r/impressionism

Eucalyptus near Lake Hodges, painted in gouache. Another piece drawn from the semi-dry, temperate landscape of Southern California.

Hodges Eucalyptus | 10”x6.2”

This past summer turned into something I didn’t expect.

I spent a lot of time reading Jung, keeping a daily dream journal, and intentionally engaging with what he’d call archetypes, paying attention to recurring images, symbols, emotions, and patterns that kept showing up in dreams and waking life. It wasn’t academic so much as experiential. Quiet. Sometimes unsettling. Sometimes grounding.

Somewhere in the middle of that process, something unlocked.

At 40 years old, I discovered I could draw and then paint. I’d never thought of myself as “an art person.” No art background, no lifelong practice. Just a sudden, persistent urge to make images and an inability to stop once I started.

This is my latest oil painting, completed about one year into my new life as an artist. It feels less like something I “made” and more like something that surfaced through me, calm, transitional, a little unresolved.

I’m sharing this partly as encouragement: creativity doesn’t always announce itself early or loudly. Sometimes it waits until you’re finally quiet enough to hear it.

Would love thoughts, critique, or to hear if others have had a similar late-blooming creative awakening.

An eerie painting of light and shade on a Southwest Virginia home.

https://tanbeliaart.com/products/biscayne-national-park-watercolor-painting-by-tanbelia-copy