Finding Art (Again) At 49

I didn’t think I’d be an artist at 49.

That sounds strange coming from someone who lugged around art supplies for 30 years. But for most of my adult life, “real life” was louder than the quiet pull of creation. I made do. I became a mom, had a grueling corporate career, created homes, and broke parts of myself in the process. I lived. But I didn’t always feel alive.

That changed for me here... in Bocas del Toro. Not all at once, and not in the ways I expected. There wasn’t some magical island epiphany. No guru moment. Just space. And silence. And a moment to breathe.

It started slowly: a brush in my hand one afternoon, painting an old canvas. No goal. No audience. Just motion. Just color. And something inside me cracked open. A kind of remembering. Not of technique or style... that all came later, but of permission.

Because no one gave it to me. I gave it to myself.

That’s what finding my art at 49 really means. It means I stopped waiting for the right time, or the right training, or the right version of myself. I stopped caring if it was “good” or “professional” or profitable. I stopped chasing approval. I just started making.

Now, my days are covered in paint. Not metaphorically. literally. My clothes, my floor, sometimes even my arms. I work barefoot. I work at sunrise. I work when it rains. I work when I don’t know what else to do with the ache of being human.

People ask me sometimes: “What kind of art do you make?”

And I say: I make the kind I needed at 49.

If you’ve ever felt like it’s too late, like you missed your window, let me tell you, there is no window. There’s just now. And it’s enough. You are not too old. You are not too behind. You are not too broken or too busy or too anything. If you feel the itch, the hunger, the whisper... listen to it.

Start ugly. Start scared. Start small.

But start.

And don’t do it for the market or the algorithm or the praise. Do it for the kid inside you who used to draw on walls. Do it for the version of you that gave up. Do it for no one at all.

Just do it.

Because it’s never too late to come home to yourself. <3

- Jennifer