Art is timeless. It has no boundaries, no age limits. Children are the best artists. They haven’t yet learned to color inside the lines or that whatever they create has to look like something adults can identify. It is enough that they know. They draw what they see, either in the physical world or in their imaginations. They are messy, uninhibited, original, and creative.

Imagine if they stayed that way for the rest of their lives. The world would be brimming with artists. But of course, they don’t. They go to school and learn to draw “correctly,” to make the tree green, not purple, and the sky blue, even when they might prefer a different color. It takes a determined child to stick with that purple tree.

At the other end of the spectrum are the elders—those who have been making art all their lives and those who have discovered this side of themselves in their later years. Georgia O’Keeffe, known as the “Mother of American modernism desert-inspired landscapes,” who died at the age of ninety-nine, was an American modernist painter whose career lasted seventy years. Most of us recognize a Georgia O’Keeffe painting when we see one.

At 103 years old, Carmen Herrera has been creating minimalist abstractions since the mid-fifties, drawing on her background in architecture to add variation to line and form. Her work is dramatic and compelling.

Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses) was an American folk artist who began painting in earnest at the age of seventy-eight and built a long and successful art career in her later years. Her paintings are charming and exquisitely detailed “primitives.”

In between the youngest and oldest among us are thousands of aspiring and working artists who communicate with the world through their art, whatever form it may take. Art feeds the soul, soothes the mind, and enhances our health. Since the world is full of art, I urge you to view and enjoy as much as possible and, if the spirit moves you, pick up a brush or a pencil and step into the magical world artists inhabit.