Arts & Culture

Involvement in the arts and in cultural life in Ireland has benefits to the individual as well providing a contribution to the broader society within which they live.

An evaluation of the Bealtaine festival, for example, found that participants gained in health, well-being, confidence and social 'connectedness'. It also found that their involvement changed the attitudes of the artists, facilitators and organisations who worked with them.

The arts have proved a constructive way to challenge attitudes about ageing and to give a platform for the skills and talents of the diverse community that make up what others term 'older people'.

At Age & Opportunity, we continue to encouraging participation in the arts by older people as a key priority, by:

• Co-operating with the Arts Council, national and local arts agencies and groups of older people to develop policy and best practice for work with older people,
• Supporting and encouraging national and local arts agencies and institutions to provide opportunities for older people to participate in the arts,
• Encouraging older people, including those in care settings, to avail of arts opportunities.

Our two main arts-related programmes are the Bealtaine festival and Creative Exchanges, our arts in care programme.

A good time to start

As novelist George Eliot once said, 'It's never too late to become what you might have been'. Here are a few examples of people who took her at her word, and the world is a better place for it.

• Famous for her novel 'The Stone Diaries', Carol Sheilds was 40 by the time she published her first novel.
• Celebrated Irish painter, Tony O’Malley, taught himself to paint while working for more than 25 years as a bank Official. He was almost 40 before he started exhibiting his work and he went on painting for the rest of his life. He died aged 90 in 2003.
• Poet UA Fanthorpe published her first collection at age 50 and went on to publish nine collections of poetry, won numerous awards and received a CBE before her death in 2009.
• In 2003, Norman Lebrecht won the Whitbread award at the age of 54 for his first book.
• Ted Allbeury, the author of more than 40 novels and numerous radio plays, was 56 when his first book, 'A Choice of Enemies', appeared in 1973. He went on to become a very successful writer of spy novels, publishing his last book in 2004 when he was 87.
• Annie Proulx (author of the Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain), didn’t start writing novels until in her 50s. At age 58, she won the PEN/Faulkner book award, for her debut novel. The following year she won a Pulitzer Prize for 'The Shipping News'.
• Mary Wesley, author of the Camomile Lawn, famously didn’t publish her first adult novel until she was 70 but then went on to become one of Britain’s most successful novelists, publishing her last book in 2001 a year before her death at age 90.

I'll go on

To quote another famous author, Henry James once said 'The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have'. Here are some artists who may have begun a little earlier but used longevity to power futher creative adventures.

• PD James started work on her first novel in her mid thirties and, now in her 80s, is still publishing bestselling crime novels.
• Goethe completed Faust at 80
• John Huston was 80 when he directed The Dead.
• Matisse, the French painter, underwent an operation for cancer at age 71
• and afterwards went on working for 13 years. His work from that period was the focus of an exhibition at the Musee de Luxembourg in 2005 (‘Matisse: A Second Life’). A few months before he died at age 85 he wrote to a friend “I am still working a bit and I observe that its quality has not fallen thanks to good discipline. But one must remain modest”.
• Hokusai, the Japanese painter famous for his series of woodblock prints known as the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, was busy creating in his 80s and looked forward to going on, saying just before he died at age 89: “If heaven gives me ten more years, or an extension of even five years, I shall surely become a true artist.”
• Titian went on painting masterpieces until well in his 90s….
• Sculptor Louise Bourgeois continues today to be creative in her 90s.