One of my favorite postage stamps is a bouquet of flowers painted by William H. Johnson. (Yes, I’m a nerd that has favorite stamps!) So when I was in Washington, DC, and saw that it was featured in the National Portrait Gallery, I had to track it down.
I was very surprised to see the flowers in the context of Johnson’s other work — mostly self-portraits or other colorful paintings of Black life. The flowers didn’t seem like his work at all, making it fascinating that it was the one painting chosen to honor him on the stamp.
It reminded me that we all have different dimensions of our lives — some that are more prominent and others that don’t seem to fit with the others but do. We never know the whole of a person, only a fraction of them based on the context in which we see them.
Remember William Johnson’s work when interacting with others. You may see flowers and in addition to that lies a whole range of other paintings, or you may only see brightly-colored people and never know that he also painted flowers. We are all surprising and multi-dimensional.
