Hi, my name is David and I’m 69. Luckily I didn’t feel my age, my wife says I don’t look my age or act like a 69 year old.

When I was as school I was always good at art. Once our children left home, it gave us both an opportunity to go to evening classes. Here I rediscovered my love of art. I did drawing, watercolour, acrylic and oil paint classes. I had written lots of poetry over the years. I discovered from my wife, that I was dyslexic, and my spelling was pretty bad.

With the help of “Spell checker computer software”, and that my job at the time involved me typing 39 hours a week, my spelling and writing improved.

Once I retired I started volunteering at Leeds Art Gallery. Here I learned more about art and was interested to find out how “The old masters” discovered techniques to help create their work. I had written a few poems about the artworks in Leeds Art Gallery. With the encouragement of “The Art Doctors” I performed some of them live in the gallery. Yes it was a bit scary, but I quit enjoyed it. On a Friday at The art gallery I joined The Meet and Make group. Here we discuss a piece of art, then make something relating to it. We made a Peace Banner as part of The Leeds double century celebration. I wrote a poem about the banner. I was then invited to perform this poem at Leeds Museum in front of 200+ people. I only knew 2 people there, so that was quite scary. I managed my performance very well and got a round of applause. As I left the stage a staff member asked if I had heard of “Heydays”, run by the West Yorkshire Playhouse. I hadn’t, but went there the following week to find out more.

I have attended quite a few courses at Leeds Art Gallery where I learn stitch craft. I really fell in love with this. It’s difficult but I love the end result and find it very theriomorphic. At Heydays I joined the creative writing group. This has help my writing ability to improve and given me enough confidence to enter some of my writing into various other writing groups. I’ve been lucky enough to have some of my writing published in The Adle parish magazine. Heyday has also helped me to be a better performer. I have used this skill at Leeds Art Gallery to tell the visitors about the artworks that I have researched. I also sold some of my artwork recently to a local bakery. I keep fit by being the only guy to attend Zumba Fitness for the last 12+ years. I My wife and I sing in a community Chior. So you could say that being retired as been a great experience so far. I hope to continue writing, performing and hopefully selling more of my artwork.