Explore Mile's work: mjonthewall.com | IG: mj.onthe.wall
[Watch the full interview below]
Every artist has a moment when creativity shifts from being something they enjoy to something they cannot imagine living without. For this artist, that moment didn't begin in an art studio or after years of formal training. It started in a new apartment during the uncertainty of 2020, with the simple desire to make a blank wall feel like home.
What began as one personal piece quickly became an entire body of work, growing wall by wall, painting by painting. Along the way, Miles discovered that creating isn't simply about making beautiful images. It's about making thousands of decisions, trusting imperfect beginnings, embracing experimentation, and learning to tell stories within a single frame.
In this conversation, we discuss where the journey began, how ideas take shape, balancing engineering with creativity, and why progress often comes from simply continuing to make the next piece.
Where did your creative journey begin?
MJ: I started my creative journey during 2020. I had recently graduated from college and had about three months before my first job started. I was moving from Washington, D.C. down to Virginia Beach, and I really wanted to decorate my apartment because I was trying to beat the bachelor pad allegations. I didn't want it to be just a couch and a PS5.
I wanted something meaningful in my space because I already missed D.C., my home. So I decided to create this large art poster made up of memories from the city. I redrew the U.S. Capitol, the pizza place I always went to with my friends, where I did robotics, and all these different places and experiences. I collaged everything together into one four foot by three foot digital painting and eventually turned it into a wall piece.
Honestly, I thought that would be the first and last artwork I ever made. Instead, it became the beginning of everything.
After that, I started treating it almost like a video game. I wanted to fill that wall with more and more artwork, pieces about the ideas I found interesting and the experiences I wanted to remember. Five years later, I'm still going.
How do you decide what story or emotion you want to paint?
MJ: I often think in directions. I'll start with an emotion or a moment that has an impact. Let's say someone experiences a sudden change. Do they become angry? Do they become joyful? I want to paint both possibilities. I want to see what that emotion looks like in its happiest form and in its angriest form, then keep navigating through those different directions.
The challenging thing about being an artist is that you don't get the luxury of linear storytelling. Everything exists in one frame. Your beginning and your ending happen at the same time.
If you want to tell a proper story, you have to guide the viewer's eye through the painting. I learned that through using recurring characters, composition, and direction. Most people naturally look at the brightest area or the center of a painting first. After that, you want their eyes to continue traveling through the rest of the image.
I became fascinated with The Death of Socrates. There's an older man sitting apart from everyone else, completely disconnected from the main scene. As you spend more time with the painting, you realize he's remembering Socrates' final moments. He becomes the beginning of the story, while everything behind him becomes the memory.
I loved that idea of using composition to guide someone through time and memory. That's something I try to bring into my own work whenever I can.
Does the finished piece usually match what you imagined?
MJ: Absolutely not. I'm constantly anxious about the direction a painting is taking. One thing people don't always realize is that artists have to make decisions all the time.
You might spend twenty or thirty hours going down one path only to realize you don't like where it's headed. Then you have to decide whether to completely start over or keep pushing forward.
I've had moments where I was working on a three foot by four foot painting, already gone through several tubes of paint, spent multiple weekends on it, and realized I needed to restart the entire thing.
The biggest lesson is learning to trust the ugly phase.
I never quit during the ugly phase. I keep refining the work until I've pushed it as far as my current skill level allows. Only then do I decide whether something truly needs to be reworked.
PS: That's reassuring because sometimes I have something so clear in my head, and then I create it and think, This doesn't look anything like I imagined.
The first two or three years, especially because I was still learning how to draw, almost nothing I imagined looked the way I wanted it to.
I had to simplify my ideas so they became possible for me to execute instead of spending countless hours trying to reinvent the wheel.
There are moments when inspiration hits like a freight train and the entire image appears in your mind. But honestly, that's probably only about thirty percent of the time.
The other seventy percent, the finished piece ends up looking completely different from where it started.
You also work as a mechanical engineer. Does engineering influence your artwork?
