I Started Painting at 50 and It Changed Everything

I did not grow up thinking I would become an artist.

Art was never really my thing.

Music was my thing. It still is. I play guitar, I sing, I have a piano and I have a whole room at home dedicated to music. Creativity was always there, but painting was not the place I expected it to land.

Apart from making art with my children when they were little, I had never been someone who painted. I had never taken formal art classes. I had never stood in front of a canvas and thought, this is where I belong.

That came much later.

I started painting when I was 50.

At the time, I was raising capital for the company I founded, The Room Xchange. I was pitching for a million dollar seed round and I had been travelling up and down the east coast of Australia for months. It was stressful, relentless and emotionally exhausting. Because I only have one kidney, my doctor told me I needed to find a way to reduce my stress.

Meditation was suggested, but meditation has never quite worked for me in the way people think it should. When my mind becomes quiet, I start getting ideas. My brain does not drift into some peaceful empty field. It starts building things, solving things and creating new problems for me to explore. Lovely in theory. Not exactly restful.

So I thought I would try painting.

There was art in my family. My grandfather was an incredible landscape artist. My grandmother painted and so did a couple of my aunties. I thought perhaps it might be in the blood. I had no idea whether I would be any good at it, but I decided to give it a go.

I bought a big wooden easel, a large canvas, oil paints, brushes and turps. That tells you how little I knew. I did not even start with acrylics like a sensible beginner. I went straight to oils because clearly I had no idea what I was walking into and apparently wanted to make things as complicated as possible from the beginning.

I went away for a few nights with my partner at the time to a wooden A frame country house near the Dandenong Ranges. It had an open fireplace and was surrounded by trees. It felt like something out of a film. I pulled out the easel and decided I would start painting.

I had no idea what I was going to paint.

Then my son Jordan sent me a screenshot of a Polaroid his housemate had taken of him.

I took that as a sign.

Of course, because I had never painted before, the perfectly logical thing to do was attempt a portrait as my very first painting. Not a bowl of fruit. Not a landscape. Not a simple little study of light and shadow. A portrait of my son. I look back now and laugh at the audacity of it.

I had no idea what I was doing. I knew nothing about underpaintings. I knew nothing about the proper way to build a portrait in oils. I watched YouTube videos, gridded up the image and scaled it onto the canvas. I used a regular lead pencil to draw the grid and if you look closely at the finished painting, you can still see the lines.

There are plenty of things in that painting that are technically wrong. Some areas are a bit flat. Some parts could have been handled better. An artist looking closely would see the mistakes.

But to this day, it is still one of my favourite paintings.

People still respond to it.

That first portrait took me around 30 hours over about three months. I took a couple of art classes during that time to learn some colour mixing, but most of it was me, YouTube, trial and error and a stubborn desire to finish the painting so I could show my son what I had made.

What surprised me most was not just that I could paint something recognisable.

It was what painting did to my mind.

When I painted, I dropped into a flow state. I was not thinking about the business. I was not thinking about pitching. I was not worrying about money, investors, pressure or what needed to be done next. I was just focused on what was in front of me.

The colour, the brushstroke, the shape and the next small decision.

That singular focus calmed me in a way meditation never had.

In time, I did raise the million dollars for my seed round. It took longer than I expected and required more patience than I probably had at the beginning, but I got there. I went on to build and run The Room Xchange for the next 10 years. Painting did not take me away from that ambition. It helped me survive the pressure of it. It gave me somewhere to put the stress while I continued doing the work that needed to be done.

Painting gave my mind somewhere to land.

It gave me a place where I could concentrate deeply without having to perform, convince, pitch, explain or carry the weight of the world. It was not passive relaxation. It was active stillness. My body was doing something and my mind could finally stop racing ahead.

That is what pulled me in.

After that first painting, I wanted to learn everything. I started with oils, then began exploring acrylics, texture, canvas work, abstract work, paint pouring and just about every medium I could get my hands on. Like many artists at the beginning, I went through the glorious and slightly ridiculous phase of buying every art material under the sun because I wanted to try everything.

I watched tutorials. I practised. I failed. I learnt. I tried again.

Then I failed again and learnt some more.

Over the years, I would say I have done my 10,000 hours. From the moment I started painting, I was spending around 15 to 20 hours a week in the studio. I stopped watching television. I spent my spare time painting, studying, experimenting and building skill. I was not afraid to fail, which helped.

That has always been part of who I am. If I want to learn something, I am willing to be bad at it first. I do not expect mastery on day one. I expect curiosity, discipline and a fair amount of mess. Painting gave me all three.

In those early years, I did not force myself into one style too quickly. I let myself explore.

I often describe it as building a wide single storey house instead of a tall skyscraper. I did not want to build one narrow tower of skill. I wanted to spread out and understand different mediums, surfaces, materials and approaches. I wanted to know what oil could do, what acrylic could do, what texture could do, what charcoal could do, what abstraction could do and what would happen if I gave myself permission to follow the work wherever it wanted to go.

That exploration mattered.

It helped me discover what I loved.

It helped me understand my own hand.

It helped me find my way into the work I make now.

At the beginning, I painted in my lounge room. I would put a drop sheet over the carpet, set up my easel and paint there. When the weather became warmer, I moved out to the deck. Later, we moved into a house that had a landing upstairs and I turned that into a gallery space. It felt extraordinary to have a place where the work could live.

Now, I have an entire studio in a two car garage.

That still feels phenomenal to me.

The physical space has changed over time, but the reason I paint has remained connected to that first discovery. Painting gives me access to something deeper than thinking. It allows me to process life through image, texture, colour and form. It gives me somewhere to put what I do not yet have words for.

At first, painting was a way to manage stress.

Then it became a way to learn.

Then it became a practice.

Now it is the way I tell the truth.

I did not begin painting at 50 because I had a grand plan to become an artist. I began because I was exhausted and needed a way to calm my nervous system. I began because something in me needed a different kind of stillness. I began because a doctor told me I needed to reduce my stress and because somewhere in my family line there had been painters, so I thought perhaps I would try.

What I did not know was that painting would open a completely new chapter of my life.

It would become the place where my stories landed. It would lead me into collections, exhibitions, mentoring, artist talks and a body of work I could never have imagined when I bought that first easel and set myself up in front of a canvas with no idea what I was doing.

That is one of the things I love about starting later in life. You do not arrive empty handed.

By the time I started painting, I had lived. I had raised children. I had built businesses. I had survived cancer. I had known pressure, grief, reinvention, ambition, fear, love, loss and the strange beauty of beginning again when life does not look the way you thought it would.

All of that came with me into the studio.

I did not have the technical skill at the beginning, but I had life experience. I had stories. I had resilience. I had a willingness to learn and a willingness to fail. Over time, the skill caught up with the stories.

That is what collectors are really seeing when they look at my work now.

They are not just seeing paint on canvas. They are seeing the result of a life that found its way into art. They are seeing a practice that began accidentally and became essential. They are seeing the marks of someone who did not take a straight path, but perhaps took the path she needed to take.

Starting at 50 taught me that creativity does not expire.

There is no age where it is too late to begin. There is no rule that says you must have known who you were at 20 in order to become someone meaningful at 50, 60 or beyond. Sometimes the work arrives when you finally have enough life behind you to understand what you need to say.

That is how painting came to me.

Not as a childhood dream.

Not as a neat career plan.

Not as something I had always known I would do.

It came as a way to breathe.

Then it became a way to see.

And eventually, it became the way I began telling the stories I had carried for years.