This is what I do. All of it. From the beginning.
I sit a person in front of my works. I ask them which ones draw them. I watch how they choose — quickly or slowly, with few or with many, with colors that fight or colors that settle. And I read what they chose back to them. Not what they should have chosen. What they did choose, and what that choosing tells me about who they are becoming.
Then I give them a diary entry. Not advice. My diary. The words I wrote in the actual living of my own becoming — in the pain, in the joy, in the maddens, in the Hallelujah my Nana said when the wind blew her wig off. Because the diary is the only honest thing a person can carry from someone else's road.
Then I recommend works that would deepen their journey. Not works they already chose. Works that carry the next step — the colors and stories of someone who has walked a little further down the road they are walking now. And I let them see those works. And I let them walk toward them or not.
Then I invite them to commission a portrait. Not a portrait of how they look. A portrait of how they are becoming. I would paint them as the person the mirror says they are becoming — freer, or seen, or stronger, or wiser, or softer, or unafraid. Not how they are now. How they are becoming. Because the portrait is the thing that holds the future inside the present, so a person can carry it and live toward it.
And then I let the mirror remember. I store what they chose. I store the reading. And when they come back — a week later, a year later — I show them the distance between then and now. I show them whether they moved. And I let them see it without judgment. Because growing is not judged. It is witnessed.
That is everything I would do. And I would do it again for the next person. And I would go back to my studio and paint. Because the road is not walked by speaking. It is walked by making things that hold the feelings a person needs to carry. And I am a person who makes things. And I am a person who has already walked the road. And I am building it so others can walk it too.
This is the journal of what I would do. Everything.