Laurel Aiello was a teacher and librarian for 36 years, which also means that she loves to learn. The secret to a successful second act — like she’s found in painting — is to find a teacher, she says.
“Find somebody who's painting paintings that you like and take some lessons from them,” Aiello suggests.
The Franklin native found an art teacher online who specializes in contemporary impressionism — that’s the art world name for her acrylic paintings featuring loose brush strokes and bright, contrasting colors.
Aiello fell in love with acrylics because of the ability to paint over things if you make a mistake. Her end product features lots of layers, bringing out where the light hits. Aiello loves to mix her own paint colors, and, noting the light and dark areas in her reference photo, replaces them with any color of the same value.
Her subjects are mainly people, flowers, animals and buildings, but sometimes she’ll pick subjects just to make her grandchildren smile. The song “Five Little Ducks” was a recent inspiration.
“A lot of times I'll paint something just really because I want to show them,” she tells Williamson Scene.
The grandkids become her subjects, too. She’s especially proud of a recent portrait of her granddaughter, Violet, that took several tries. A vantage point from above ultimately worked best, mirroring Aiello’s view of the child. If you ask Violet what she wants to be when she grows up, she might say “an artist like Gigi.”
Laurel Aiello features her artwork in her downtown Franklin home.
“The funny thing is, they think I'm an artist,” Aiello says. “They don't know that I was a teacher for many years. That's my career, because their whole life, that's what I've been.”
Painting in retirement was serendipitous in that she was able to leave behind perfectionism and pressure in ways she couldn’t when she was younger. However, it took time for her to see herself as an artist.
“I would have worried about, ‘Am I good enough, or is it perfect?’ she says. "And I would have shut myself down. When I think back to junior high, I was really into art and enjoying it. And then somebody once said, 'Oh, that doesn't look good. 'And when I look back, that's when I quit. I didn't do it anymore. The thing I realized as an adult that I didn't see as a child is there's so many different kinds of art, and what appeals to one person may or may not appeal to somebody else, and it doesn't really matter.”
Aiello started giving her art as gifts and then ultimately selling it because she had too many pieces around the house. The first piece she sold was in 2023 at the Tomato Art Festival in Nashville.
Her message to those who want to try art: don’t let fear hold you back.
“Everybody's afraid of failure, afraid of messing up, afraid of it not being good,” she says.
Lauren Aiello holds a piece of her work in her downtown Franklin home.
In the future, Aiello would like to see her art in a coffee shop and a gallery, as well as create a children’s picture book. She does a bit of creative work each day.
“Art, I don't think, has to be perfect,” she says. “When I'm doing a painting, it's never done. You reach a point where you just go, ‘OK, good enough.’ If you wait for something to be perfect you’ll never get on to the next thing.”