Goodbye career, hello bliss

When he was a lawyer, Jay Rolfe measured his professional life in minutes and hours, billable hours. The hands of the clock seemed to move glacially. Evenings and weekends beckoned because they promised relief from the grind.

"What people don't tell you is that the law is boring," Rolfe says.

The measure of Rolfe's life now is that he never stops working. He works mornings, afternoons and evenings, seven days a week. When he's not working, he's thinking about work - trying to figure out what to create next and how to make it.

Time flies because his work is play.

"I feel happy," says Rolfe, "I'm having fun. I'm doing something I always wanted to do."

Rolfe, 63, of West Chester, is a late-blooming artist. He makes three-dimensional paintings that are big, bold and colorful. Many of his works involve what he calls "iconic cultural symbols" - peace symbols, crucifixes, rocket ships, dollar signs, the pitchfork from Grant Wood's "American Gothic."

"To me, they represent powerful, emotional or fun experiences that resonate with my subconscious," Rolfe says. "They jolt me out of the mundane."

For now, Rolfe still carries amateur status, in that he's making art for love, not money, though his goal, certainly, is to do both. He has yet to sell any of the three dozen pieces he's made (price range: $2,500 to $350,000), but Rolfe is confident of his work's appeal. His blog trumpets: "From starving artist to 21st century Picasso."

His ambition may be a tad overweening, but in seeking to express his creativity at this stage in life, Rolfe has plenty of company.

Grandma Moses began painting in her 70s, after abandoning a career in embroidery because of arthritis. The Russian lyric poet and novelist Boris Pasternak wrote his first novel, Dr. Zhivago, at age 66. American folk artist Eddie Arning didn't begin drawing until he entered a nursing home at age 66.

"Art historians will tell you that the late period of many artists is also the period of freedom, a time when they really come into their own and blossom," says Robert Butler, president and CEO of the International Longevity Center and a professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. "And studies show that people who have something to get up for in the morning - not just playing golf, but something that has meaning - live longer."

"Most of us have creative potential that we haven't tapped," says Bill Sadler, a professor of sociology at Holy Names University in Oakland, Calif., and author of The Third Age: Six Principles of Growth and Renewal After 40. "This new period in life that I call 'the third age' - from roughly age 50 to 75 - is the time to tap into it. People paint, play music, write, design a whole new life. It's exciting.

"In the 'second stage' - from 25 to 50 or so - we're goal-oriented, and life is fairly linear. When we reach our 50s, we shift gears. We begin asking: What do I want to be? What do I want to do now? We want to find meaning, to leave a legacy, to contribute, to have more fun."

When Rolfe was a lawyer, few were the days when fun was on the docket. Oh, there were some heady times early on, when the Penn law grad clerked for a federal judge in Richmond, or worked for the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. He enjoyed constitutional law and applying those noble principles on behalf of the indigent and disenfranchised as a public defender in Philadelphia.

But he found the bulk of his labor monotonous. In grammar school, Rolfe had enjoyed painting and drawing, but he was discouraged when a teacher insisted he do things her way. While he was a marketing major at Penn, his enthusiasm for painting, and such artists as Mondrian, Monet and Renoir, was fanned by a girlfriend who introduced him to museums and cultural sites.

In his 20s, Rolfe painted in the evenings and on weekends, but he abandoned his artistic ambitions when it became clear he couldn't make a living.

So he dutifully plied his trade as a barrister, and his lack of passion showed in his susceptibility to detours: a move to a farm in upstate New York, forays into venture capitalism, and writing novels and screenplays.

"I kept wrestling with the question: What do I want to be when I grow up?" Rolfe says.

In the fall of 2002, while visiting his daughter, Rolfe went to the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, where he saw a painting by Ellsworth Kelly titled Blue Green Curve. It was shaped like a wedge. For Rolfe, it was an epiphany.

"I realized I didn't have to paint rectangles," Rolfe says, and he finally felt free to create outside art's traditional boundaries.

Six weeks later, Rolfe woke up in the middle of the night inspired by what he calls "the vision" - "a unique artistic idea."

Emboldened by that vision, Rolfe quit the law. It helped that his two children were grown and that his wife, Randy, a family therapist, was fully supportive and prepared to plug the income gap.

Rolfe's "unique artistic idea" is three-dimensional shaped stretched canvas - 3DSSC, for short, or in spoken parlance, "three disk." Because of its depth and dimensionality, his art occupies a middle ground between conventional painting and sculpture. He describes his style as "minimalist symbolist pop."

Rolfe's works are simple, colorful and monumental in size. Many are eight feet tall and are designed, he says, for "museums and mansions." Lately, though, to give his work broader appeal, Rolfe has begun scaling down the dimensions to three or four feet. (To see his work, visit www.jayrolfe.com.)

After he conceives an idea for a piece, Rolfe makes sketches and figures out the engineering and construction details. That process, he says, can take as long as two years. In his studio, a converted sunroom in the back of his house in rural East Bradford Township, or in his driveway if the weather is fair, he fabricates a frame or skeleton from lightweight pieces of wood.

Once stretched and stapled over the frame, the canvas is adorned with three to five coats of acrylic paint.

"The impact comes from the size, color and shape," he says.

In 2004, Rolfe displayed eight pieces at the Convention Center. He has not presented any of his paintings in local galleries (largely because of their size and price, he says).

"He has really refined his craft, and his work has started to become really interesting," says Ben Gall, owner of the Arts Scene in West Chester. "His art is not easy to sell because it's too contemporary, too innovative, and Chester County is very conservative and traditional."

"I think it's fabulous," says a completely unobjective critic, his wife, Randy. "The scale and innovation of his work are amazing."

More important, her husband is happy. "He's never been more content and fulfilled," she says.

The moral of the story: "Find a way to do what you love," says Rolfe.