Challenge Creates Opportunity

For the past eight weeks, I've lived inside a brace. A simple thing, really — some foam and metal wrapped around my fingers and wrist — but it managed to touch nearly every corner of my life. I paint for a living. I chase the curl of a petal, the exact purple of a shadow, with fingers that are supposed to be free and quick. Suddenly they weren't. In fact, suddenly they could barely help at all.

I could still paint, as it turned out. Just much slower. Every stroke had to be chosen instead of assumed, every movement made with a kind of attention I hadn't practiced in years. It was everything else that undid me. Chopping an onion became a negotiation... that I lost. Gardening, washing clothes, twisting open a stubborn jar lid — all of it required patience I didn't know I lacked. I found myself asking for help more than I have in years, and learning, slowly, how to accept it without apologizing for needing it.

I've been released now, mostly — my hands are mine again, except for the heavier work still off-limits. And I celebrated the only way that made sense to me: I started and finished a large painting, the first in over ten years. The kind of ambitious canvas I'd kept circling and never felt I had the time for. That is one of my trademarks: start big, start now.

Challenge creates opportunity, and mine came disguised as a piece of foam and metal that made me look at my own hands like I was seeing them for the first time.

I don't think that's a coincidence. The slowness the brace forced on me didn't just cost me speed — it gave me back a kind of attention I'd let slip away. Challenge creates opportunity, and mine came disguised as a piece of foam and metal that made me look at my own hands like I was seeing them for the first time. I'm grateful for that, I am grateful to be painting, and grateful, in the simplest way, for two hands that work.

I can give you a sample of the larger work…

Untitiled, 40x30 in, oil pastel, July 2026

But like everything good. It still needs time: for drying, for varnishing, for finishing. Just like my hand. So, you will see it again- in about 6 months.

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 — Cynthia