Residing with a Painting
The sun was blaring, the metal chairs were searing my skin, and I was handed a fragment of a painting. Truth be told, this was the last thing I wanted. I was itching for decent air conditioning. Nonetheless, I was stuck with a seemingly random portion of a painting whose name I didn’t know and an artist who remained anonymous. The exercise itself I found to be deceptively simple. I had to look closely at the fragment, share observations, and pondered over what bigger picture this could possibly belong to. Only after the conversation ended were each of us shown the complete painting. Each of our fragments found its place within something much larger than we had imagined. With this, I assumed the lesson was over, and I’d trudge my way home, feet heavy, eyes heavier still, and forget. However, the painting followed me home. After the lesson I was offered a larger version of it to take with me, and I happily dragged it on my journey.
And since then, it has rested against the wall in my room, surrounded by cool, grey walls. and every time I pass by it, I notice something I somehow missed before. I’m a firm believer that this is what good art does. It doesn’t shut up. The painting itself is called Deep Rooted. At its center stands a pregnant woman whose body is assembled from newspaper clippings, maps, headlines, and photographs. She is not simply surrounded by history; she is composed of it. The child she carries develops within those stories, inheriting a world that was already being written long before either of them arrived. For the first time looking at this picture, I was satisfied with this observation. Then, I noticed something else. The woman is entirely in black and white, while the world around her is full of color. At first I wondered whether the artist was distinguishing the past from the present, as history often reaches us in grayscale. We inherit black-and-white photographs, newspaper archives, and textbooks that unintentionally make the people before us feel distant. We often forget that they lived in color. They walked beneath blue skies, stood among green trees, and watched golden sunsets just as we do. History may not be as far away as we would have it appear.
Another detail quickly emerged. The woman has an outline, and the tree does not. Its branches disappear into the sky. Its roots extend beneath the earth beyond the frame. The grass melts into the landscape. Nothing in nature seems satisfied with staying neatly inside the lines. Only the human figure does. This led me to wonder about naming. Earlier this summer, I found myself returning to a simple observation: whenever we name something, we also draw a boundary around it. Naming itself is a necessary act. We wouldn’t be able to communicate without it. But names also create edges. They tell us where something begins and where it ends. They set limits.
The painting itself actually depends on this act.Every newspaper clipping was first cut from a larger page. Every photograph was separated from its original context. Every map was trimmed until it fit. The collage ultimately exists because someone decided where the edges belonged. And it didn’t take me long to realize that we do the same thing with people. We use labels like student, teacher, leader, immigrant, conservative, progressive, successful, failure, felon. While each of these labels may capture something true, none of them has the ability to capture the whole. And only after living with this painting for several days did I remember that it had been created by an incarcerated artist. That knowledge did not change the painting, but added something significant to me. I returned to the woman’s outline. How often do we freeze people inside the borders of a single story?
We use photographs, headlines, to capture moments and preserve events. We create criminal convictions to record actions. Over time, the moment becomes the identity. The record becomes the person. The headline becomes the whole story. And I find that this painting quietly resists that conclusion. The woman is pregnant, and her child is growing. The tree continues reaching upward and downward. Everything in the painting is still in the process of becoming. This reminds me that living, evolving things cannot always be outlined, categorized, or completely understood. And perhaps they were never meant to. Perhaps wisdom begins when we recognize that every person we meet is larger than the headlines, labels, and categories that surround them. They are larger than their names.
