Teachers are also good at learning things. They make good students, even when the subject is something pretty different from what they teach.

Bev Gilfillan of Downers Grove, who has become proficient at watercolor painting, is a good example of this.

Gilfillan, who moved to the village with her children in 1983, was mainly an intermediary grade-school teacher. She retired only about three years ago, and that was because she needed to care for her mother.

She had not had much experience with art but needed a new activity to balance the other, more serious aspects of her life.

“I attended parochial school where the extent of the art we learned was creating one poster per year,” Gilfillan said. “When I got to high school, I was deathly afraid of art because the other kids had already had some training in it.”

Yet she liked the creative outlet and always wanted to explore it more but never had the time to do so until she retired from teaching. Gilfillan saw that a painting class was being offered at Fairview Village in Downers Grove through the College of DuPage’s Older Adult Institute. The location and timing were convenient, so she signed up.
It just happened to be a watercolor painting class.

“If the class had been on oil painting, I would have learned that instead,” Gilfillan said.
Many of the other students were repeats who signed up to take the class over and over again. She found herself being inspired by these classmates. One man in his 90s was still painting, Gilfillan said.

Gilfillan herself is only in her third year as a watercolorist but has already achieved an impressive level of expertise. The “secret,” she states, is practice. She said she goes through a lot of paper trying to perfect different techniques or subjects.

Some of Gilfillan’s practice took place while she was caring for her mother.

“When my mother would take a rest, I would paint,” she said. “It is just a wonderful, therapeutic activity.”

Gilfillan doesn’t set a schedule for herself, like a writer who might try to work for a set number of hours per day at a regular time. She paints when the mood strikes her and sometimes gets so involved in her project that she continues to paint when she shouldn’t.

“I’ll keep painting even when the lighting is bad or through the night,” she said.
Gilfillan’s workstation is just her kitchen table. She’d love to have a regular studio someday, even though she doesn’t have plans to make her hobby a business, which she is talented enough to do.

Gilfillan has gone from painting still-life scenes of bowls of fruit and vases of flowers to painting landscapes, and she said her next challenge is to tackle portraits. With enough practice, she’ll no doubt master that, too.