Proudly in My Skin: A Conversation with Tess

Natalie giving a reading

I have known, from the moment the painting arrived, exactly where it belongs.

There is a wall in my home that has waited for something worthy of it. Something that would make a person stop mid-step, forget what they were walking toward, and simply stand there. Tess's painting is that something. It now lives where it was always meant to: in that particular light, at that particular height, where the first thing any guest sees upon entering is not a decoration, but a declaration.

I wanted to understand how Tess did it. So we set up a time to talk about her process on Zoom.

"Tess, walk me through your process. How does a painting begin for you?", I asked her.

She smiled the way people do when they are about to say something true. "I think in silhouettes first," she told me. "Before I know anything else, I need to feel the shape of a person. Then I move to personality. Then design. Then, finally, color." She paused. "Color comes last, because color is the feeling. You have to know everything else before you can know how something should feel."

What I find extraordinary about Tess is that she does not begin at the canvas. She begins in the life of the person she is painting. Before she ever lifted a brush for my piece, she had read Black Girl, White Skin. She had sat with my story, my contradictions, my survival. She told me she wanted to capture what she found there: bravery, and beauty that had been hard-won.

Tess says she sees womanhood as the goddess archetype on earth.  For her, every woman she paints, she is painting the divine. That is where her process begins. Not with what a woman looks like. But with what she carries.

She dipped into astrology to understand me further, something I found both unexpected and completely right. As a Cancerian, I have always felt the pull of the moon: protective and emotional on one side, fierce and boundary-setting on the other. Tess saw this. She looked at my chart and thought of Artemis: goddess of the moon, huntress, sovereign. Brave enough to stand alone. Tender enough to protect those she loves. "Two sides of womanhood," she told me. "The warrior and the nurturer. I wanted to hold both in one image, because both are true."

That is the duality she was reaching for: mortal and divine, ordinary and mythic, fragile and unbreakable. It is the duality I have lived. To be a Black woman with albinism is to carry contradictions in your skin, to be always negotiating visibility. Tess did not shy away from that. She painted straight into it.

This year's International Albinism Awareness Day carries the motto Proudly in my skin — celebrating all skin tones, and when I look at Tess's painting, I see that motto made visible. Not as a slogan. As a truth. A dear guest, on her first visit after the painting was hung, spent a long time standing before it. She positioned herself at different angles, moved closer, then back, as though she were reading it. "There is so much in here," she said quietly, almost to herself. There is. That is precisely the point.

I asked Tess what the process had been like for her over the months it took to complete. "It was five months," she said. "And I work only with acrylics — from the very first mark to the last. It kept me honest." She told me that working on this piece had helped her become more consistent in her own practice. That in painting me, she had also found herself.

I think about this often. That is what sisterhood in art does: it does not deplete; it replenishes both women. Tess's process is so reflective, so intricate, so rooted in genuine understanding of the human being before her, that the result cannot be anything but authentic. For me personally, it has stunned me into silence. Every time I sit in front of it, I see something new.

Art, when it is made this way, does not simply reflect life. It corrects the record. For those of us whose images have been distorted or erased, representation in art is not a nicety. It is a necessity: a way of insisting, in pigment and permanence, that we were here. That we were seen. That we were, are, and will be.

Editor’s note: stay tuned for the unveiling of the painting in the next and concluding part to this series, in honor of International Albinism Awareness Day next week.