Milk and Honey Day 14: The Places In Between

Yesterday was a really hard day.

Not necessarily art wise. Life wise.

And day’s like that are exactly why I keep painting transitions over and over again…

Years ago, I became fascinated by liminal spaces and lines of demarcation. Those moments where your life quietly divides itself into before and after. Places where you cross something invisible and suddenly the version of you that existed previously no longer exists in the same way.

I think everyone has those moments.

Some are beautiful. Some devastating. Some both.

As a child, I was in a car accident that caused nerve damage in my spine. I was eleven years old and from that point forward my life was shaped by chronic pain, migraines, sciatic issues, cluster headaches, and physical limitations that never fully left.

That was a line of demarcation.

So was becoming a mother.

Finding out I was pregnant changed the entire trajectory of my life, but holding my first child for the first time changed me even more deeply than words can express. There are versions of yourself that only exist after certain moments happen. Marriage changes you. Divorce changes you. Grief changes you. Love changes you. Illness changes you. Survival changes you.

You can not cross those thresholds lightly or unchanged.

I think that is part of why I paint roads, rivers, passages, wilderness landscapes, distant horizons, and places suspended somewhere between arrival and becoming. I am less interested in painting destinations than I am in painting transition itself.

Because transition is where most of life actually happens.

The wilderness stories in Scripture were never really about geography. They were about transformation. Egypt was behind them, but the Promised Land was not fully theirs yet either. They were becoming something in the middle.

Honestly, I think a lot of people live there emotionally.

In between versions of themselves.
In between grief and healing.
In between survival and flourishing.
In between who they were and who they are becoming.

And creating art feels strangely similar to that process sometimes.

There is something deeply vulnerable about carrying a vision internally before it exists physically. You nurture it quietly for awhile. You protect it. You work on it when nobody fully understands what you are trying to build yet. And then eventually there comes a moment where you have to fight to bring it into reality.

That part is rarely graceful.

There is almost always a stage in a painting where I genuinely question myself. Usually several. The piece stops matching the vision in my head. The composition feels wrong. The atmosphere disappears. I start wondering if I actually know what I am doing or if I have somehow lost the ability to paint entirely overnight.

Fear gets loud in those moments. Doubt too.
And honestly, I think that is part of the process.

Not because suffering is romantic, but because creation requires endurance. You fall back on skill. You keep showing up. You solve problems one layer at a time. And you chase tthe light. Literally how it moves and shapes things. And sometimes you move forward through inspiration and sometimes through sheer stubbornness.

Most meaningful things in life seem to require some version of that.

Motherhood does.
Healing does.
Relationships do.
Rebuilding does.
Art definitely does.

I think that is why the ugly stage of a painting affects artists so emotionally. It is not just frustration over technique. It is the fear that the vision will never survive translation into reality.

But usually, if you stay with the work long enough, something shifts.

The painting starts breathing again.
The light returns.
The layers begin working together.
The thing that felt impossible slowly starts becoming whole.

Not perfectly.
But honestly.

And honestly, I think people are like that too.

Maybe that is what I am really painting underneath all these wheat fields and glowing skies and rivers and gold light. Not perfection. Not arrival. Not polished certainty.

Becoming.

The strange, difficult, beautiful process of crossing from one version of your life into another and carrying both grief and hope with you at the same time.