what to do when your creativity is stalled out
time to untangle some of your own blocks and limitations
Creativity itself feels weird right now. So today, I have an exercise for you to help untangle some of your own blocks and limitations with your creative craft.
While some might argue this is just adapting to seasonality, we have to face that we are living in increasingly strange and disorienting times. You, like me, might find it hard to attend to your favorite practice of making, and maybe an unexpected one that helps you self soothe would feel more nourishing at the moment.
I keep trying to paint but find the practice of knitting far more soothing for the massive bag of anxiety I carry about so much uncertainty and grief. I’m a child of Polish immigrants and I cannot stand the deluded fascist policies being enacted. Turning to books has helped, so here’s a quote Beth Pickens from Your Art Will Save Your Life:
“Your art will help you navigate the world and it will light the way for others… Anytime you feel overwhelmed by humanity’s impact on people, animals, and the planet, or really, anytime you think you cannot leave the house because the world is too hard, I want you to think about the art, performances, music, books, and films that have made you want to be alive.
Think about how those artists, like you, probably felt overwhelmed by their lives — and the times they were living in — but made the thing anyway. Your future audiences need your work, so you need to make it.”
Now, for the exercise, inspired by gardening:
In the practice of knitting, we can just work on a single row — pick up an in-progress project, follow a pattern, and take action on one very small thing. This idea is something I want to investigate for each of my art practices (music, writing, painting, collage, photography) and my responses will be a subject for a later newsletter.
Rather than waiting to have all the answers, I want to invite you to attempt to figure this out with me.
Borrowing from an idea from an earlier post regarding energy menus, take a piece of paper out or open a new document in an app that lets you think on a computer.
Start with headers. Write down each of your creative practices, all of them.
Next, write down your ideal version of what each practice looks like for you.
examples: for music, that means intuitively crafting a melody. for painting, that looks like working at the easel with oils. for writing, that looks like writing a finished newsletter.
Now, we backtrack. What is the first step for each of those practices. If your art is a garden, what are the seeds or starts for each of those plants?
Okay, let’s go a little deeper. What elements help nurture the possibility of these seeds sprouting? Is it a particular condition or environment that sparks inspiration? Is it proximity to the work that makes it possible to do? Is it the action of doing this work with others that helps you make the time?
if that last option really hits home for you, I run free creativity clubs (a cameras-optional live hangout where we build community and make art of any kind together) on my Discord server every month and we have one coming up very soon for January.
So you have the ideals, the first steps, and the right conditions, great! But in a garden, we don’t just plant seeds, we have to weed, water, and assess problems as they come up. Let’s do that for each practice. Write down what tends to stop you or avoid a practice.
for me, this is everything from frustration, imposter syndrome, fleeting inspiration, shiny-new-project distractions, admin work getting in the way, studio setups that aren’t conducive to actually doing the work.
When I was studying organic gardening with my Aunt Susan, she taught me about soil amendments — a concept where you test the soil, see what deficiencies it has, and make a mixture that will allow the specific plant you are putting in that plot to thrive. Now, let’s come up with amendments for each part of our practice.
here are a few examples:
for painting, the current location of my easel looks great on a tutoring call, but is terrible for actually working. I have to move its location.
for music, I need to schedule time for play and not ignore it. doing something as simple as keeping an accountability blog kept me working. It’s time to do that again.
for my sketchbook, the goal is not to perform but to experiment. working on a daily play spread in my planner is a good way around this.
I hope that this simple practice helps you to find the things holding you back! If you have questions about the exercises, share them with me in a comment, and then share this with a friend to do it with you.
Now let’s talk about attention and sustainability.
I have two things I would love for you to look at and enjoy this week. The first is a short film that I made in collaboration with my partner Wes Jackson that we filmed back in September in Sequoia National Park. It features an essay I wrote about our collective struggles with attention, the grief of witnessing burn scars, and you get to watch the process of this painting!
Here are a few quotes from the essay to inspire you to make some tea and watch:
When we are moving through times like these where everything feels quite terrible, cultivating wonder, especially with others, feels like a clear act of rebellion.
We need to strategize ways to do this work in solidarity with others, as individual pursuits don’t help the collective to quit. Especially now in times where so many are talking to their customized ai chatbots, walling themselves off even further from being challenged at all, from witnessing the world, and from building meaningful real-world relationships with humans.
The second thing I’d love for you to look at this week is this interview with my artist friend Misty Granade on her blog! In it we talk more about my creative history, working through perfectionism, and my thoughts on sustainability.
Here are a few excerpts from the interview to inspire you to read the whole thing:
I want to showcase how I think, as a human. Because I teach classes, lead retreats, and offer one-on-one tutoring, I want my work to showcase the vulnerability of figuring things out in real time on paper. This is something that for years I did digitally only, with my main companion, the undo button! But forgoing layers and tech tools is a really important part of my current rebellion towards AI sobriety. I need the process itself to show my values too.
Sustainability, for me and my practices, is about recognizing that each day is different and the act of being an artist is a life-long marathon not a sprint. My grandmother, the painter, taught me how to drive and her whole philosophy was about taking the route that would get you there in the right frame of mind. While map apps can show you the fastest route to get anywhere, my grandma’s idea on life and arrival helped me remember that the most important thing is to think about how you wanna feel when you arrive.
when it comes to my YouTube channel. I always ask, what does my community need, as balm, as advocacy, as direction. Where community meets curiosity is where a lot of my classes and teaching philosophy forms.
A few new classes and website updates:
In the new year, I always go through my website and make some changes to align with my direction or compass I’ve built. (If that sounds like a neat concept, I have a recording of class on that whole process available on my shop)
My most popular creative craft class, Gouache and Watercolor for Beginners, is now a self-directed experience you can do at your own pace!
I created a page to better explain the Persistent Bloom Retreat Center, and align all the work I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. I’m so happy with how this has turned out and it’s the place where you can sign up for the in-person retreat waitlist. I can’t wait to announce what I’ve been planning!
Speaking of waitlists, I updated my classes page to do a few things:
to announce a workshop series with my friend Kim of Oinopo Studio running between January 29th - February 19th at 9AM PST. Tickets will go on sale next week to the waitlist first.
Kim's workshop is first, called You just THINK you're bad at graphic design, where you'll learn a simplified process to create digital designs that come out looking great every time (if you do it right).
My section is a two-parter called Collaging your Uniquely Human Voice, where you’ll get to play with physical materials & digitize them with Procreate. If you’ve been real into my thumbnails lately, this is where I’ll show you my process for making them!
We will wrap up with a final session where Kim and I will give you feedback on the work you create over the 4 weeks!
You can sign up for the waitlist for any class I am dreaming up offering. The class with the highest waitlist subscribers will be the first one offered starting in February!
Why am I doing waitlists? I want to know who here, specifically wants to learn more about different classes and get your explicit consent to hear more than a blurb about them (My friend Amelia Hruby, PhD shared a great episode of her podcast Off The Grid last week that re-affirmed this is the move for 2026.)
I reactivated my Custom Work page if you are interested in working together to make some art for you this year!
Ok, that is all for this dispatch. I am going to be working on the exercise I shared this week and I’ll share my results in a future dispatch. Thanks for reading as always and until next time, stay creative and find your own ways to persistently bloom.