My rookie era: I wasn't immediately good at oil painting, but it taught me to find pleasure in struggle

"As a five-year-old, I loved fairies, Spice Girls and Vincent van Gogh. It wasn't the famous ear incident or the existential despair that I found fascinating, but a picture book. For the Love of Vincent, by Brenda V Northeast, told the story of Van Gogh's life but with one minor change: Vincent was a teddy bear, not a depressed Dutchman. It was this book that lead me to the real Van Gogh and to his art,"

"I was a happy painter for years, until I reached high school and I started getting marked for it. When art went from something I simply did to something I could be judged for, that made it terrifying. And as I learned more about artists like Vincent (man, not bear), I began to suspect that an artist's life was for other people, who seemed to experience life a lot more vibrantly than I did, good and bad."

"But when I began writing about art for a living, I felt the itch to paint again specifically oil paints, which I'd never used but always felt carried a certain prestige. I wanted to learn how to paint, but I also wanted to learn how to be fine with possibly being bad at something — but do it anyway. I enrolled in an oil painting class and committed to spending four hours each Sunday in front of an easel."

A five-year-old loved fairies, Spice Girls and a picture of Vincent van Gogh presented as a teddy bear, which sparked an early passion for painting. Painting remained joyful until high school, when grading turned art into something judged and frightening, leading to giving up. Later, while writing about art, the person felt compelled to paint again, choosing oil paints despite inexperience. Enrollment in an oil painting class established a weekly four-hour practice. The curriculum covered colour theory, composition, drawing, and crucial paint-mixing skills, with progression through abstraction, landscape and portraiture and learning by copying.

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