One advantage of aging is forgetting. While irritating at first, eventually forgetting can be a friend and a tool. You can read the same book over or watch the same movie again with pleasure. You forget about old grudges and appreciate people whom you may have resented in the past. You even begin to forget about other people’s opinion of you and be who you want to be at any given moment.
For those who take up an art form later in life, forgetting can be an advantage. With painting, often a bad art education keeps people from being able to learn to draw and paint. They were told the wrong things by an ignorant teacher. Or the teacher had too little time and too many students to do a proper job. So it is great to forget that somewhere back in childhood you were told you were a bad artist because you painted a sky orange. When in fact, if anyone had looked out the window at the time, the late afternoon sky was a blazing orange. You began to mistrust your own eyes.
Aside from formal art education, the culture may have given incorrect concepts about what art is and how it is made. For example, that art can only be made by a select few that have talent.
I have encountered new artists in the latter part of their lives who managed to forget that they couldn’t do art because “they can’t draw a straight line” or “my sister was the talented one in the family”. They see no reason they cannot learn to paint or draw, or for that matter, dance or learn a new instrument.
If you catch young children soon enough before negative messages cloud their thinking, you can show them anyone can make art. But the difference between them and older students is that once the older student begins to make art, they have a lifetime of experience and memories that can feed into the process. Their memory of these things may be hazy at first, but the process of making art can actually bring memory back into focus, but with a wonderful flair based on the wisdom of old age.