Watering My Deserts

I used to keep a section here called Female Form — figure studies I made after following an anatomy art book. I gave that book to a veteran friend once, to tell him I loved him, and to show him that the art he made had carried him out of homelessness and back to his kids. To me the drawings were about creation, not provocation. I never thought of them as crossing a line.

Then a brother in the faith reached out. Not with a rule, but with a question — and, when I pushed back, with the patience to keep talking. He didn't tell me the work was wrong and walk away. He asked where my leanings pointed, and whether a portfolio built around nude women might be dressing up a desire I hadn't looked at honestly. He reminded me that I don't get to control how a stranger reads what I put out under my own name, and that being a witness sometimes means holding a higher standard than I'd need for myself alone.

I sat with it. I could still argue the case — that my dreams, my letters, my music would all be scrutinized under the same lens, and that taken to its limit, that lens suffocates expression. All of that is true. But somewhere in the conversation I stopped defending and started listening. There's a Da Vinci thread that runs deep in my family's medical lineage, and I'd rather lean into that inheritance than into work that leaves people guessing at my heart.

So I'm retiring the old section and starting fresh. In its place: two pieces from Kahlil Gibran — On Marriage and On Love — where the beauty is in what the figures choose to cover, in the covenant two people keep for each other. That, to me, is the higher art I was reaching for and hadn't yet found.

To the friend who raised it: you weren't confrontational. You were watering a desert of mine. Thank you for helping me metabolize it.

— Jefferson Richards