Image by Edu Lautonfrom Unslpash

As a culture, we cherish the new.

We like the gleaming promise offered by fresh talent and untarnished creativity.

In art, this tendency is compounded by the centuries-old stereotype of great artists having a predestined pathway. As far back as the Greeks, stories have been told of the child prodigy whose talent was recognised in juvenescence.

Unfortunately, these cultural caricatures have the effect of persuading some people that, when it comes to creativity, they may have missed the boat.

But I want you to consider that this is nonsense.

It’s worth recalling that Edward Hopper didn’t sell his first painting until he was aged 31. The painting, Sailing (1911), was displayed at the seminal Armory Show in 1913. His most famous work, Nighthawks, wasn’t painted until Hopper was 60.

Painted when the artist was 60 years old: Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago, US. Image source Wikimedia Commons

And then there is Paul Cézanne, who painted his entire adult life yet was widely considered a failed painter in his 40s. He even became the inspiration for the defeated impressionist painter in his friend Émile Zola’s 1885 novel L’œuvre, (loosely translated to “The Work.”). However, Cézanne continued to paint and eventually found professional success in his 50s and 60s, achieving his first solo show with dealer Ambroise Vollard when he was 56. Cézanne went on to be one of the most influential artists of the last 200 years.

Then there’s the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, who made one of the most recognisable images in the world at an age when most people have retired.

Great Wave off Kanagawa (c.1830) by Katsushika Hokusai. Woodblock print. Image source Wikimedia Commons

Great Wave off Kanagawa is a woodblock print made by Hokusai sometime around 1830.

Hokusai was born in 1760 in the city of Edo, today’s Tokyo. He spent his whole life making prints and paintings and is thought to have produced over 30,000 paintings, sketches and woodblock prints during his life.

Hokusai was in his early 70s when he created Great Wave off Kanagawa. He later claimed that nothing he produced before the age of 70 was of very much value. For Hokusai, with age came wisdom, as he wryly expressed:

“And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.” (Introduction to series “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji”, 1834)

Finding your creative peak in full maturity

A more recent artist Luchita Hurtadohad been painting for over 70 years, but only gained wider recognition when she was included in the 2018 Hammer Biennial.

Born in Venezuela in 1920, Hurtado was in her late 90s at the time when she had her first solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2019.

Portrait of Luchita Hurtado, 2018. © Luchita Hurtado. Photo by Oresti Tsonopoulos. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Hurtado emigrated from Venezuela to New York with her mother aged eight, travelling by boat via Puerto Rico. As they arrived at customs on a pier in Brooklyn, she was fascinated to see snow for the first time. She later travelled extensively in Mexico, before settling permanently in Santa Monica, California, in 1951.

Though she painted most of her life, she rarely exhibited her work. According to one report, her art was often made not in a studio but on the kitchen table, and her painting hours coincided with children’s bedtimes.

Yet she remained deeply embedded in the North American art scene and made friends with many famous names of the last century, from Isamu Noguchi to Frida Kahlo, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Judy Chicago.

The arc of Hurtado’s output took a meaningful shift at the beginning of the 1970s when she entered a more surrealist mode of representation. Her figures stand above floors and rugs crisscrossed with zigzags, diamonds, stripes, and chevrons of Latin weavings. These are images of invented snapshots, vignettes of an impossible reality.

Despite being acknowledged for the originality of her art in her later years, she denied any feelings of resentment, saying “I don’t feel anger, I really don’t. I feel, you know: How stupid of them.”

The challenge of forgetting

Picasso once said: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

The difficulty with adulthood is that we are expected to take on so many responsibilities that we end up thinking about our lives in more and more practical terms. Finding a job, earning a living, establishing stability and protecting our loved ones.

In the face of all these duties, seeking to lead a creative life — or even just taking an hour or two out of your normal routines in order to write or paint — can sometimes feel like irresponsible behaviour.

The challenge therefore, is to forget about the weight of responsibility for a time. Stop telling yourself that you should be more sensible.

And also to remember, it’s never too late to find creative success.

If you liked this, you might like my book Great Paintings Explained, an examination of fifteen of art’s most enthralling images? Go here:

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