Art and Lifelong Learning

Many Drawing/Sketching readers are just coming back to art after years spent focusing on career and family. It's wonderful to hear from people who have rediscovered their creative side and are learning to express themselves through drawing and painting. Many people enjoy learning independently from books and the Internet, but formal education is also available to mature students.

It isn't always easy learning a new skill as an adult. As an independent learner, you're faced with the problem of 'where do I start?' and a huge range of choices. Well at least I can help you start learning to draw! We tend to be hard on ourselves, expecting great things, and getting easily frustrated if we don't progress. That can lead to taking shortcuts - beware of trying to run before you can walk! Make sure you take your time and cover the basics. As an adult, you are used to being good at things, even expert, and being a beginner can feel very uncomfortable.

Being an adult also has huge advantages. We already have good hand-eye control, a solid vocabulary and some exposure to art, so we have a good foundation for studies in art. You've already learned many skills, so you know that while you are struggling with something now, you know that you will eventually master it.

Art school can provide a whole new set of challenges for the older student.

Having to fit in with a large number of much younger students can be daunting at first. You might wonder how they would feel about an 'old fogie' hanging around, but you'll find that mature age students are an enormous asset to any art class. Art is often about ideas, so the real-life experience that older people bring to the class adds much-needed depth to conversations. My experience of art school was that the age of students varied widely, with about two-thirds of the class being fresh from highschool, the remaining third being anywhere from twenty to seventy-odd.

If you're at art school, or thinking about it, check out the advice on going back to school and fitting in from Continuing Education Guide, Deb Peterson. Deb makes some very good points!

I sometimes come across educators who reveal a bias against adult education. They speak about lifelong learning as a sort of quaint indulgence, and see their real job as educating youngsters who have the potential for a career. I observed this recently, when children were awarded prizes based on ability, the adults for community contribution. Community contribution is wonderful, but haven't most of us already given a great deal in other aspects of life? Why is the adult's creative endeavor not as valuable in its own right? To me this is typical of the 'life is a journey' fallacy. Life is not a journey. Life is a destination. We live in the here and now, and nobody knows what is around the corner. Making art isn't about potential, or about some distant reward - the exhibition, the sales. It's about spending time, right now, making a picture. It's that simple. The creative force of an eighty year old, who is seeking to express the ideas that they've gathered over a lifetime, deserves as much nurturing, and as much applause, as that of a highschool freshman.