Becoming an Artist at 36

Reflections on moving from occasional sketches to a dedicated art practice.

For most of my life, art was something I did occasionally. I would draw from time to time and very rarely paint, but it never felt like something I could sustain consistently. I loved it, but it always remained on the edges of my life.

Last year things began to change. After being diagnosed with ADHD and Bipolar II and starting medication for the first time, I began experiencing something new: space.

For the first time in my life, my mind had the capacity to engage with things beyond simply getting through the day. Instead of collapsing into passive activities in my free time, I found myself with energy and curiosity that had been difficult to access before.

And with that space came a strong drive to create.

Taking my art practice seriously wasn’t a financial decision or a career calculation. It was something closer to necessity. Creating has become a way of maintaining my mental wellbeing, a place where my mind can slow down and focus. The process of observing, drawing, and painting brings a sense of calm that wasn’t previously available to me.

Before this shift, sustaining an art practice was difficult. Because of my ADHD, I could only work impatiently. When I did draw, I often found myself getting a headache and feeling mentally exhausted. It was something I enjoyed, but it was also draining.

Now the experience is very different. Working on a drawing or painting feels relaxing, almost meditative. Instead of depleting my energy, it restores it. The act of focusing on light, colour, and pattern, of really looking at something, has become grounding in a way I hadn’t expected.

I make art now because I have to. Not in the sense of obligation, but because something in me feels compelled to create. And in many ways, my mental health is better for it.

Learning to Look Closely

There’s a whole world that exists just beyond what our eyes are comfortable seeing.

I remember looking down a microscope for the first time when I was about seven years old. My mum owned one from her undergraduate science degree, and I vividly remember the first time I saw human blood cells under the lens. It felt magical, a hidden world suddenly revealed.

Later I studied science myself and spent many hours working with a dissecting microscope. Years after that, I experimented with a macro lens and again found myself fascinated by how much detail could appear when we look closely enough.

But interestingly, my fascination with subjects like pineapple skin or garlic didn’t start with seeing them in that way. It started with drawing them.

For me, drawing has become a process of experimentation and discovery. It’s less about capturing what I already see, and more about asking a question: what might reveal itself if I draw this?

Rather than deciding in advance that something is interesting, I’ve found myself collecting objects from around the house and simply seeing what happens when I spend time with them on paper. A clove of garlic, a pineapple sitting in the fruit bowl, sunlight filtering through basil leaves, ordinary things that begin to feel quite different once you slow down and observe them.

Art has gradually trained my eye to notice things I might have overlooked before: the way a face changes as a head turns, patterns repeating across surfaces, and the way light settles on a form.

And sometimes, when you look closely enough, the ordinary begins to feel extraordinary.

Taking the Practice Seriously

Taking my art practice seriously has really meant taking myself seriously.

Or perhaps a better word is meaningfully. Instead of racing through drawings or telling myself that I’m not good enough yet, and therefore never will be, it has become about believing that I can build a meaningful body of work. Work that is meaningful to me, but that might also resonate with others.

I’m still working out exactly what my routine will look like in the long term, but for now my creative time tends to fall either early in the morning or in the evenings. What matters more than the schedule is the consistency. I’m practicing almost every day and deliberately setting small challenges for myself to step outside my comfort zone.

Recently I set one of those challenges during International Women’s Week. I decided to paint seven portraits in acrylic, my first real attempt at painting people in that medium. By the fourth portrait, something began to click. I started to feel more confident about how the paint behaved, how I wanted to approach colour and brushwork, and how I wanted to capture the presence of a person on the canvas.

The challenge taught me a lot, not only about acrylic paint, but about the kinds of people and moments I want to paint. It reminded me that developing an art practice is less about waiting until you feel ready, and more about learning through doing.

The Fear and the Dream

One of the biggest questions that sits beneath all of this is simple: am I good enough?

And perhaps even more confronting: can I really pursue this dream?

Becoming an artist has been a deeply buried dream of mine since I was quite young. Even writing that sentence feels a little vulnerable, because it can feel like such an impossible thing to say out loud. There’s always a voice that asks, who am I to think I could do this?

But then another thought follows close behind: if other people can pursue their dream of becoming an artist, why can’t I?

