What do you think a voice would look like (if it could look like anything)? I think some voices might be dark red on canvas. With big, thick brush strokes. I don’t really like those voices. Other voices might be barely visible, off-white on white. You’d need to be inches from the canvas to even notice the nuances. Young voices would be rich with all the colors in the spectrum, painted with round, billowing edges. And, if older voices were lucky, they’d look a lot like younger voices. At least on canvas.

This is what I’d like my voice to look like:

Dear voice,

At first I didn’t know how to begin painting you. So I just closed my eyes. I started with all the other voices around me, some gray, some really rich and beautiful and interesting. And then I began on you. I’d like for you to be the product of a lot of different experiences, colorful experiences. And I’d like for you to take on a unique and intricate shape, but a shape that is open and aimed at the sky. And I’d like for pretty pink flowers to be your words whenever possible. Thanks for everything so far. Go get ‘em!

Love,

Leora

Against all odds I wanted to give the world an undeniable gift of some kind. Eventually, as you might have guessed, I had the audacity to begin thinking of myself as an artist. And tangled up in this longing to discover my true place of birth was a ragged prayer I still sometimes toss at the sky. God, I pray, by some miracle, make my life a work of art. What does it look like and feel like to live artfully? I think to myself that I could begin the work of answering this question in ways that might actually be of use to someone if I weren’t drunk on the sky. I have a problem with these clouds that loom and sleigh across the the basking blue floor of heaven: I get lost in that white-as-bone, icy fluff. It sometimes feels as if the sky, maybe more than anything else, will ultimately break my heart.

-Linford Detweiler (Over the Rhine)

Like Linford, I’ve worked to develop the audacity needed to call myself an artist. But, I’m still not able to put into words what living artfully means. I know that, for me, it has a lot to do with swallowing whole those unexpected encounters with beauty with the hunger of a five-year-old. The desire to binge on sweets fully intact.

Oh, and I paint. You can check out my website, plus I’ll be featuring a couple favorites here on my blog. This one, yellow/red, is part of my new “oils series” (there’s a story behind this painting, but for another time):

Orphans don’t really have a lot of mementos.

(The types of things that most of us take for granted from childhood: yellowed photos, weathered stuffed animals with the occasional Kool-Aid stain, favorite storybooks, shaky old videos from our first birthday parties. Although I usually turn red when my parents bring out the bulging albums from my kid-hood, I’m so thankful that I don’t just have to rely on fleeting memories and can instead look at tangible evidence that my haircuts really were that bad.)

The Memory Project, a non-profit founded in 2004 by Ben Shumaker, aims to change this. He was inspired after talking to man in a Gautemalan orphanage:

Having grown up in an orphanage, this young man did not have any pictures from his earliest years or any parents to share memories of his youth. Consequently, he felt that much of his childhood had been forgotten, and he shared this feeling with a group of university students working at the orphanage.

Simple in its scope, The Memory Project solicits the help of advanced artists capable of creating “memory portraits” of orphans. Once a partnering artist receives the orphan’s photo, she is required to create a lifelike portrait of that child which will be sent back to the partnering orphanage as a gift. Below are some beautiful examples:

The Memory Project has also expanded to include Books of Hope. An opportunity for young artists/writers at any level to create uplifting and personalized storybooks for impoverished children. Currently, books are being accepted for children in India who have been rescued from slavery and Uganda for children who have experienced brutal civil war.

A simple way to make a creative difference in a child’s life.