I Fell In Love This Summer
My Latest Obsession
I’d love for you to meet my latest obsession.
Art.
Drawing.
Portraits.
It’s not quite a new love. It’s really more of an old flame I’ve reconnected with.
An Old Flame
I fell in love again this summer. Almost every night I retreated back into my Studio and uncovered a love buried deep inside of me.
Art!
Growing up stuttering, you never imagine you’d be able to make a living using words—especially spoken ones. So you learn to use pictures to paint thousands of them. I grew up drawing more than writing or speaking, because pictures helped me communicate publicly in ways words couldn’t. My writing was never the best, and my speech was hard for people to stomach, by my pictures…my pictures caught people’s attention. So as a kid, I followed the compliments and leaned in. (It’s crazy how carving out a career as a preacher, author, and speaker, almost no one—even my best friends—know this side of me.)
I forgot about this side of me.
Remembering Me
I stopped drawing at 14 years old when my late brother, Sam, and I started bonding over basketball. Throughout life, I tend to spark these obsessions and can’t focus on anything else. Sam was an instigator of the best sorts. Turning my little sparks into forest fires. At 14, I traded in my pencil for a Wilson Evolution and never really looked back.
I forgot how much I loved it.
Buying a new pack of pencils two months ago cured my amnesia.
Over the last quarter of a century (26+ years) I can count the amount of times I’ve drawn anything. My most recent, before these pictures, was a piece of a cartoon in an iPad app in 2016.
I grew up drawing cartoons mainly. I’ve NEVER drawn faces. 2 months ago I decided to try my hand at it.
A few pencils, YouTube tutorials, books and articles about the Loomis Method, and lots of childhood curiosity later and here are some of the ones I like looking at the most.
To date, I’ve drawn 19 faces in my entire life.
These are some of my favorites.
Love in the Lost & Found
Drawing has reminded me that loves lost can be recaptured. Dig through your pasts lost & found and you’ll find something special. I started taking pictures with my Fujifilm x100v a few years ago. I remember meeting my homie Sebastian in Israel a few years back, and hearing how his love for photography grew when his mom died. He didn’t have many pictures of her and never wanted to make the same mistake with future relationships.
I don’t have many pictures with Sam. I take photographs, like Sebastian, to protect myself from the same future regrets he fears. What I love about pictures is that in some way they allow me the opportunity to rewrite the past.
Maybe I’ll get nice enough with the Portraits to rewrite the narrative about Sam and I not having many pictures together. Maybe my rememory1 will be strengthened not by words of my writing, but pictures of my making.
I fell in love with art this summer. I’m glad you get to see my heart on the page instead of just imagining it.
Maybe one day, I’ll be known for my pictures again as much as my words.
What childhood loves do you need to recapture?
A term coined by Toni Morrison, rememory is the act of taking control over a past narrative to reclaim present and ongoing trauma. It’s an act of narrative love that helps people hold their grief, not by giving answers for it, but by reminding them that the past story is not a complete one. Each scene is a part of an ongoing story still being written; and as that new story is retold, we then have the ability to revisit the past and use our rememory to help shape it. Drawing is a way I hope to use my rememory to help shape how I continue to process my brother’s death.
Thank you for these words and reminders- and also a hope that as we lay down and pick up lost loves, the seasons of life are there to meet us every time. Glad to hear your drawing is growing with you this season!
WOW this really woke me up! I want to fall BACK in love with writing. I loved writing it was a release for me and like you it was my speech because I was afraid to speak. I learned early in life how much power my words held so it silenced me to writing. Thank you for sharing and I pray you keep writing.