Why Posting My Art Online Set Me Free

The beginning of this story is not what you might expect.

Before I had painted seriously, someone spoke something over me — what those in my faith tradition would call a prophetic word: a Spirit-led impression, spoken out loud, as an encouragement for the road ahead. She told me that when people saw my artwork, healing would be released. That a new stream of creativity was coming — and for me, that meant something significant. My primary creative expression for decades had been dance. This word was pointing to something entirely new. That I would find colours I had only seen in heaven, and that the anointing of the Lord would be on it.

I hadn't earned that word. I hadn't proven anything yet. It was given before the work existed.

And then, in the year that followed, I went through one of the hardest seasons of my life. A significant betrayal. A crushing. It happened in a context I had poured myself into, which made it cut deeper.

Art had always been part of my life. But without that crushing, I believe I would have stayed where I was comfortable and familiar — in dance, in what I already knew. The crushing didn't just wound me. It moved me. It broke open new ground, new territory I would never have stepped into otherwise. Creating became part of how I healed. But it also became something I would never have found if everything had stayed intact.

So when I began sharing my work, I wasn't posting from strength. I was posting from somewhere much more tender than that. Every finished painting went up. Consistently. For ten years.

In the beginning, the fears were all there. What will people think? What if nobody responds? What if they think, who does she think she is?

I already knew what rejection felt like. That didn't make it easier to risk it again. In some ways it made it harder.

But I posted anyway.

Here's what ten years of doing that taught me.

Fear is misplaced faith. It's faith that something bad will happen — and the more you believe it, the more power you hand it. You cannot live in fear and in faith at the same time. They cannot occupy the same space.

You cannot wait until you're perfect before you start. And you cannot let what other people think stop you — because the truth is, most people are not thinking about you anyway. Whatever response they have to your work, or don't have, is far more about where they are than where you are.

That realization was freeing for me. The silence after a post, the scroll-past, the no-response — none of it was a verdict. It was just people living their lives.

In the tradition I come from, prophecy works the same way. You risk speaking a still, small impression out loud. You might be wrong. You might be ignored. But you learn to separate your worth from the response. The whole creative process is very similar — you risk putting something on canvas that came from somewhere deep inside you, and then you post it for the world to see.

This painting is called Faith.

She isn't standing in safety. She's standing in fire — arms open, leaning into the light. I understand that posture now in a way I couldn't have before the crushing. Faith that has never been tested doesn't look like this. This is faith that knows what fire feels like and opens anyway.

A note on this image, because transparency matters to me and to this community.

The print you're seeing here is not AI generated. It began as an original acrylic painting on paper — you can see the original above — which I then mounted on panel board. For the print version, I used a photo editing tool to make adjustments, the most significant being the addition of a spotlight. This was one of my early experiments in taking original, hand-made work and developing it for prints.

I document this process fully in the integrity notes on my website for any work where the print differs meaningfully from the original. I think artists who are navigating this space — where digital tools meet original work — owe their collectors and their community that honesty. I'm committed to it.

After a decade of consistently sharing my work, I can say honestly that I have no fear about posting anymore. Not because the fear stopped coming — but because repetition changed my relationship to it. I stopped letting it make the decisions.

I experienced the same thing again recently when I started the Prophetic Art group here in ArtHelper. Same hesitation. Will people understand this? Is this too niche? Am I the only one here who thinks this way?

I started it anyway. There are now around 100 members.

What I'm learning — still learning — is how to talk about what I carry in a way that opens doors rather than closes them. That doesn't happen in private.

If you're holding something back — a painting, a creative direction, something you sense but haven't put out yet — I want to say this plainly:

The freedom doesn't come before the risk. It comes because you kept showing up while you were still afraid.

And sometimes the most powerful thing you can offer others is the work you made while you were still healing.

Post it. Someone may need exactly what you made.

What's one piece you've been hesitant to share? Drop it below — I'd genuinely love to see it. 👇