MJ: Definitely. I love geometry, so straight lines naturally find their way into my work. I think a lot about precise measurements, framing, the rule of thirds, and even things like the Fibonacci spiral because certain compositions naturally feel balanced to the eye.
Engineering is really about problem solving, and art is full of problems that need solving.
Maybe I'm working with an incredibly dark scene. How do I reveal just enough detail without losing the mood? How do I make a still painting feel like a character is actually falling? Those are problems to solve.
My engineering mindset helps me simplify those challenges.
I'll think, What are my inputs? What are my outputs?
Maybe I want to include the color red, reference another painting, pay homage to contemporary music, and incorporate influences from West African griot storytelling traditions. Those are my ingredients.
Then I figure out how to balance them so they all support the story I'm trying to tell instead of competing with one another.
What's your secret to balancing a full time job with your creative life?
MJ: Art and sharing my art have always gone hand in hand. I started posting on social media at the same time I started creating work.
My ideal routine looks something like this. I'll sketch in the morning from around 8:00 to 9:00. Then I work my engineering job from 9:00 to 5:00. During work, I'm usually writing down bullet point ideas, organizing concepts, or making notes about what I want to paint as soon as I get home.
Then I get home and try to fight the magnetism of my bed. Once I sit down with my iPad, it's easy to get back into a creative mindset. I'll paint from around 6:00 until 9:00. After that, I'm usually pretty tired, so I'll edit videos for Instagram or work on content for my website. Now, that's my ideal productive day. It definitely doesn't happen every single day.
The biggest thing I've learned is that you have to play the game of interest. You already spend forty hours every week at your job. Maybe on Tuesday you only make two percent progress. Maybe Wednesday is another two percent. That still counts.
Don't discourage yourself because the progress feels small. If you keep stacking those small wins over the course of a year, you'll eventually have an entire body of work. Weekends became my golden time. I'd spend long weekends at my studio or painting in my mom's garage, just clocking into the work I genuinely wanted to do.
It sounds like you truly love creating. It's so obvious that you love this because if you didn't, you wouldn't spend this much time and energy making these pieces. How long does it usually take you to finish a painting?
MJ: At this point, I'd probably say about a month from start to finish. The actual painting time is usually somewhere around twenty to thirty hours, but I'll often leave a piece alone for a few days or even a couple of weeks before coming back to it.
Some paintings come together in just two or three days because the idea arrives so clearly. Others have taken me a full year. I had one painting that was nine feet tall, and that alone took forever.
PS: Something we don't talk about enough is how much time goes into developing the idea before a brush ever touches the canvas. As artists, I think we should factor that creative thinking into how we value our work.
People sometimes assume artists are just doing what they want all day, but art is decision making. Think about a chess grandmaster. They can burn thousands of calories during a match simply because they're making constant decisions.
Painting is similar. Every brushstroke, every color choice, every composition is another decision. Those tiny decisions might lead to a painting that changes your career or eventually sells for thousands of dollars. The mental effort is very real, even if people don't always recognize it.
You mentioned that art is really about making decisions. How do you approach those decisions?
MJ: I would say I benefit from trusting my instincts. About seventy percent of the time, I go with my first decision.
I'll keep working with that decision unless I reach a point where I genuinely think, I completely hate this. Sometimes I have to be impulsive because the faster I work toward something I don't want, the faster I can discover what I do want.
That's why I love sketching digitally first. On the iPad, you can experiment, undo things, and move quickly before committing to the canvas.
One thing I also remind myself is that artists aren't limited to making only a hundred paintings in their lifetime. We get to keep creating.
I've made plenty of bad decisions in paintings that no one will ever see, but those pieces taught me why those decisions didn't work. Every one of those lessons helped me make better decisions in the paintings I create now.
Have you ever made a painting that you didn't love?
MJ: Oh, absolutely. There was one painting that was part of a series, and when I posted it online, it didn't get the reception I expected. At the time, I had around two hundred followers. Most of my paintings were getting thirty or forty likes, but this one only got around ten. It definitely affected me. I started wondering if it just wasn't a good painting, and I became much more critical of it.
