What Separates Those Who Return to Drawing From Those Who Stop

The box of pencils is in the cupboard. There was a period when drawing was part of the day, and then it stopped. Sometimes because of studies, sometimes because of work, and sometimes for no reason anyone can point at. When the thought of coming back arrives, the first question is almost always the same one: is the ability still there. Underneath it waits a second question that is harder to admit to: even if I come back, what stops me from quitting again in two months.

The first question has no answer outside the page. The second one has a documented record, and the record is more interesting.

Two artists came back, and did it in opposite ways

Laurel Bushman, a writer at Lookout Santa Cruz, went back in the summer of 2021 to the caricature stand on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk after more than a year away from the work. Her own account of the first day: "I felt a little rush of terror my first day back at the Boardwalk this summer. Would I remember how to do it after more than a year of dormancy?" [1]. Her co-worker there, the caricaturist Christian "Meesimo" Meesey, calls live caricature "the pressure-cooker-gauntlet of drawing," and the mantra she takes from him to get through the day is his: "Don't think, just look and draw. Draw faster than the speed of second thought" [1].

Clara Lieu did the exact opposite. Lieu is an artist and adjunct professor at RISD, where she studied in the 1990s and to which she returned to teach in 2007. In August 2016 she wrote on her own blog: "It's been 2 years since I made any artwork. I promised myself that I wouldn't make any artwork until I really wanted to, and when it would be fun again" [2]. She adds that part of her felt terribly guilty for producing nothing for so long, and that she genuinely needed that time away to reset [2]. The post closes on one line: "For the first time that I can remember, drawing is fun again" [2].

Both routes put a working artist back to work. Bushman forced her way in through the fear. Lieu refused to go in until the desire came back on its own. Anyone looking here for a single rule that covers both will not find one, and that absence is itself a finding.

What the evidence actually measures

There is research that speaks directly to the second question. Darby Mackenstadt, Carolyn Adams-Price and Sarah Israel published an abstract in Innovation in Aging in December 2022 reporting a survey of 279 adults aged 40 to 84, all with at least one creative hobby, conducted during the Covid pandemic. The finding as the abstract itself states it: a positive relationship between identifying with a creative hobby and mental well-being, and a negative relationship between receiving recognition for the hobby and mental well-being [3].

The limits are worth knowing before anyone leans on it. This is a conference abstract rather than a full paper, so it carries no methodology in detail. The sample was 95.3 percent female and 88 percent white, so it does not represent a general population. And the abstract qualifies itself, citing Barker and colleagues from 2009, that people who pursue creative work as a career may not receive the same benefit, because of the stress of trying to earn a living from it [3].

The same distinction arrives from a second, independent source. In Julianna Bragg's CNN report from February 2025, Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a licensed clinical psychologist and emerita professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, says that approaching a hobby for personal enjoyment, rather than with the pressure to monetize it or gain social media validation, keeps it lighthearted and fulfilling, and can help people reframe or overcome perfectionist tendencies [4].

Why the return does not happen by itself

Max Alberhasky, an assistant professor of marketing at California State University Long Beach, wrote in Psychology Today in April 2025 about research he conducted with Rajesh Raghunathan and published in Psychology & Marketing in 2023. Their distinction is plain: some activities improve with practice, such as playing guitar, and some do not, such as scrolling social media. The finding was that participants spent far more of their free time on the second kind, and that when asked which kind gave them more happiness and meaning, the answer flipped [5].

His explanation is the flow state. Flow occurs when a task is challenging enough to hold attention. Too easy against your ability and boredom follows. Too hard and frustration follows. There is a band where challenge meets ability, and an activity with no skill in it cannot offer that band at all [5]. That is why an evening set aside for drawing ends on a phone, even for someone who knows perfectly well that the drawing would have served them better. His practical suggestion is a five-minute timer, with a commitment to those five minutes only [5].

