Donna Avedisian took a run at the New York art world in her 20s. With a graduate degree from Rhode Island School of Design in her back pocket, she showed her mixed-media abstracts at galleries all over New York City, plus openings in Boston, Philadelphia, and Armenia. 

Portlanders discovered her work at Haze and Gallery 500—art spaces then at the height of their power—as well as in the lobby of the Jupiter Hotel, after she moved to Portland in 2003. Then came a yawning 17-year gap on her résumé, save the occasional show at Catlin Gabel School or Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. She was occupied with having babies. Two girls and a boy. “I bring my whole self to everything I do,” Avedisian says. “That’s why for parenting I gave it 120 percent and didn’t have much time for my studio.”

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For those 17 years, Avedisian, now 54, assumed that she would return to art. Like many creative types who find themselves otherwise occupied, she presumed that she would “just know” when the time was right to return. But do creative third acts, sometimes called empty-nester careers, consistently come to pass? 

“I don’t want to be negative, but the making of art is incredibly rigorous,” says Portland gallerist Elizabeth Leach. “It requires time—not only in the studio every day, but time out in the community to have the dialogue.” There’s networking and hosting studio visits, and also the critical art world gambit of fitting one’s work into the going conceptual contexts of the art scene. 

Leach agrees that Portland is an ideal city to plunge into a later-in-life creative career, with its vibrant arts scene and a cost of living below other major West Coast cities. Recall: this is the city where sipping single-origin espresso while “making things” through the gray, rainy half of the year is a socially condoned activity. But for every Louise Bourgeois—the late French artist who parented three sons and then reemerged, eventually producing acclaimed spider sculptures in her 80s—there are many more who never quite “pick up the thread” again, says Leach. Day jobs and caretaking tasks wiggle their way into priority positions, plus family-related moves away from the cities where the dialogue happens for a particular art niche, all of which cause creatives to step away. Could Avedisian’s dream of an empty-nester painting renaissance ever come true?

Helpfully, the modern art world has lately been in swoon of “discovering” septuagenarian and octogenarian women artists—nearly all of whom were steadily producing art all along, and were simply ignored. But one creative field has long supported talent at whatever age it arrives: Toni Morrison published her first book, The Bluest Eye, at 39; Raymond Chandler was 51 when his first detective novel was published; Julia Child’s first cookbook hit shelves when she was 50. Literary agent Todd Shuster, co-CEO of Aevitas Creative Management, has a wall of books in his Manhattan office by authors that he’s represented over three decades. Gazing at the spines, he estimates that in the mid-1990s, about 30 percent of his authors came to him with no significant name recognition or media platform, such as a lofty job at a newspaper or TV gig. Nowadays that number is 10 percent. 

“It’s not impossible, but it’s much more difficult,” Shuster says. Authors now need media “hits” to move copies, and a robust social media presence doesn’t hurt. Shuster primarily represents nonfiction authors; he says there’s a little more wiggle room in fiction for relative unknowns to burst through, at any age. The renaissance of small publishing houses, some digital-only, willing to take a leap of faith on newcomers has created opportunities, too. 

The book industry has its preferences. “There is a bias toward novelty, but that’s more about first books than how old the author of the first book is,” says Anna Sproul-Latimer, the Washington, DC–based president of Neon Literary. Nonfiction authors tend to benefit from age in gaining the field expertise necessary to write, she says. The youngest author she ever signed was 21; the oldest 77.

British author Claire Fuller, 57, is a later-in-life success. She ran a marketing agency for technology clients (“quite boring, really”) with her first husband for 23 years, and picked up a pen to write fiction at age 40, in a short-story writing contest at her local library in England. She lost, but she kept entering every six weeks until she won. “I realized, ‘Oh, I quite like writing and I’m getting some satisfaction from this,’” she says. “It was a huge challenge out of my comfort zone.” 

Fuller wrote her first book, Our Endless Numbered Days, in a master’s program for creative writing while working full-time in marketing and raising two teenagers. She sent the book, about a girl kidnapped by her survivalist father, off to agents. It was published in the UK by Penguin and stateside by Portland’s Tin House Books in 2015. “I was like, ‘I don’t know how this is happening to me,’” she says, though by then she was bitten by the book bug. “I knew I had to write another novel because I had to see if it would be bought,” she says. 

