click here to go to the Phila Obit Project site
Last spring my husband Joel helped to organize a “Gun Violence Awareness Day” with his seminary and our church. One of his roles was to get some folks from our neighborhood involved, though as I suspected, there wasn’t as much interest as the organizers of the event, Heeding God’s Call to End Gun Violence, had hoped, as folks in our neighborhood are all-too-aware of gun violence.
Awareness is hardly the issue here, where there are memorials to three young men shot and killed in just the past year within a block of my house. Every Sunday during prayers of the people, Joel stands and reads the names of people murdered in the past year in our neighborhood. He gets the information from the Philadelphia Obituary Project, a website honring lives taken by homicide. Right now there are fifteen people who were murdered in my neighborhood of Germantown in the past 12 months, most shot to death with guns.
This memorial is around the corner from my house. We go by here every day when we walk the dogs.
It’s been there for months and months, and the candles are always burning.
Awareness is hardly the problem, and yet it is difficult to know what to do when politicians beholden to the NRA refuse to act on gun control and headlines about mass slaughter no longer shock the rest of us.
So we do what we can.
The event Joel helped organize included an exhibition commissioned and curated by the Souls Shot Portrait Project, which pairs artists with the families of people killed through gun violence so the artist can paint a portrait of the family’s loved one.
I have no idea what I was thinking when I applied last spring to be an artist in this project.
I only taught myself to draw, with the help of a $20 course on Udemy, a year ago.
I learned to paint in theory by obsessively binge-watching Mark Carder’s incredibly generous teaching videos at Draw Mix Paint, but I’ve only actually painted a couple of still lifes, none of which I ever finished.
But for some reason I still don’t understand, I had complete confidence that I could paint a portrait for this project.
An overview of a project matching fine artists with families and friends of victims of gun violence and creating portraits to celebrate the lives lived before being tragically ended or altered by the scourge of gun violence.
I was paired with James’ mother, who lives in the Juniata section of Philadelphia. Near the zoo, where my kids and I practically lived on winter afternoons when they were little (no one goes to the zoo on winter afternoons, so we often had the place all to ourselves.
While I was knitting and watching my kids play in the Tree House at the zoo, James’ mom was raising her three kids just a few blocks away. James and his two sisters. They were a bit older than my kids, so probably in high school then.
James would have been playing basketball with his friends, getting ready to go to college. Always laughing, joking around, playing good-humored tricks on everyone.
The story of James’ murder is his mother’s to tell, not mine, but suffice to say, it is an unimaginable tragedy.
James died before we all had excellent cameras in our back pockets 24/7, and she does not have many photos of him. One of the few is a grainy photo in reds and golds, where James’ head is tipped to one side in a way that brought to mind religious icons. When I mentioned it to his mom, she agreed. That photo was the inspiration for my portrait, titled “Jester, Martyr, Saint.”
I used another photo from James’ senior yearbook to work at getting a likeness of him.
It took a very long time.
This is not a great photo. That ray of light is the sun, not the painting (tho I kind of like it!). But still! Right?
I took so many wrong turns. I made so many mistakes. This is hardly a brilliant painting.
But it is my first painting, like really, ever. And I’m proud of it.
And as I was painting, an amazing thing happened: James’s face began to emerge, it was as though he was there in the studio with me, and I felt like I was getting to know him. He went from being very abstract to a companion and co-creator.
Along with his mother, and the Soul’s Shot Project, we made this.
James: Jester, Martyr, Saint
30” x 40” oil on canvas
But not just this.
Nothing will ever mend James’ mother’s broken heart. Her loss is beyond my comprehension; it is my very greatest fear in the whole world.
But I’ve had my loss, my heartbreak, my crucibles. I’m sure you have too. And working on this painting, co-creating it with James and his mom, was transformative in ways I’m still working out.
While I was painting this, as James really began to emerge, and it felt as though he and his mom and I were all together in my studio, I found myself singing that old Sweet Honey in the Rock song “We Who Believe in Freedom”—do you know the one?
We who believe in freedom cannot rest.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
Until the killing of black men, black mother’s sons … is as important as the killing of white men, white mother’s sons.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest …
And then I had this idea.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could be my co-creator too?
Because what else can we do?
Maybe you already have something you do that helps calm your despair about gun violence. If so, you should click the button below anyway, so you can tell us about it in the original blog post comments.
If you are still trying to figure out what you can do, something that can be one next step in our never-ending honor and responsibility to co-create the world—a good and just and safe world—I have an idea.
(This is just going to take you back to the original blog post, promise!)