Getting Into Art As a Grown-Up

Illustration by Dola Sun

There’s been a creative thread running through my life, a need to set my hands on making pretty things. As a child, I was enamored of pens, markers, paper, and stickers. I used them to write letters, to illustrate my “books,” and to make cards with chunky, uneven letters. I wasn’t one of the art kids who actually knew how to draw and whose work would get entered in contests at school. I just liked to play around.

In high school, my mom taught me how to sew, and fabric became my new artistic expression. I sewed my own clothes and embraced the crafts craze of the 1990s, which involved a lot of bubble paint and Wonder-Under. I taught myself applique and hand embroidery when my kids were little, making them quilts to capture their changing interests.

(Nothing will ever top the Clifford quilt I made for my son when he turned 2.)

I still like to have some kind of artsy project going at all times. I’ve been learning how to hand letter, creating colorful spreads in an art journal. I’ve also been working on making a gallery of needlework for an empty hallway wall in my house. I have six pieces finished, waiting patiently in their hoops. One more—odd numbers are always better—and it will be ready to hang.

So am I an artist? Yes, but not in the way some people are. For me, art is less of an identity and more of a practice that weaves its way into my life. It’s something I personally need, but I’m not looking to change the world with it.

As far as I’ve been able to figure out, I come from a line of people like that: practical, list-making, routine-oriented people who no one will read about in an art history textbook but for whom creativity remains essential. My mom, now 90, still quilts and embroiders.

My dad has been gone for 12 years, but his life was full of creative pursuits. He spent his boyhood doodling and sketching cars—I have a bunch of his old school notes to prove it—and he took evening classes as an adult to learn things like woodworking, stained glass, and model ship building.

I guess you could say I learned by watching my parents that artistic pursuits can be whatever you want them to be, and at any season of life.

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about my paternal grandmother, Vivien Donnelly Ketteler, who took up painting late in life. We grandchildren have many of her framed pieces. As I sit in my home office writing this, I’m staring at her painting of a spartan desk in front of a narrow attic window, a scene from her own home. Compared to her other, more cheerful work, it’s an outlier—a study in perspective and shadow, the glass looking haunted, either because that was the mood or because she was still learning the subtlety of shading.

Vivien was born in 1905 and, from what I’ve been able to piece together, grew up comfortably in a nice home on Scott Street in Covington, one of four children. The family owned Donnelly Funeral Home on Madison Avenue. Vivien was just a teenager when both her father and grandfather died of the Spanish Flu. At some point, they had to sell the funeral home and move to a smaller home, although I’m not sure where.

I’ve seen pictures of my grandmother from the 1920s, and she had this fantastic androgynous style. My grandfather, whom she married in the late 1920s, kept a photo album, and I’ve made copies of several of the pages. It’s full of images of her looking carefree, wearing pants and houndstooth while her flapper friends wore dresses and wrapped boho-looking scarves around their heads.

In my favorite photograph, she’s leaning against the driver’s side door of a big, boxy automobile (which describes every car of that era), her head cocked, a hand in her pocket, and one foot resting on the oversized running board. She looks wildly stylish, with pants tucked into knee-high argyle socks and a loose-fit sweater with a pointed collar. My grandfather captioned it, “My Baby.”

It’s the look in her eye that gets me every time. I imagine she must have felt like she had rounded the corner on tragedy, her coming-of-age interrupted and resumed, their little rat pack before there was a Rat Pack.

My grandfather clearly had some artistic sensibilities of his own. I can tell by the expressions he captured with the camera, which I imagine wouldn’t have been nearly as easy in 1928. I know little about him, because he died in 1942 of kidney failure related to high blood pressure. My dad was 11, my Aunt Sally was 7, and my grandmother, just 37, was pregnant. Everyone told her to put her kids in an orphanage and just focus on the baby she was about to have.

I try to imagine these conversations: Just dump your kids and look out for yourself. Was it because we were at war, and in wartime the most brutal of survival instincts kick in?

Instead of heeding that advice, she cobbled together a childcare arrangement and went back to work full-time after giving birth to my Aunt Mary. She also took in boarders in their small Park Hills home. The coy girl with the argyle socks turned out to be more resourceful than anyone ever thought she could be.

She sewed and embroidered and kept her hands busy, but it wasn’t until she retired around 1970 that she started painting, taking art classes at Baker Hunt in Covington. Growing up (I was born in 1974) I knew her as a petite, no-nonsense woman with white hair who produced the art for our walls. Her paintings were mostly bucolic scenes of farm life. A mother and her children feeding chickens. A water wheel next to a rocky stream. A russet barn on a golden hill.

She usually painted from photographs, often images from wall calendars. I seem to recall her having at least one art show, though I don’t think she was motivated to try to sell her work. Or maybe she was? I don’t know.

I don’t think I ever had any conversations with her about art. She died when I was 20, long before I knew everything I would someday want to ask. Like: Did you amass canvases, flooding them with burnt orange and muddy brown and spring green, to help heal the scars? When you saturated the sky with cheerful cerulean, was it because that’s how the sky felt to you or because it’s how you wanted it to feel? Did you choose scenes to paint that you thought would bring other people comfort or did they bring you comfort?

Expanding your creative horizons later in life makes perfect sense. Toddlers aren’t nipping at your heels. You have a moment to actually think. My Aunt Sally actually went to college in her late thirties once her five children were all in school, earning a degree in fine art from NKU. My sister, Laura, now 60, has been taking drawing classes at Baker Hunt, and she’s learning to sketch and paint—things she never thought she was good at until she took the time to learn.

Now that I’m in my 50s I see autumn coming, the season that will lead to the final season. I still have so much more I want to create. I want to learn to make altered books, like my Aunt Sally used to make. I want to junk journal, to make something interesting with all those old college notes my dad saved and I plucked from a file cabinet after he died.

Several months ago, I discovered a sticker and nostalgic art supply store in Wyoming called The Sticker Shop, and every time I walk in there I’m 10 years old again, needing to touch everything, and wanting to test out the pens, buy all the stickers, and lose myself in the possibility of making. It’s the same impulse from childhood, but what’s different are the scars.

Late-in-life-art can still be full of aspiration, but you’re battle-tested and beaten up. Life has sucked you up and shit you back out a few times. It can all feel so unfair until your brain gets a little vacation while your hands spin up something that feels beautiful to you.

I’ll let you in on a secret about the real reason I’m turning that wall into my personal art gallery. It’s because I need a new story to replace the old one. The day before we took my teenage son for inpatient treatment for substance use, he punched the wall and broke the cheap Van Gogh print that had been hanging there for almost 20 years. My husband spackled and repainted, and it’s been blank for a year.

I don’t have my grandmother’s exquisite 1920s style, but I have her instinct. Turn your sorrows into something else. Keep making art. And when you think you’re too old, make more.