Day 21: Hitting the Wall: Finding Creative Fuel in a Daily Painting Practice

What would you say if today I shared a blank canvas and called it Wall: The One I’ve Hit?

Moving into the twenties of this 31-day daily painting practice, I’m finding it harder and harder to figure out what I even want to paint. The momentum that carried me through the early days is thinning out, and everything is starting to feel a little forced.

During this stretch, I found myself scrolling through photos on my phone and landed on images from a candlelight concert we hosted at the gallery last October. The evening featured Mississippi blues musician and visual artist Thomas Jackson. We didn’t really know what to expect—how many candles we’d need, whether the weather would cooperate, or how the night would unfold—but it turned out beautifully.

Jackson is an artist in every sense of the word: a storyteller, a musician, a painter. Seeing those photos again reminded me why the gallery matters so much to me, and why I keep showing up to this daily painting practice even when it feels stalled. I’m getting a little more comfortable with acrylic paint so I decided to give it a go using one of the photographs as a reference. I love painting musicians because you can linger on something that isn’t permanent— the song ends, the strings stop vibrating, but the painting kind of holds it all, or at least tries to.

Today’s painting grew out of that remembering. It’s a quiet acknowledgment that creative blocks are part of the process—and that even when I’m hitting a wall, there’s a deep well of lived experience, community, and past beauty to draw from.

 Sometimes the work isn’t about pushing forward, harder. Sometimes it’s about looking back to beautiful moments already experienced.