Last week, on my seventy-fifth birthday, I had a new adventure. As I do most days, I went downstairs to my studio and began working on another Artist Book. 

After 50 years, my studio is still an exciting adventure. Everyday, I  feel I am experimenting, learning and facing new problems. Very little is humdrum or deja vu. I love my solitude and the challenges I continually force myself to confront.

After all these years, I still encounter failure and frustration. The years of frustrations have given me an education in art, a course in psychology, and a Ph.D. in perseverance. “Keep going” has become a keystone of the adventure. If you keep on going, something eventually will happen. When it doesn’t, just throw away the old and begin again. Bandage the wounds and move on.

Happily, getting old means that more experiments are successful. When I was a young starting artist, an older painter told me that the visual arts are special because often artists get better with age. This cliche has offered me support and comfort, and seems, from my vantage point, to be true: I think my work is getting stronger as I age. I don’t have to think about what I am doing I just sense what needs to be done. 

Paradoxically, perhaps because of my birthday, I took out of the drawer some artwork I’d done thirty or forty years ago. It surprised me.  I could see myself and hints of my future work in the images, style and my experiments. Some was pretty good, certainly not the failures I recall thinking at the time.

Maybe getting old means getting easy or comfortable with oneself? Ease gets me bored. I like struggle. It forces me out of my comfort zone. I must find new solutions, and I keep discovering new projects, Artist Books, imagery, color palettes, new ways to use materials, and more.

So even now, I don’t feel old. My imagination is vigorous and sharp, and fortunately, continues to wake me up in the middle of the night with a slew of new projects. I continue to feel invigorated like a young man in search of an elusive treasure

From Hokusai: “From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before dthe age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.”