Later on, though, I started bringing that same painting to in person events, and people loved it. That experience taught me an important lesson. Social media is great, and I'm incredibly grateful for everything it's brought me. It's part of the reason I'm able to have opportunities like this interview. But it can't be the ultimate measure of your happiness or the value of your work.
There are definitely paintings I've made that I personally don't think turned out as well as I hoped. At that point, though, it's up to the people experiencing the work. Sometimes an idea is valuable simply because it becomes the prototype for your best painting later on.
PS: It's hard because social media doesn't always give you a true measurement. You don't even know who's actually seeing your work. It's very different from watching someone experience it in person.
Exactly. There were times when I thought, I did everything right. I thought this was a great painting.
But I realized the most important person who should like the painting is me. That's what kept me making work and sharing it. If I think it's a cool idea, then that's enough reason to create it.
I know your grandmother was a painter. Were you making art when you were young?
MJ: I took the art classes everyone takes from kindergarten through high school, but my high school focused primarily on engineering through Project Lead The Way. Even then, design was still a huge part of engineering. I learned isometric sketching, orthographic drawing, and perspective.
I also doodled constantly in the margins of my notebooks. I wasn't making art thinking, I'm going to hang this on a wall one day. I just enjoyed drawing.
My grandmother was the first person I ever saw painting. I remember watching her work with oil paint when I was five or six years old. I never thought I'd pick up a paintbrush myself. I just thought it looked beautiful. I loved the smooth texture of the paint.
Then, years later in 2020, when I wanted to preserve memories from home, painting suddenly felt like the right medium.
Looking back, I'm incredibly grateful I picked it up. The world can be a very noisy place, and painting gives me something that keeps my mind quiet.
Let's talk about the Wall Series. How did that idea grow beyond decorating your own apartment?
MJ: When I first started my Instagram page, I wondered if anyone would actually follow an account that was just posting artwork.
So I wanted to create a narrative. I started with a completely blank wall and slowly filled it piece by piece. If someone followed me from the very beginning, they could literally watch the wall grow over time and see my artistic journey unfold.
I've always loved the idea of an art wall.
There's something powerful about standing in front of a collection of your own work. Even now, sitting here surrounded by these paintings, I feel empowered by everything I've created. That feeling became the inspiration behind the entire series.
This started as a hobby. Has that changed?
MJ: Most definitely. Everything really started changing once I began participating in exhibitions and receiving opportunities. I've hosted a sip and paint event in Barcelona. I've had my artwork displayed on stage in front of sold out crowds. I've painted a mural back in the same community where I grew up, in a place I used to walk past every day on my way to high school.
Experiences like those completely changed the way I looked at art. There never seemed to be such a thing as I can't. I know I love making paintings, and I know I can keep doing this for the rest of my life. Hopefully I've got a long life ahead of me, and I want to see just how far this imagination can take me.
I remember thinking it would be amazing if fifty people came to my first solo exhibition. Instead, around two hundred people showed up. The following year, I had month long solo exhibitions.
I definitely became a victim of my own success in that sense, but every opportunity keeps inspiring me to push the boundaries a little further.
What do the next few years look like for you?
MJ: I'd love to become a local legend. Washington, D.C. is my home, and I love it deeply. I'd love to create five, ten, maybe even twenty murals throughout the city. I also want to organize more community driven events, not just solo exhibitions, but group shows as well.
More than anything, I want to help cultivate a stronger fine art culture in D.C., similar to what people think about when they imagine cities like New York or Miami. I want art to feel inviting.
Imagine a young kid stumbling into a gallery for the first time and seeing incredible artwork up close. That's how appreciation begins.
One of my favorite things about art events is that they're natural gathering places. You can have people of every age and background standing in the same room, talking about one painting.
Art becomes the icebreaker. It doesn't have to be loud like a club. It doesn't have to cost a hundred dollars for dinner.
You're simply surrounded by people sharing ideas and conversations. I think that's one of the most powerful ways art can bring communities together.
Finally, what's a message you'd like to leave for artists who are just getting started?
MJ: One thing I'd tell every emerging artist is this.
