My early childhood and teen years were spent in England and Washington D.C., as my father followed his U.S. Air Force career. The earliest art influence came from a family friend, French expatriate and Post-Impressionist Paul Maze, under whose gentle tutelage in his lush Sussex country garden, I learned to play with pastels. This 1956 oil is of my mother, my sister, and me.
The motivation to draw came from early years learning to ride in London’s Hyde Park, where I fell in love with horses. My passion for horses expanded into wildlife and wild country when my family spent summer vacations on a friend’s ranch in the Teton Mountains of Wyoming. I was lucky to be allowed to run free in the pastures and woods on my own, always on a horse or with an old bamboo fly-fishing rod. I spent idle hours hanging out at the barn, doing little pencil sketches of horses in between mandatory chores of mucking out the stalls.
There was quite a bit of art influence within my family...My great-grandmother, May "Topsy" Olds, was a prolific watercolorist. Her specialty was birds, but every Christmas, she would paint snow scenes and send them out as separate Christmas cards, often numbering 50 little original drawings. I treasure them. My father was also an artist. His genre was caricatures and scenes from his various Air Force assignments, often illustrating biting wit and strong opinions.
Early art education (if it could be called that) was in elementary and middle school art classes, where drawing instruction was casual. I remember learning perspective, but not much else. However, one of the main influencers of my life came from years under the sweet, welcoming spirit of art teacher Mary Crouch Lilly. I was a solitary child and Mrs. Lilly offered me a sanctuary even between classes. We remained lifelong friends.
During middle school in England in the early 1960s, we had to produce drawings in a notebook for biology class and were graded on accuracy. I wish I’d kept those notebooks! History of Art in high school and visits to many great art museums in Europe and the U.S. focused my deep appreciation for art through the ages.
In my first semester at Vassar College, I signed up for Art 101, Life Drawing, but within the three-week deadline allowed to drop a class, the instructor quietly told me I shouldn’t be in the class, that I should just…go paint. It wasn’t until years later that I realized the significance of how this potentially knocked me off course. Could I have followed my love for art into graduate school and become a serious artist? In senior year, I attempted to sign up for a 300-level oil painting class but was turned away at registration because I hadn’t completed Art 101! My BA was in English/Creative Writing, which, unbeknownst at the time, would come into play forty years later when I wrote a book.
It would be ten years after college before I did any art again. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1979 to 2000 made the world of art wonderfully accessible. While raising my child and working as an office and project manager for corporations in the financial district of the city, I was able to take life drawing classes at Fort Mason, etching and print-making at the College of Marin, and a summer course in oil painting at San Francisco Art Institute. How I wish I could have become a full-time student there! During that time, I was juried into exhibitions with the Marin Society of Artists, the Mill Valley Art Society, and a one-person show at the Mark Reuben Gallery in Sausalito.
A later move to the Puget Sound, to be near my sister, influenced a dive into the deeply organic, earthbound art of the Pacific Northwest. There, I participated in Gig Harbor Open Studios and juried exhibitions at Cornish College of the Arts and the Pratt Center for Fine Arts. Local Puget Sound artist Christopher Mathie became a dear friend and is my greatest art influence today.
In 2003, I moved to Colorado to be near my aging father. During this time, I took art classes at the Art Students League of Denver and was juried into an exhibition at the Steamboat Springs Art Depot, where I had a large room to myself and sold all 22 small pastels of the local landscape. This was the first time I began to think I could be a serious artist, dedicated only to creating art.
It was not meant to be, as life took yet another turn. After living with my father as his caregiver during his terminal illness in 2007, I made a promise to him to write his biography. The next three years were devoted to that effort. In 2010, my book, Fighter Pilot: Memoirs of Triple Ace Robin Olds, was published. Thus began a decade where I became a public speaker, moved back to California, and traveled the world extensively to promote my father’s legacy, a role which continues to this day. During the past ten years, I’ve happily been able to accomplish a good amount of Plein Air painting at Sonoma County wineries and around the local landscape of Boise, Idaho, where I currently live.
I feel that, better late than never, I’ve arrived where I want to be. It’s been a long, wayward journey filled with fitful starts and stops, bursts of creative energy and stretches of success, followed by long, fallow years when other things became more important. But the dream never left me. I see art now as my first love – and my last.