There is a social side to it too. Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and founder of the National Institute for Play, adds in the same report that starting an activity read as childlike can feel embarrassing to an adult [4]. Anyone taking pencils out of a cupboard at forty knows that hesitation, and it is worth knowing that it is documented rather than personal.

How long a gap can run

Agnes Martin left New York abruptly in 1967, at the height of the recognition her work had won. The documented reasons include the death of her close friend Ad Reinhardt, the demolition of buildings at Coenties Slip where her studio stood, and the end of a relationship. The same record notes that during her decade in New York she was repeatedly hospitalized for schizophrenia, and received electroconvulsive therapy at Bellevue Hospital [6].

After leaving she drove for eighteen months around the western United States and Canada, then settled in New Mexico in an adobe house she built herself. Through those years she did not paint. The source is not internally consistent about the year she resumed, giving both 1971 and 1973, so the accurate phrasing is several years, into the early 1970s. From 1975 her new work was exhibited regularly [6].

The case is useful precisely because it does not flatter the simple version of the question. Martin's gap was not a scheduling problem, and its ending did not arrive as a decisive return to the desk. It lasted years, it followed a real crisis, and the painting came back slowly.

What is missing from the record

The gap in this article should be stated plainly. Hebrew-language searching ran across five different angles over two research days this week and turned up no Israeli or Hebrew-language account of an artist who stopped drawing for years and came back. The closest thing found in Hebrew is a column by Amalia Rosenblum in Haaretz from January 2026, which opens on the claim that most children stop drawing when they discover they cannot draw realistically enough [7]. That column is about stopping in childhood, and the rest of it sits behind a subscriber wall, so it is cited here for that one line only.

Something closer to home is missing too. Muli Asido's public material speaks to someone starting seriously as an adult, and not to someone who stopped and is coming back, which is a genuine difference in the psychological question being asked. What is there applies to the first day in either case: "Every exercise builds one ability. Once you know which, the hours start to count," and beside it, "A good drawing does not just happen. It is built, decision after decision" [8].

What can be said on the first day

The record does not allow anyone to promise that a return will hold. Bushman closes her own piece by announcing that she is moving to writing: "I'll keep drawing too, because I love it, just not quite enough" [1]. That is an honest answer, and it belongs in the picture in its own right. A person can come back, find the ability intact, and still decide their place is somewhere else.

What can be said concerns which question gets asked on the first day. "Do I still have it" asks the page for a verdict, which makes it a question about recognition. "What do I want to draw today" is a question about identity. Mackenstadt and colleagues' finding and Durvasula's description both point the same way, that the second question protects the person asking it better than the first [3][4].

And anyone coming back will meet the old gap between eye and hand quickly, which is the subject of an earlier article here. Returning does not cancel that gap. It puts you back inside it from a different place, with an eye that has already seen something and a hand that needs reminding.

CTA: A short conversation is enough to know if this is the right path.

Sources

[1] Laurel Bushman, Lookout Santa Cruz, 11 July 2021. Her own account of the day she went back to the caricature stand, and the quotes from Christian Meesey.

[2] Clara Lieu, Drawing Again After a 2 Year Drought, 16 August 2016. Her own words on two years without work and on what brought her back.

[3] Darby Mackenstadt, Carolyn Adams-Price, Sarah Israel, Expectations of Recognition and Benefits of Creative Activities for Middle and Older Adults, Innovation in Aging, December 2022. A conference abstract. Identity against recognition, the sample, and the caveats.

[4] Julianna Bragg, CNN, 23 February 2025. The remarks of Dr. Ramani Durvasula and Dr. Stuart Brown.

[5] Max Alberhasky, Psychology Today, 23 April 2025. Skill-based activity, the flow state, and the five-minute timer.

[6] Agnes Martin, English Wikipedia. The 1967 departure, the eighteen months on the road, and the source's own inconsistency about the year she resumed.

[7] Amalia Rosenblum, Why most adults do not draw, Haaretz, 29 January 2026. The opening paragraph only, before the subscriber wall.

[8] Muli Asido, About. The two principles stated there on practice and on building a drawing decision by decision.