Painting With a Tremor: How My Hands Changed the Way I Work

A few years ago, I started living with an inherited nerve tremor. It's the kind of thing that shows up quietly at first, then gradually becomes part of how you move through daily life, including the parts of daily life that happen to be your job. For me, that job is painting, and painting depends almost entirely on what your hand does when it touches a brush to canvas.

At first, the tremor felt like something to manage around. I tried to steady my hand, slow down, control the line the way I always had. It didn't work, not really, and it took me a while to stop treating that as a failure. The shake was going to be there whether I fought it or not, so eventually I stopped fighting it and started paying attention to what it was actually doing to my mark-making.

The tremor turned out to add a kind of texture I couldn't produce on purpose even if I tried. A line that's supposed to be straight comes out slightly alive instead, with small variations in pressure and direction that give it more presence than a perfectly steady line would have. Edges blur just enough to feel less rigid. I started to think of the tremor less as an obstacle and more as a collaborator, one that's involved in every single piece whether I plan for it or not.

This shift changed more than just how individual lines look. It changed my whole approach to a painting. I used to work toward a fixed outcome, an image I'd already decided on before I started. Now I let the work evolve as I go, responding to what the paint and my hand are doing together in real time. There's more looseness in the process now, and more presence too. I'm paying closer attention to each individual mark because I genuinely don't know exactly how it's going to land.

None of this means the tremor is easy. Some days it's more pronounced than others, and there are pieces where I've had to set the brush down and come back later, or adjust my grip, or work at a different scale than I'd planned. It's a real physical condition, and I don't want to romanticize it into something it isn't. But I've found real value in letting it shape the work instead of treating it as something separate from my art that I have to push through to get to the painting underneath.

If you've followed my work for a while, you might notice this in the paintings themselves: a certain looseness in the linework, a softness at the edges of figures, brushstrokes that feel more like gesture than illustration. That comes directly from how my hands work now, and I've come to think the paintings are better for it.

I wanted to share this because I think plenty of people, whether they make art or not, run into some version of the same question: what do you do when your body doesn't work the way you expected it to, and the thing you love doing depends on it. My approach, for now, is to let the tremor into the work instead of trying to shut it out.

Shana