In All Seasons

Some fragmented thoughts on the life and work of the artist Lanecia Rouse Tinsley, grief and resilience, planting seeds, Michigan produce, and crispy waffles

May 27, 2021

Thursday, May 27
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Hello, friendly reader.

I remember how irritated my parents were when I was in my five-year-old “But why?” phase. To be honest, that phase never ended; I just learned not to say the phrase out loud all the time. It’s why I became a journalist, which is another name for a professional busybody who gets paid to ask, “But why?”

My curiosity about why people do what they do rises when I see that they’re passionate. What motivations sit beneath the surface? How do they make what they make? What drives their creativity?

Sometime last year, I happened upon a work by the Houston-based artist Lanecia Rouse Tinsley called “In All Seasons.” Made from swatches of fabric printed in shades of vibrant blue, it seemed mostly abstract, except for the image of a sunflower in the middle. Its visible stitching reminded me of a quilt. I began saving my pennies, even though it seemed nonsensical to do so: We need a new dishwasher, I could probably use a desk, and we don’t need more art. But maybe we do? Last month, “In All Seasons” arrived at my house. And recently, I called Tinsley to ask her: “But why?”

Photograph of Lanecia Rouse Tinsley's "In All Seasons." Cyanotype on fabric (2019) — “In All Seasons,” by Lanecia Rouse Tinsley (2019). I love this piece so much, and I am so honored that it lives in my home

Art is Tinsley’s second career. “I’d always wanted to pursue the arts—and when I say always, I mean since I was a little kid,” she told me. She loved painting, drawing, experimenting with different media, but she wasn’t confident in her abilities. Anyway, if you’d asked young Lanecia what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have said, “Singer”: “I was going to be like Michael Jackson.”

Life’s brutality has a way of eroding dreams. “With maturity, time, and middle school, I became really insecure in who I was. I shied away from anything that I knew would expose weakness—and eventually, my insecurities even hindered me from nurturing my passion for singing,” Tinsley said. “I had some fears around failure.”

Tinsley, a daughter and granddaughter of ministers, was reared Methodist. After graduating from Duke Divinity School, she became a pastor. But the arts remained a theme even in her church work. While pastoring in Leeds, England, she became known as “the singing reverend,” because of her ever-present guitar and her habit of praying in song. Later, while she ministered in Nashville, art became a bridge, both with youth and with refugees. “Where language failed,” she said, “art seemed to help to connect us.”

Tinsley moved to Houston in 2011, taking a job at St. John’s United Methodist Church, which has a robust ministry with those living on the streets. Sitting in classes and workshops with her flock, she found something healing in making things, especially through collage. “I found something right,” she said, “in exploring how fragments could come together and create something that was beautiful and say something true.”

December 4, 2013, brought a tragically clarifying moment: Tinsley gave birth prematurely to a daughter, A.J., who died. After A.J.’s death, Tinsley took stock of her life and her work. “I don’t regret a day I spent in ministry. However, it did feel like wearing clothes that constantly didn’t fit,” she said. “I needed clothes that let me breathe and live and thrive—and I wanted to honor the mother I had prepared to be.”

She realized how profoundly fear was woven into that uncomfortable but familiar outfit. “I was afraid of wearing something new. I was thinking of all these material things I would lose, because I was constantly afraid,” she said. “When we lost A.J., I realized: I’m still here. This was the worst thing I could possibly lose. It hurt like hell. The pain was always there. But I just wasn’t afraid anymore. I had a desire to honor her life, to honor the life I still had—and I wanted to experience joy again, because for so long, I had just settled for sparks of happiness. I really wanted to live.”

She went to her husband, Cleve. “I know this is going to sound crazy,” she said to him as she shared her dream of changing careers. He replied: “That doesn’t sound crazy at all. Let’s figure out how you can do it.” At age 36, she became an artist.

