Peonies, Paint and Personal Growth with Sally Jean Fox

How age and life experiences can reignite artistic passions long buried beneath the weight of societal expectations. 

For this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Sally Fox, a once-aspiring artist turned leadership consultant. After years of letting grades and external validation dictate her creative identity, Sally bravely broke free from the chains of self-doubt. Now in her 70s, she revels in her creativity, embracing art, writing, and performance with newfound vigour. 

We discuss the pivotal moment during a flight from Japan that sparked her artistic renaissance, as she realized that her creative essence could no longer be suppressed. 

Our discussion also touches on the barriers many face in reconnecting with their creative selves, particularly the pressures of childhood and societal norms that often stifle artistic expression. Sally reflects on her own childhood, where the judgement of others led her to abandon her natural artistic inclinations. Through her narrative, she emphasizes the importance of nurturing creativity in later life, encouraging listeners to reclaim their artistic identities regardless of age. Sally’s insights not only inspire but also challenge us to consider how we can cultivate a more creative existence in our daily lives, reminding us that creativity flourishes when we allow ourselves the freedom to explore, play, and express without fear of judgement.

Whether you’re an artist at heart or someone who has yet to find your creative outlet, this conversation is a gentle nudge to embrace your inner artist and explore the vibrant world of creativity waiting to be unlocked at any age.

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Researched, edited and produced by Claire Waite Brown
Music: Day Trips by Ketsa Undercover / Ketsa Creative Commons License Free Music Archive - Ketsa - Day Trips
Artworks: Emily Portnoi emilyportnoi.co.uk
Photo: Ella Pallet

