wonderful recollections & comforting & inspiring words. I love those early paintings, but equally what you do now is wonderful. Don't let that doubting voice (or any other) hold you back.
Thank you very much, Nick, that is so kind of you. I will try very hard!
I so relate to what you say about time being squeezed, and that sense of urgency and time diminishing. I'm so thankful for this nudge you have given. I started a creative writing masters degree this year (I've wanted to do it for a very long time), and it feels so right.
Congratulations on the course, that must be very exciting! That "squeeze" has happened only recently but it is very present. I am trying hard not to let it affect what I do, but it is hard. Thank you very much for reading it, Carri.
Wonderful post, wonderful photos and paintings. It’s all a journey, isn’t it?
Thank you very much for reading it. It is and sometimes it is easy to forget that!
Each journey unique and special
It is. Thank you very much for reading it, Paolo.
I will add a small note here. The Pandemic had one saving grace. It compelled people to rethink their life path. Some left their deadening jobs to pursue their Passions. Your paintings are lovely, as is your prose. Carry on, Deborah. Carry on!
Thank you, dear Perry! Yes, that is very true, it did allow people to have a space in which they could explore what they wanted and prompted so many to reassess. I realise that having written this, I had better be as good as my word!
I have so enjoyed reading this post, thank you very much. I have a garden which I love, but which is always on the brink of getting away from me, specially this year after all the rain! However I love it and find Christopher Lloyd and Great Dixter a great inspiration.
Wasn't he wonderful? I loved how outspoken he was and how he did exactly what he liked, such as when he dug up the rose garden and planted exotics. I can barely walk down the paths at the moment (and get soaked when I do!) as everything is spilling over...
Deborah: Thank you for writing of this kindness to yourself in the face of perilous procrastination and nagging doubts. Having just reluctantly left work I loved, yet was having difficulty returning to - you are an inspiration!
What a lovely message to receive - thank you! I hope to be back drawing soon! x