The reality, of course, wasn’t so tidy. When she quit full-time pastoral work, Tinsley also became a part-time receptionist, to help pay for her new venture. She also had to answer other practical questions, including what medium to work in. All the artists she respected seemed to have a specialty. Through Instagram, she won a session with a coach. When Tinsley said that she felt as if she needed to choose one medium to be successful, the coach replied: “Follow your joy. Follow the things that give you life. Follow your curiosity.”

So she dabbled. “I did not study art, so those first three or four years were almost like an art school. I learned so many different mediums,” Tinsley said. “Now, if I choose not to paint with oils, I can say that it isn’t that I don’t know how to. I can create with the mediums that help me say what I want to say and share what I want to share with the world.” In 2017, Tinsley quit her part-time job and began focusing on her studio work full-time.

Tinsley describes herself as a morning person—and her morning routine is crucial to her studio practice. She always begins with coffee, usually black, usually made with her Chemex, though some days call for a lavender or vanilla latte with oat milk (“when I am feeling really energized and when I know, Yo, there is something in me that needs to get out”). She always opens a window. Then she sits down with her journal and a book of poetry: “Right now, Lucille Clifton is giving me a lot of energy for the work I am doing, helping me ask the questions I need to ask to get the answers that I need.”

Different poets have accompanied her through different seasons. Early on, Mary Oliver showed up often, as did Tinsley’s sister, Ciona Rouse, who is a poet in Nashville. For a year, Tinsley constantly returned to Alice Walker’s book Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. Kahlil Gibran’s “On Joy and Sorrow” has been a regular touchstone. Lately, she’s also been spending time with Rose, by Li-Young Li.

When she created “In All Seasons,” she was regularly in conversation with “Separation,” a short poem by W.S. Merwin, who was also a preacher’s kid:

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

“Everything I do is stitched with the memory of the loved one,” Tinsley told me. “That’s why I wanted to do hand-stitching. I wanted it all to be handmade, collaging these broken fabric fragments together, working with the elements. It’s a process of control—and release of control.”

“In All Seasons” belongs to a 2019 series that delved into grief, sorrow, and living through loss. Every piece in the series used cyanotype, a photographic printing process that requires treating the surface, whether fabric or paper, with chemicals, which must be done in darkness. Bringing the material into the light triggers a reaction that helps create an image. Washing it prompts the next stage of processing, which brings out the blue, and then you dry it. “I love that process,” Tinsley explained. “It requires darkness, light, water, and air in order to become.”

Cyanotype also allowed Tinsley to integrate photography. Though she doesn’t often share her photographs publicly, she captures images throughout every day. Her iPhone currently has 90,000 photos on it. “It’s constantly crashing,” she said. But the pictures document important moments—“moments that brought me to stillness, moments that capture my imagination.”

As we talked, Tinsley guided me across the panels of the work. Of course I had seen the central image of the sunflower; she had chosen it as “my love note for A.J.,” so that every time she spotted one anywhere, she would remember her daughter. But other images in the work had escaped my attention. One panel, which looked to me like abstract shapes, was actually a photograph she took a couple of years before, of a textured, weathered wall in the 6th arrondissement in Paris. Another features a tiny print of a photograph of birds sitting on a wire. Still another was an image of a flower and barbed wire; up close, I’d thought it was just a stem.

Detail from “In All Seasons.” What looked to me like the stems of a plant at first glance are actually impressions of barbed wire.

Whether I or anyone else who encounters her work perceives all of these images is in some sense beside the point. “Of course I am seeking to articulate and share something. In my work, I explore what it means to be human. When I’m doing that, no matter the specific topic, I have to journey through it all—the grief, the sorrow, the joy,” Tinsley said. “But once I release the work, it is something beyond me. That’s part of the wonder of the power of art. We all have lenses we see things through.”