There is a blessing in being unknown. There is a blessing in having no expectations. When nobody expects anything from you, you're free to experiment. You're not worried about people saying you've fallen off or that you're disappointing them. You're simply learning. Use that time to experiment as much as you possibly can.
When success eventually comes, you'll be far more prepared than if everything happened overnight.
I actually hope people don't become successful too quickly. I think it's much better to slowly climb the hill than to be dropped at the top. If success comes too fast, you might never understand what actually got you there. Maybe it was the algorithm. Maybe a famous person happened to see your work.
Instead, build a strong foundation. Develop your practice. Build your website. Figure out how you're going to ship your artwork. Create systems for yourself.
At the end of the day, art is still a project. If you want to make a lot of work, you'll need timelines, organization, and a workflow that supports your creativity. The sooner you treat your passion with that level of intention, the more successful you'll be in the long run.
Key Takeaways
Your first project doesn't have to be your masterpiece.
Too often, creatives place enormous pressure on their first idea, expecting it to define their future. Instead, treat every project as an opportunity to learn. One piece naturally leads to another, and before you realize it, you've built a body of work.
The goal isn't to create your best work today. The goal is to create something that makes you excited to create again tomorrow.
Great art is built through thousands of small decisions.
One of the most insightful moments in this conversation was hearing the artist compare painting to chess.
Every composition, every brushstroke, every color choice, and every adjustment is another decision. Most people only see the finished painting, but they don't see the hundreds or even thousands of creative choices that made it possible.
Creativity isn't random inspiration. It's thoughtful problem solving.
That perspective also changes how we value creative work. You're not simply paying for hours spent painting. You're paying for years of learning how to make better decisions.
Trust the ugly phase.
Every creative project has a point where it feels like it's falling apart.
The artist admitted to restarting large paintings after weeks of work, but he also emphasized something every artist needs to hear: Don't quit during the ugly phase.
The middle of a project often looks nothing like the vision in your head. That's completely normal. Growth usually happens after the moment you're most tempted to give up.
Small progress is still progress.
Balancing a full time career with creative work isn't easy. Instead of waiting for the perfect weekend or endless free time, the artist learned to value incremental progress.
Some days it's only a sketch. Some days it's organizing ideas. Some days it's editing content instead of painting.
Those small actions accumulate into something much bigger over time. Consistency almost always beats intensity.
Social media isn't the final judge of your work.
One painting received far less engagement online than expected.
Initially, that felt discouraging. Then people began seeing the same piece in person, and the response was overwhelmingly positive.
It became a reminder that algorithms don't determine artistic value. Sometimes your audience simply hasn't found the work yet. The person whose opinion matters most is the artist standing in front of the canvas.
If you still believe in the idea, it's worth creating.
There is freedom in being unknown.
One of the most refreshing ideas from this conversation was the belief that anonymity can actually be an advantage.
Without expectations, you're free to experiment. You're free to fail. You're free to discover your own voice without worrying about maintaining someone else's perception of you. Many artists spend years wishing they had more attention, but those early years are often where the most meaningful growth happens. The freedom to experiment today becomes the confidence you'll rely on tomorrow.
Build your creative practice before success arrives.
The artist encourages emerging creatives not to chase overnight success. Instead, build the systems that allow success to last. Learn how to finish projects. Develop a workflow. Create a portfolio. Build a website. Understand how you'll present and sell your work. Success is much easier to sustain when your foundation is already in place.
As he explains, art is still a project, and projects require organization, discipline, and intention.
Community is part of the artwork.
Perhaps the biggest dream shared in this interview wasn't about selling paintings. It was about building community. Creating murals throughout Washington, D.C. Hosting exhibitions that bring strangers together. Creating spaces where conversations begin because someone stopped in front of a painting. Art has always been about more than what's hanging on the wall. It creates connection. It creates dialogue. It reminds people that they aren't experiencing the world alone.
📢 Check Out the Full Interview
Watch the full interview with Miles Johnson below or youtube @ainahcommunity
Explore Mile's work: mjonthewall.com | IG: mj.onthe.wall
