Blog / 2026 / My Artistic Nemesis Has a Sense of Humor.

In 2024, I revealed that there’s this thing I just can’t get the hang of as an artist. This is my video confession of my problem with painting long smooth lines.

At the time, I swore that every year I’d create one image that required me to work on the steadiness of my hand, something to keep me in conversation with my foe.

And I respected that promise. Early in 2025, I decided to paint the building I’d been living in and display the piece in the front door’s window in order to bring the surreal into the everyday.

Then, later in the year, I applied to make an image to go with a short story for Flash Frog, an online flash fiction magazine, not knowing that the text I’d be assigned would need an image full of long smooth lines. This accidental extra challenge amused me, and I felt pretty good about my relationship with my nemesis, while also being relieved that I’d earned the right to take a break for the rest of 2025.

Except I couldn’t, because this happened. In October 2025, I was hired to make art for 52 Weeks of Firsts, a public art exhibit organized by the National Constitution Center, Historic Philadelphia, and Mural Arts Philadelphia to celebrate the many ways that the US’s first capital was first in the nation.

One of the pieces I was commissioned to create required me to paint a famous building, but that was child’s play compared to the First Steamboat for Passengers and Freight, shown above in process.

Some of the lines required for this image were over three feet long. Plus, the surface I was painting was pocked, bumpy, and eerily absorbent, no matter how much I coated it with layers of medium. In other words, the #1 sculpture sucked the moisture right off my brush, making an uninterrupted line impossible.

The situation was pretty funny. Your basic “be careful what you wish for” tale, but with some delightfully silly stakes. The whole thing was reminiscent of this sunset painting debacle from 2019, and, given the tree mural I’m painting this summer, it’s only getting more ridiculous.