Season 1, Ep 9 is here. For anyone who has worried that the creative window has passed you by, this one’s for you!

A quick reminder that you can watch above or listen to this right on Substack and wherever you get your podcasts.

In all my 45 years of life, I never once thought I’d be sitting next to my dad, Kim Wilde, in a slightly-too-close-for-either-of-our-comfort setup and talking about art.

Over the decades, I have admired my dad for being many things: a curious questioner willing to challenge his long-held beliefs/stances & admit he was wrong; a compassionate “old person” doctor with barely legible handwriting; a slightly-eccentric-tinkerer; a compulsive-non-fiction-reader; a rock hunter; a fun dad & grandpa with questionable fashion sense.

But never, ever an artist.

“I’m just not artsy. Or creative in that way,” he would regularly say. “I don’t get art.”

And yet here he is, at age 73, spending large chunks of his retirement years learning how to create art. Telling me that it is relaxing. And being good at it!

I am genuinely shocked.

My parents live 1200 miles from us and I really wanted to learn more about his excursion into learning how to make art. So during our recent time together, I cornered Dad and picked his brain. This ended up being much more than a conversation about a surprising retirement hobby; it became a window into unearthing a hidden part of who my dad has always been and his honest reckoning with what he would do differently.

Here are my top takeaways from chatting with Dad:

Finding something you love doesn’t always start as a burning passion. One day, Dad woke up, staring his looming retirement in the face and he realized he had no creative pursuits—no hobbies, no outlets, no plan for what came next. After realizing harmonica and woodworking offered more stress than joy, he dipped his toe into drawing and was surprised to find how much he loved it. It was a great reminder that finding something you love doesn’t have to start as a passion. Sometimes it just has to be willingness to step out of your comfort zone and try something new.

Learning that art is more than raw talent changed everything. I had no clue that Dad has always had a curiosity about “art.” As a kid growing up in small town South Dakota in the 50s & 60s, he had few opportunities to explore it. He believed he just wasn’t the creative type. The turning point in Dad’s art journey was when he was given the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. He discovered that the great masters used process, techniques, and tools to get proportions, color, and shapes right. That realization gave him permission to use his process-oriented, left-side-dominant brain in a discipline that had always seemed mystical to him. Structure and process made creation possible and gave creativity space to flourish. Some of his other favorite resources include Learn to Draw from The Great Courses, Jerry Yarnell , and Bob Ross.

Use the time you have to become a multi-dimensional person. When I asked what he’d tell his younger self, he had no hesitation: work less; take art and music and history classes to understand the expansiveness of the world; don’t be a one-dimensional person; stop & smell the roses. He may not have had the time to explore art fully in those really busy middle years, but a little foundation and five minutes a day would have given him the gift of stress release, skill building, and a reminder that life is more than the present chaos. You never know what love might be hiding right under the surface.

Nothing needs to be wasted. Even though he didn’t start studying art until his late 60s, Dad spent decades listening carefully, observing faces, noticing subtle details in his role as an internist that others might miss. He told me he can recognize former patients from a distance just by their walk. That kind of deep perceptual attentiveness was honed over decades and has given him the immediate ability to pick out an enormous number of details to add into his art (sometimes too many details to create the artistic look he wants!). It is inspiring for me to know that even when I can’t dedicate the time I want to my craft, my experiences now can inform what I create later.

Curiosity is essential to living a full life. Watching my parents move into their 70s, one of the things I’ve noticed and admired most is that they haven’t calcified. My dad told me that life would be boring without curiosity, that his career kept him in a rut and curiosity is what lets him peek above it. He continues to learn about the world, allowing it to inspire him to try new things—his recent visit to Monet’s garden in France helped encourage him to try working with color. Curiosity is a choice he keeps making, and I think it’s one of the most important things I’ve watched him model.

Creative freedom comes from knowing that “making mistakes” in art won’t ruin everything. And isn’t this just the best lesson for all of life?

🦄 Kristin

Unicorn Hollow Podcast is a listener- and reader-supported series of Unicorn Hollow where we sit together in that prickly place of learning to see what could be without ignoring what is. If you’d like to see more of my writing, check out a Map of Unicorn Hollow, and then subscribe to make sure you never miss a post! For centuries, artists of all disciplines have been kept afloat and creating by patrons who looked at their work and said, “Yes! This matters! This needs to be in the world.” If you have that feeling, I’d be honored if you would be my Patron by sharing my work. My posts & podcasts will stay free, but if you have the means, you can help me build up this space by becoming a paid, monthly subscriber (and get some thank-you perks!). You can also give a one-time donation on Ko-Fi. This is my career, so every bit of support goes directly to feed and clothe my small army of children. Thanks for being my unicorn!

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