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Speaker: 1:02

Then it was dependent on what other people said, and that changed everything. So the reason I stopped making art when I was 10 years old was because of grades. And I realized, I said to myself, you have 11 hours, honey, to figure that out. Because if you don't figure it out, there's a big cloud of depression that's going to pour down on you as soon as you get off the point. Use the third act of life that period post 50, but really post 60 or 70, as potentially the most creative time of our lives. I was such a not artist for so many years that the opportunity to make art in my 70s has been glorious. Hi, I'm Claire. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or refound their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits. This time, I'm chatting with Sally Fox. Hi, Sally, how are you? I'm great, Claire. I'm so excited to be able to speak at last with you. Thank you. Start by telling me, please, how you feed your creative soul currently. Oh my gosh, it's like, how do I not feed it? I write. So, you know, I wrote a book and now I'm starting on my next book and I journal. But my real heart these days is in my art. And as I talked about in my book, I'm a born again artist in the sense that I was such a not artist for so many years that the opportunity to make art in my 70s has been glorious. And then I dance, I sing, I make up stuff. I feel like my creativity is really well fit. Oh, that's amazing. That's so lovely. Let's talk about your experiences with creativity as a child and young adult. Were they positive at home in education? I think we have to distinguish between natural creativity and focused creativity because all kids are naturally creative. And thinking about myself as a child, I spent hours playing in the woods. I had imaginary friends, I made up stories. You know, I had this rich creative life. But if you said creativity like a specific like art or music, then it was dependent on what other people said and that changed everything. So the reason I stopped making art when I was 10 years old was because of grades and the fact that you knew that certain people were the artists and then there were the rest of us who shouldn't even bother to try. And the same could be true of singing or dance or acting. All the specifics. You had to be deemed talented by the outside world. And that's a creativity killer for so many kids. So the one place I shone was in school. So I, you know, and that's a certain kind of creativity too. But it was more academic and left brain. And it took me until I was in my 60s to say, born. Get it. I don't want to give the world the power to tell me whether I'm creative or talented or not. You know, why did I give it away when I was 12? Well, so many of us do. Absolutely. It is something I've heard so many times on. So many times. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you said you were academic and pursuing things on that side. What was that trajectory like? Did you have a plan for after school? Maybe? Did you know what you thought you wanted to do when you grew up? When I was in high school, you know, people would ask the question, what are you going to do? And my only question was, I'm going to go into something that hasn't been invented yet. Or that I didn't. I don't know what it is. Cause I didn't feel myself getting slotted into, you know, the typical professions back in the 60s. And I think that was actually a pretty good answer that I didn't know. And I've sort of meandered it through several different careers. But the real driver is I'm fascinated by people. I don't like to stay in a rut. I like to create things as I go and I love to share what I'm learning. I mean, how do you put a word on that? You could call it teacher, eventually became a professor. You could call it blogger. Because that's part of what I do when I blog. You could call it very curious person, you know, But I didn't know what I was going to be. And so I followed the breadcrumbs. But I didn't think it involved art. That was one of the most clear things I knew. It was not art because my father did art. I love my father, but no art for me. Why do you say my father did art, so no art for me? Well, because I had such a strong feeling that I had been deemed artistically untalented when I was 10. Right. But I'll tell you a story that I describe in my book. When my dad died, art was very private for him, but he loved it. It sustained him. He was not a professional, but it was his hard work. And when he died, there was this big box of very carefully organized art supplies that he left. And when I was helping my mom clear out her little house, I came upon that box several years after he died. And I said to my mom, it's Dad's art supplies. What do you want to do with it? And she said, well, maybe we could give it away. And I said, no way. And I didn't tell her, but I took the box that evening, and I took it back to my house. And I thought, someday I'm going to open the box and see all these things. And I actually got in and got charcoal on my fingers and saw the watercolors he had. It was 17 years later when I was talking with someone who invited me to take a beginning watercolor class. And I told her, I said, no way, no how. I'm not an artist. And she looked at me with that sad, puppy look. And she said, I don't understand. It's a beginning class. Why don't you come? People love it. And I said, no, I'm not an artist. And at that point, Claire, I heard the voice inside of my head. You know, the still small voice, the one I call the muse. And. And the muse said to me, sally, you have a box of your dad's art supplies. You have kept them for 17 years. You are either going to take this class or you're going to give away that box. And I was like, oh, my God, she's right. And I took that class, and the rest was history. There was a reason you were keeping that box. Oh, totally. Yeah, totally. You know, that part of us that is always true, that always remembers that we're creative, that never gives it all away? Well, that part was holding it like a little seed, saying, you know, the outside world can say this or that, but inside you will carry the seed of the artist for 60 years before you can let it hatch. But isn't that glorious that we never totally forget that it waits for us? Yeah, exactly. Why did you go to business school? I was deeply concerned about the world. And I had been en route to get a PhD in sociology. Cause I really loved learning about people. But it was out when I was working on a project in Africa because I was in international development, that I realized the world was getting shaped not by researchers, but by people who knew how to make things run. And all of a sudden it occurred to me, like, why don't you give up on this particular PhD and go study management? Because you want to help people. You want to help people make the world a better place. So I enrolled in the one Business school in the US that seemed to understand that you could. You could use your management skills in a