Carol Douglas wanted to study art as a teenager, but her parents didn’t see the point and she spent decades regretting what might have been. She now

A new start after 60: I went to art school at 66 – and now I’ve sold hundreds of paintings

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2024-10-14 13:00:02

Carol Douglas wanted to study art as a teenager, but her parents didn’t see the point and she spent decades regretting what might have been. She now has an exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

In 2017, when Carol Douglas got the news she would be going to art school aged 66, she couldn’t have been happier. “I felt I had been given the biggest gift on the planet,” she says.

Throughout her adult life, Douglas had regretted giving up art at school when she was 16. “Art is for Saturday mornings,” her parents told her, and she listened, dropping the subject for Latin and then pursuing a sociology degree. “Ever since then, I had a general underlying feeling that I hadn’t done something I should have done and I never would,” she says.

She went on to have various jobs – a community worker, a chef in a vegetarian restaurant, a catering manager and a pupil support worker. It wasn’t until her 50s that she tapped into her creativity while working as a kindergarten teacher in an international school, after moving to Thailand for her then husband’s job. “I was working with four- and five-year-olds, encouraging children’s creativity through school art projects – it was the most fulfilled I had been,” she says.