Lanecia Rouse Tinsley

If you live long enough you’ll lose something you really love. Often many things. Family. Money. Jobs. Health. Love. It comes with the all the stuff you find. Friends, money, jobs, health, love. Gain and loss. Suffering and surviving. Thriving. It’s all part of being human.

Sometimes the things we lose take us down, devastate us for years, and sometimes the things we lose change us, transform us into something new, bigger, more beautiful.

Lanecia Rouse Tinsley suffered a great loss but, amazingly, turned into a most incredible new life.

Lanecia was born the daughter of a pastor. Growing up, the church fed her and gave her a sense of belonging. As a young adult, she chose to study divinity and become a pastor herself. But then, at 36 years-old. Lanecia found out she was pregnant. And, as many expecting moms do, she started to examine her life in preparation for parenthood. She began questioning things in the church she hadn’t questioned before, and she started to re-envision who she was and what was possible.

And then her baby died.

AJ was just 2 hours and 45 minutes old. She was too small, born premature, her body not strong enough to sustain the life within her.

Lanecia made a decision. She was going to write a new story. A story no longer about simply surviving, doing what made sense, what was logical. But a story about passion and dreams and art.

And that is when Lanecia began the journey into life as a full-time artist.

Lanecia’s art is brave and true. She is a woman of integrity who makes what she sees and creates what she longs to live into.

Here Lanecia shares her story as honestly as she does her art, her struggles with the church, her loss around her daughter, and her new life as a full-time artist who is finally free.

“I need to make art that is honest and true to what I’m feeling, what I’m thinking at the time, what story needs to get out of me and what honors the gifts and the skills that I have.”