Learning to Paint at 60

An old dog attempting to learn a new trick...

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Pablo Picasso

Recently a friend of mine said, “you only do the hardest things.” Was he saying I was spread too thin to actually be good at any one thing? Or simply stating the obvious, that I’m addicted to the impossible?

I was in my late 50s when I decided to attend art school and picked up my first stick of charcoal (carboncillo). It made writing and music seem easy by comparison. I had returned to Valencia with the intention of studying advanced Spanish but my teacher, Sal, told me it was unnecessary. I had always been interested in visual arts. Why not take art classes in Spanish?

Feed two birds with one scone as the vegans say.

As a young person growing up it was the artists who impressed me the most with their magical powers to conjure whole worlds into books and canvases and albums. I came from a creative family, but I was of the understanding that being an artist either came naturally or not at all. Talent was everything. I eventually learned that with desire, disciplined routine, a good teacher or two and the good fortune to persevere, I could conjure a few tricks of my own.

I began my latest apprenticeship with all the self-confidence of a teenager. Although I’d managed to write books and produce albums, I soon learned that starting over with a new craft can really cut you down to the nubs. This became painfully obvious when I had a stick of charcoal in my hand and I was standing in front of a statue with profesor Paco barking at me to draw what I saw, not what I thought I was seeing.

Humble beginnings, 2019 (left top). Learning to create movement and volume. Throwing it all out the window, 2025 (right bottom).

The proportions were wrong, too much attention to details, no sense of movement, no blocking out of the forms. “Every drawing is a fight to the death,” Paco comforted me as I struggled to improve. (Truer words were perhaps never spoken.)

I was beginning to get the picture. The free spirit must die so that the free spirit may be born again.

We all have natural drawing styles. Most of us rely heavily on lines that fail to project dimension or perspective very well. Traditional art teachers are trained to exorcise these tendencies from your creative persona. In my experience, it’s been a long and sometimes painful process, 4 hours a day, 4 days a week for months at a time.

After the pandemic, Paco retired and for the past five years I’ve studied with his former assistant professor, Estefania Muñoz, an amazingly talented, dedicated and supportive teacher about whom not enough good things can ever be said. I’ve spent months in her studio painting badly, mistake after mistake, struggling mightily until the path opens up and I achieve a moderately acceptable result.

Learning to paint is daunting and materially intensive. You’re chasing light and shadow, learning color theory and vocabulary, all the while riding the ups and downs and trying to find your style and subject matter and what you want to say. There are times when I’m painting and drawing without lines and trusting the process only to have the image magically appear after hours of struggle. Other days I’ve been on the verge of quitting. But I’m not quite built that way.

We were tasked with rendering a still life of an object, in this case a Pugeot pepper mill, from academic drawings to relative abstraction, 2024.

Once you’ve replaced the free spirit with technique and some semblance of realism and studied art history on a deeper level, you’ve strayed far from the naturally born creative soul that you once possessed. That’s precisely when you want your free spirit back, to be liberated and without preconceived ideas but reconditioned with chops. Finding your way back to beginner’s mind is a maze but also a great daily practice.

Of all my impossible dreams, maybe I’ve saved the most difficult for last. When it comes to painting I will always be a journeyman at best and I think I’m okay with that. But what I love about the process is that I can become totally lost for hours at a time without the chatter of the world or the distraction of a phone. Estefania might come by for thirty seconds every half hour and offer a bit of sage advice. I realize how physically and mentally demanding painting can be, good or bad, the attempt to conjure something from nothing in hopes of finding something hidden inside and for just a little while leaning into the flow.

While we’re on the subject, you might want to listen to our recent conversation with artist Narsiso Martinez, whose unmistakable style — portraits of farmworkers painted and drawn directly onto discarded produce boxes — grew out of his own years working in the fields to pay for college and celebrates the people behind America’s food system.

Another favorite painter, my cousin, Peter Schaumann, started his career as a New York illustrator and later devoted himself to landscape and figure painting and portraiture.

All for now.