Dried leaves. Fresh buds.

It's never too late to start growing

We get good at telling ourselves that the time has passed.

That we’re too old, too set in our ways, too far down a different road. That the creative version of us — the one who filled sketchbooks as a teenager, who always meant to learn something, to make something — was a younger person, and it’s a little embarrassing to pretend otherwise now.

My mother was in her seventies when she walked into her local NPR station and offered to help out. She had no background in broadcasting, no experience in journalism, no obvious reason anyone should take her on. Soon she had two radio shows with interviews and essays about her community. Within a couple of years, she was running the news bureau — director of the whole operation. She did that for a decade.

She also invented an art form. She calls it Leafages: pressed leaves she’s collected from around the world, combined with her calligraphy — quotes and aphorisms written in her own hand, the words winding around and among the leaves, the whole thing composing into something neither purely botanical nor purely literary but entirely her own. She sells originals and prints. Someone who hadn’t made art till her sixties is a working artist in her eighties.

A leafage by Dr. Hazel Kahan

Mary Delany would recognize the impulse. In 1772, recently widowed and grieving at 72, she noticed a scrap of colored paper on her table that matched the hue of a nearby geranium. She picked up a pair of scissors and started cutting. The botanical collages she made over the next decade were so precise that the leading scientists of her day consulted them as references. Nearly a thousand pieces. The British Museum has them now. See here.

Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

Inge Ginsberg survived the Holocaust, spent the 1950s writing songs for Doris Day, and, in her late 90s, decided that her poetry about the world wasn’t reaching enough people. So she became the front woman of a heavy metal band, growling lyrics over distorted guitars at an age when most people are just trying to finish the crossword. She went viral. Dig it.

Inge and the boys

Harry Bernstein spent his career editing trade magazines while quietly wanting to write his own book. After his wife of 67 years died, he sat down at his typewriter and started. His debut memoir, published when he was 96, became a bestseller. He won a Guggenheim fellowship. Three more books followed before he died at 101.

Harry’s first book.

I’ve watched something like this happen thousands of times at Sketchbook Skool — people who spent decades convinced they weren’t the creative type, who had that impulse pushed aside by a teacher, a parent, the sheer pressure of a practical life, and who showed up somewhere in their sixties or seventies and found it still there.

They discovered things about themselves — a resilience, a capacity for attention, a pleasure in just looking — that being “sensible” had kept under wraps.

They didn’t know drawing would change things, but they just showed up and started, and slowly their life began to change.

I’ve been thinking about all of this while finishing a new short film called The Museum of Lost Art. It tells the story of a man who lost touch with his own youthful creativity until later in life, he wanders into a magical museum and discovers his dream is still alive. I hope you’ll watch it.

I deferred my dream for decades, but I spent the last 25 years breathing new life back into it. I hope that my essays, videos, and courses will help you to rediscover your own potential, no matter how long it’s been in the drawer.

Your pal,

Danny