FINDING HER ‘CRAZY THING’
Among the paintings and collages pinned to the walls of Lanecia Rouse Tinsley’s art studio in the Warehouse District, one item on display stands apart. Tucked between the doorway and a light switch hangs a print of a poem written by her sister.
“Do the crazy thing,” the poem begins. “The hard to imagine but somehow you did thing.”
She looks at it all the time. Then she gets back to work, doing her crazy thing.
Raised as a pastor’s kid, Tinsley earned her masters of divinity from Duke University in 2003 and spent much of her adult life as a preacher herself. But she always longed to be an artist.
During a year spent preaching in England, she earned the nickname “The Singing Pastor,” for constantly carrying her guitar to church. Back in Houston, she facilitated church-based art projects. Often, she’d dream of trading in her church role to become a full-time artist. But she’d stop short.
What a crazy thing to do, she’d tell herself. Crazy and scary. Then, in 2013, she and her husband, Cleve, lost their baby girl, A.J.
“In that loss, and going through that grief, and just really kind of confronting it, sitting with it, reimagining what it looks like to live in that new normal, I allowed myself to just kind of name the dreams that I had,” she says now. “Which of these are really ridiculous for a time like this, and what could really be a reality for me. And so the fear of not doing it became greater than the fear of doing it.”
She’d think about her sister’s poem. Roll it around in her mind.
“Like, what is my crazy thing,” she’d ask herself.
“That moment kind of paused life for me, and made me think about really what does it mean to thrive and live through this pain,” she continues. “How can you do that? And for me, it was to create. So I did it.”
In September 2014, nine months after her daughter was born and passed two hours and 45 minutes later, she resigned from her church role.
“After losing a child, all the things I was afraid of losing, in comparison was just, nothing,” she says. “I had courage and this resilience that I never knew I had. And I was like, I can do this. And if I lose along the way — if I lose my car, you know, at the end of the day that was the real fear, all these material things. But you can get those back, or you can do without them.”
A year before that would have sounded crazy. But now crazy sounded perfect.
“So I just jumped,” she says.