For me, “In All Seasons” tells a story of piecing together wholeness out of fragments—and isn’t that the story of our lives? The sunflower image summons my attempts to grow things, and the more abstract elements invite me just to be, even when I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. The varied blues, bright as well as melancholy, remind me of the oceans—waters across which my ancestors traveled, across which I’ve traveled, across which I still hope to travel.

In her new work—her first solo exhibition will open at the Four Chapter Gallery in Kansas City, Mo., in September—Tinsley is contemplating resilience. “I don’t know how to make sense of it at all, but that’s what I’m trying to work out: How does this resiliency thing work?” she told me. As she composes collages from imagery produced in the 1940s and 1950s, she often thinks of her grandparents: “There have been moments of remembering people who also bore witness to a strength that feels otherworldly, who were able to keep pushing and choosing life in the midst of some really harsh realities.”

Resilience sounds grand, but maybe it’s just pieced together from small moments, much like Tinsley’s work and process. It’s the choice to make a latte that energizes you. It’s the decision to look up at the sun and be attentive to its warm embrace. It’s the awareness of one’s surroundings, expressed in the intentionality of seeing, smelling, feeling. “In the midst of it all, it is the small things that keep me going,” she said. “Small moments of joy. Of beauty. Of comfort. Of companionship. Of love.”

Even when Tinsley discusses something emotional, her voice is even and soothing, though the pacing sometimes slows as she seeks the right word. Her thoughtfulness is as present in conversation as it is in her work—and it reminds me of the best pastoring I’ve encountered. So I dared a question I knew she might not welcome, given her departure from full-time ministry: “Why don’t you see your art as ministry?”

The question seemed to stop her. “For me, ministry as I understood it for so long, and still do in a sense, is this work that is intentional in practice and form, and connected to a sense of calling by God to draw people into something or care for something,” she said. I didn’t say it right away, but it struck me that her description could apply to her art. Finally, after meandering around the topic, she said: “I don’t see myself as a minister anymore! I don’t want the responsibilities that are attached to that!”

Fair enough. Still, I wonder whether it was only her medium that changed. The heart remains. And Tinsley’s work, in its examination of grief and its pursuit of joy and its steady study of resilience, is both pastoral and prophetic. She meets us where we are, unflinching in her willingness to look sorrow in the eye. Yet she’s equally resolute in offering a vision of the beauty that could be—if only we pay attention and if only we continue to choose life.

You can follow Lanecia Rouse Tinsley on Instagram at @larartstudio. You can also see more of her work on her website, laneciarousetinsley.com.

What I’m Growing: We had some unseasonable heat over the weekend, so my backyard bok choy is starting to bolt. But in the community garden, everything feels seasonably hopeful: The beans are in the ground. I planted sunflowers, cosmos, zinnias, and ammi yesterday. Looks like some rain is coming in tonight. You can be certain that Fozzie and I will be there as often as we can, looking obsessively for the first signs of germination.

What I’m Cooking: Our friends Werner and April came to visit from New York over the weekend too. Our first houseguests of 2021! It was so good to have friends stay with us—and I might be turning into a Michigan stan. Every meal I cooked featured vegetables and meat from small Michigan farms, our fridge was full of Michigan beer, and one might fairly wonder whether I have secretly taken a job doing PR for Michigan’s food and agriculture industries. On Sunday morning, for instance, I made waffles with blueberries Tristan and I picked and froze last summer, and we served them with our favorite Michigan bourbon-barrel-aged maple syrup as well as maple sausage we got at a butcher up in Traverse City. Anyway, I thought I’d share the waffle recipe (below). We like our waffles very golden and very crispy—the secret is cornstarch. I’ve been making this recipe for years now, and it halves easily, as long as you don’t get too tripped up doing fractions. Or you can just save the waffles and toast them back to crispness for breakfast another day.

Enough for this week. Thanks for your patience, your grace, and your encouragement. If you feel like sharing, I’d love to know what’s giving you hope and delight right now as well as whether there’s anything I can be holding in prayer for you.

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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