Her editor, Maisie Cochran, points to Fuller’s imagination—not just to create fictional worlds, but to forge a new career for herself. “You are doing one thing and have to imagine that you could do something totally different,” says Cochran, editorial director and interim publisher at Tin House. “People think you’re a born writer or novelist, but she really came to it at 40 and she’s just spectacular. She had lots of books in her; she’ll keep going.” Fuller has published five novels.

The question, of course, is what magical trait is possessed by people who enjoy fruitful later-life creative careers? “One thing that a lot of people don’t think about is that being an artist or a writer is actually being an entrepreneur,” says Mary Blalock, a Portland career coach. “Those types of jobs take some business acumen.” Fuller, for example, worked in marketing, and building an author persona and selling a book are both marketing skills. 

Blalock’s clients range in age from their 20s to their 70s. She hasn’t noticed a specific age or life event that triggers people to make big creative pivots; rather, “it’s more of a personality type,” Blalock says. The type? Passionate and motivated, with a certain stubbornness. “Those clients often don’t want to do anything else.” 

Leveraging the brain’s cognitive apogees over time can give late bloomers an edge. Information processing speed peaks in the late teens, according to a 2015 study in Psychological Science. Short-term memory and facial recognition—which make people effective parents and managers—are tops in the 30s. Social understanding and complex pattern evaluation—both useful in art—are strongest in 40s and 50s, while verbal knowledge peaks after 65. The lesson here is to “lean in to where you’re going,” says Rich Karlgaard, 69, editor-at-large at Forbes, where he was publisher for 20 years. He identifies as a “late bloomer,” which became the title of his 2019 book, Late Bloomers: The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace. “At age 35, if you want to be a programmer and compete against 18-year-olds”—Karlgaard lives in Silicon Valley—“the odds are against you.” 

Late bloomers, he says, also need to work at the intersection of their passions and talents. “The problem with ‘follow your passion’ is that it might be incompatible with what you’re really good at,” Karlgaard says. “Your passions might blind you to the fact that you’ll never be better than a decent neighborhood artist. I think that can be frustrating.” 

Passion is also not a consistent trait over time: in some people, it wanes. This, more than any other factor, is why an aging artist might land far from the blossoming painting career she envisioned decades earlier. Hermundur Sigmundsson, biological psychologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, studied passion, grit, and positive mindset in 917 people ages 14 to 77. The unfortunate age appears to be 54: that’s when passion and grit tend to unravel. “Our passion controls the direction of the arrow, what we’re fired up about and want to achieve,” says Sigmundsson. “Grit drives our strength and how much effort we are willing to put in to achieve something.” After 54, some people can still be passionate but lack grit, or vice versa: all tenacity, with nary a smidgen of passion. 

Sigmundsson says that sinking into those soft-yet-supportive couch cushions is not inevitable. He recommends surrounding oneself with external sources of grit and passion: activities and interests that “ignite the spark,” and people who both inspire and build accountability.

The good news is that creative abilities are dependable into old age. A 2019 study of 31 Nobel Laureates in Economics found that conceptual innovators who challenge conventional wisdom peaked at 25, but experimental creatives, whose work builds on itself and blossoms over time, peaked much later, averaging in their mid-50s. That creative aptitudes are in full swing for decades is supported by the endless list of visual artists, novelists, poets, photographers, and painters who create rigorous works in their 60s and 70s. 

Leach, the gallerist, has noticed that the entry (or reentry) path is smoother when artists take shorter breaks. An absence of 40 years may be harder to come back from than, say, 10. And Leach has tips for returnees: consistency in creating new work, and acknowledgment that the artist’s “voice will need warming up.” And she advises those taking a break to try not to fully disappear—keep sketching at the kitchen table or break away from the family trip to swing through an art museum. “That’s the trick,” Leach says. “Don’t take your eye off the profession.”

Avedisian brought sketchbooks on family vacations, took photos on hikes and donated occasional pieces to charity auctions. And when the demands of parenting lessened, with just one high schooler left in her Lake Oswego home, she knew it was time to ramp up her art again. 

In September, Avedisian re-debuted on the Portland art scene in a group show at an in-home pop-up gallery with four other women. Her new work—dreamy vertical abstracts in oil with names like quietRising and springCollapse—caught the eye of Leach, who encouraged her. “There’s a professional consistency in her work and, as she has more time, she’s just going to get better and better,” Leach says.

Avedisian is modest but not surprised. “At times it felt like there’s this thing that’s waiting, and it’s right there staring at me,” she says. “I always knew I would go back.”