corporation or a nonprofit. It's all management. And I joined to continue that dream and making things better by understanding how things ran. How did that come to fruition? Well, in a way, it didn't, because I felt like a fish out of water for two reasons, Claire. One is that I realized I wanted to make things better, and a lot of my friends wanted to go make a lot of money. So I felt a little bit like a fish out of water. But the other thing was, I didn't know it at the time, but I had a very artistic way to work in the world. I was creative. I wasn't processing my world linearly like you often have to do to do spreadsheets and all in business. And even though I have a very well trained left brain, another part of me just never fit. And I always thought that I was the odd one out in business school. But I tell you, 40 years later, I feel like I wasn't the odd one out. I actually was different. And so I'm grateful I went to business school because now I do have a well des, well developed left brain, and I can use that in support of whatever I want. But I also honor the parts of me that are interested in mystery, that are interested in what we don't know, what we sense, what wants to come through us that we can't even put into words. You know, that was always part of who I was, and now I get to be that. So how did the. How did you then fit into the working world? And what roles were you taking on? And were they satisfying? I was working in a company and I ended up actually quitting, which was amazing because I didn't approve of their ethics and they didn't know where they were going. So I went cold turkey and became a consultant, which was ridiculous to think about. But through that, I backdoored into teaching management and leadership, and I found one of my true callings, which was to teach. And then I was teaching in a small university in Seattle, teaching management, and I had the opportunity to develop a graduate program in leadership. And so leadership became my shtick. And this is just for us. I could not say these words back then, but for me, leadership was as close as I could come in a business context to teaching people about their soul development, you know, to helping them be authentically themselves, to be. Help them answer the questions of who am I in the world? So I found in this sneaky kind of way, my Way into a helping profession that gave people access to their own spirit, you know, And I feel like I'm still doing it now, but I call it creativity coaching. In the management world, one of the words that people understand is leadership, leadership development. You want people who lead. But my vision was, you always lead from within. So leadership could be soul development. And for me that's what it was. And so that's what I did. I helped people find out how they wanted to express themselves in the world. In the corporate context, I could call it leadership in my life now I call it creativity coaching. Now you've told me about an experience that you had on a flight back from Japan. Yeah. When was this and what was the experience and how did it affect you going forward? Well, I was 53 and I was a leadership consultant and I was going to Japan to teach leadership. And I did it over a period of 10 weeks, over three years. And I fell in love with Japan because although they're very efficient, there's this amazing aesthetic that I fell in love with. Especially in the Japanese gardens where I would sit and I would consume beauty. Like I was ravenous. And I had never seen anything as beautiful as those gardens. So when I was on the plane going back, I had had this amazing experience. I was full of beauty. And then I thought, well, here I'm going back to my work and I'm going to be working till 10 o' clock every night. I used to think I'd love it. I love my husband and some other things, but where am I going to find beauty? Where am I going to find that sort of soul renewing blaze? And I realized, I said to myself, you have 11 hours, honey, to figure that out. Because if you don't figure it out, there's a big cloud of depression that's going to pour down on you as soon as you get off the plane. So it was one of those moments in life where you just, you talk tough to yourself. And so it was 10 hours into that flight and I'd been thinking a lot where I realized that the answer wasn't going to come from a vision statement or a mission statement or even in words. It needed to be an image or sensual. And at that moment I began to have this whole flurry of images come through me until one landed. And that image was peonies. And all of a sudden it was like I saw my life in a flower. And I realized that peonies and I barely knew the flower was like a call to beauty. It was a call to sensuality it was a call to pleasure. And just on the other side of that, it was the road to creativity. Because I didn't want to just absorb beauty, I wanted to create it. So the moment I got off that plane, I realized the museven, though I didn't use that word at the time. I had been given a gift, and the only way I could fulfill on it was to start creating almost the moment I hit the ground. So I did. I just said, I don't care what I do. Read the artist's way, start doodling anything that would fulfill on the promise of moving forward into this new life of creative expression. So that was 20 years ago. And I tell you, Claire, I haven't stopped. I was so profoundly moved. How did that change the trajectory of the rest of your life? Yeah, well, I started to do things and one of the ways I'd love to create was I'd loved performing and presenting and speaking. That's just like my happy place. So I started doing improv and I started writing and I discovered that a lot of what. What I loved was telling stories. And I started doing that and I started writing them. And I also coached people because a lot of times in business people are way too boring because they don't know how to tell a good story. So I worked professionally for a few years coaching organizational storytelling. That was my beat. I was moving leadership development to organizational storytelling. And then I realized I had a story and I needed to tell it. So then that took me into the. Into my work of becoming a writer. So I hadn't ever seen myself as a writer. And at about 60, I became a writer. I started writing a regular blog. I still do. I started writing magazine articles. Still do. And started writing a book that then came to fruition last year. And tell me about the book. It's about the journey that you and I are talking about, about how to use the third act of life that period post 50, but really post 60 or 70 as potentially the most creative time of our lives. But instead of just telling people that because I'm a storyteller, I wanted to show them that by going through some of the things that had shaped me post 50 and had really solidified the sense that creative expression is probably one of the most important things that we can do to keep ourselves going, to really fill our spirits and increase our life. You know, it's both. It's a physical