The life plan I had imagined for myself looked quite different. I currently work as a coach, and my next step had always been to become a counsellor, building a practice that combined both fields. Yet despite that plan, I increasingly find my time and energy drawn toward art.

Interestingly, I don’t feel worried about starting “late.” In many ways, 36 feels like the perfect time. There’s a depth of experience, observation, and reflection that comes from living life for a while, and those things inevitably shape the work.

Strangely enough, I also feel excited to be an emerging artist at a time when artificial intelligence is becoming so prominent. At first glance that might sound counterintuitive. AI can generate images instantly, and some people see that as diminishing the role of artists.

But I see it differently.

In some ways it reminds me of what happened when photography became widely accessible. When cameras could capture a likeness perfectly, there was less reason for painters to simply reproduce what they saw. Instead, art moved somewhere new. Artists began exploring impression, interpretation, emotion: things that photography couldn’t quite replicate.

I think something similar may be happening now.

The presence of AI highlights where art truly lives: in the human act of seeing, interpreting, and discovering something unexpected. It pushes artists to explore what only they can bring to the work, their perception, their curiosity, their way of noticing the world.

And perhaps that’s why the more seriously I take my art, the more playful the process becomes.

Art gives me a space to experiment, to observe, and to discover what is right in front of me in ways that no other work quite allows.

Why Living Forms

I often find myself drawn to plants, organic forms, and the movement of the human body. I think part of that fascination comes from an awareness of how fleeting life is.

In a way, every drawing or painting of a living subject carries something of a memento mori. The moment I capture will never exist in quite the same way again. A leaf will grow or decay, a flower will fade, a body will move and age.

Even when we draw something simple: a clove of garlic, a pineapple skin, a hand in motion - we are observing a moment that is already passing.

There is also something deeply fascinating about the way nature organises itself. The patterns that repeat across surfaces, the way leaves grow along a stem, the structure of petals unfolding, or the way muscles move together beneath the skin. It feels almost impossibly intelligent, yet it happens without instruction.

When I draw or paint these forms, I’m not just trying to represent them. I’m trying to understand them; to observe how they exist, how they move, how they organise themselves.

And in doing so, I find myself returning to that same sense of curiosity I felt as a child looking down a microscope for the first time: the feeling that there is always more to see.

The Role of Studies

Studies play an important role in my practice because they allow me to understand how something works.

When I’m creating a study, the goal isn’t to produce a perfectly finished piece. Instead, it’s about observing closely and exploring what’s happening in front of me, how light moves across a surface, how colours shift, how patterns repeat, or how a form holds itself together.

Working this way allows me to stay curious without getting bogged down in perfection. It’s a way of learning through observation and experimentation.

I also enjoy sharing these studies on social media. For me, it’s important that people see the work that goes into making a finished piece. Art rarely appears fully formed; it grows out of many small experiments and discoveries along the way.

Sharing those studies invites my audience into that process. It allows people to experience the experimental side of the work with me and to see how observation, interpretation, and deconstruction eventually come together to form a study, and sometimes a finished artwork.

Looking Forward

Looking ahead, I hope to become the kind of artist who makes art feel accessible, work that brings joy into people’s homes and into their everyday lives.

I also hope that my journey might resonate with others who find themselves discovering or rediscovering art later in life. It’s easy to believe that creative paths must begin early, but I’ve come to realise that there is no single timeline for becoming an artist.

Right now, what excites me most about building my portfolio is simply the possibility of what I might learn to create.

I’m particularly drawn to the idea of recreating historical moments in sport, trying to capture the emotional energy of those moments on canvas, the sense of movement, anticipation, and triumph that makes them unforgettable.

At the same time, I’m equally excited by the quieter discoveries that appear in everyday life.

Inspiration might come from going for a walk in the rain, preparing dinner, or making a cup of tea.

There’s something about the everyday that becomes much more vivid when you begin observing it as an artist. Ordinary moments suddenly feel full of possibility.

A Different Way of Seeing

Perhaps the most surprising thing about returning to art at 36 is how much it has changed the way I see the world.

A pineapple skin, a clove of garlic, sunlight through basil leaves, a fleeting expression on someone’s face, these small things now feel like entire landscapes waiting to be explored.

The more closely I look, the more I realise that inspiration isn’t something distant or rare. It’s already here, quietly present in the everyday moments we often overlook.

All it asks is that we slow down long enough to see it.