thing, but it's also emotional spiritual thing. And so I wrote how I came of age into my own spiritual, creative path and from What I know, you know, it's not a huge bestseller because it's really hard to get books into that bracket. But the people who have read it, the thing that I love most is that they'll say to me, I read your book, and I went back to the piano. I read your book, and I decided I have to return to art. It was actually moving people more than if I had told them how great this could be. They felt my journey, and they wanted it, too. So that's been priceless. I am so happy, and I'm still on a quest because I feel like the world's pretty hard this year, and it was last year. We're in a mess. We are totally in a mess. And for those of us who can acknowledge that and still find joy by going out to our studios, taking time, writing, playing with our scrapbooks, it doesn't really matter what the medium is. What matters is that we give ourselves space to do what's calling us. Yeah. So tell me about the painting, then. Because it's a big thing. Painting. Painting is a big thing. My watercolor teacher, I had to stop classes because of the pandemic, but I fell in love with how watercolor drips across a page. And she would always say, well, when are you going to paint something? And I said, I just did. You know, this is gorgeous. Rose madder is moving into this beautiful yellow gamboge, and it's so gorgeous. And she'd be like, but where's the flower? And I go, no. And then I went over and started some online classes, working with a teacher who does abstract work. And I also played with a teacher in Italy who didn't care at all whether it was representational, as long as it was coming for myself. And abstract acrylics are my happy place and collage, because I don't have to represent things. I am still a very beginning drawer. I don't think that's my strength, but I love color, and I love form and I love movement. So my abstracts are full of that. And I had three small shows last year, which is totally amazing for a girl who just started painting, you know, several years before that and had never, never, never wanted to do that. So I love it. Like, you can just go into a world of curiosity to explore what's going to happen with the painting, to let yourself be in your left brain, to not have to do it perfectly. And acrylics are great because if. If they're not good enough for your inspiration, you just paint over them. Yeah. How does, like, I'm going to get really boring now. How does the day to day life of, you know, you doing these things? How does your life look? Yeah, on a day to day basis? Um, well, every day is different and every day is over full and I don't have the energy that I did, you know, 20 years ago, alas. So I'll get up and I have a horse and I have to feed the horse, I have to muck the paddock and I have to feed the dogs and I take care of my husband because I love to have coffee with him in the morning. But before I do that, if I can, I will meditate. And there's this online program called 750words that lets you do what Julia Cameron suggested of writing three pages. You do it online. She wouldn't like that. But that doesn't matter. I find it great to know that I've written in the morning. I may have administrative work to do, I may have client work to do. I adore coaching. I love to speak. So I may be giving a talk or preparing a talk, preparing what I'm going to teach my body. I have to deal with severe osteoporosis, so I'm on a roll to get stronger. So I go dancing or I go to the gym and do senior fitness, which sounds very uncreative, but you know, we gotta be fit and you can hum while you, you lift weights. So it's, it's all good. I write a weekly blog and I put a lot of time into that. And then occasionally I podcast. Oh no. And I have a radio show, so I talk, I interview people every week. And I have a horse I need to ride and I need to, you know, walk and dance and see my husband and play with the dogs. And then if I can, I'll go out to the studio for an hour, hour and a half, whatever I get. Yeah, now I was going to ask about that bit because that bit was missing. Yeah. I try and go in the studio every day. I don't always make it and sometimes I'll just give myself a half a day, you know, out there on a weekend. And I am so happy. It's just like going into altered space. I just, it's my happy place. No matter what I create, I'm happy out there generally. Do you have any plans or aspirations for things you might like to explore in the future? I think my biggest exploration is how to take what I'm discovering and make it useful, not boring to people. Like how to take this whole ephemeral world of creativity and art and look at it from both the possibility of expression and inner growth and also the possibility of how do you do it in a very busy life? How do you keep that drive, that momentum, that excitement and how do you get better? And that's a tricky question because, you know, I had this left brain training. I can be very critical, competitive and comparative. And I also know that kills my art. How do I improve my art without going down the chute into judging it? That's a major question that people like me have to grapple with. You know, how do I do that and keep the spirit alive? Sally, tell me how people can connect with you by which all of the things the blog, the book, the coaching, everything. How can anybody get in touch to talk with you about any of those aspects? Oh, thanks for asking. The easiest place is my my website, which is called Engaging Presence. It's P R E S E N C E, all one word, engaging presence.com because there they're going to find the blog. They can find many of my podcasts and please sign up for that blog because I'm always coming up with new stuff. It's not very promotional. People really like it, so I'm very proud of it. And there's a page that talks about my book which is available in the UK on Amazon. It's available in the States and there's some Amazon alternatives that people can go to. And I think that the book for those listeners who are in that bracket of beyond 55 or so and looking for what gives joy and meaning to their lives, I hope it will give them some ideas. What's the name of the book? Meeting the Muse After Midlife. A Journey to Meaning, Creativity and Joy. And it's about how I actually met a muse and what has come of that. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Sally. It's been lovely to chat with you. Thank you, Claire. You have a wonderful show. It is so timely and relevant for so many of us. And thank you for including me. Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, perhaps you'd like to financially contribute to Future episodes@buymeacoffee.com CreativityFound There's a link in the show Notes. If you are listening on a value for value enabled app such as Fountain Trufans or Podcast Guru, feel free to send a few sats my way. And if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, you can find out more by listening to my sister podcast called Podcasting 2.2.0. In practice.