The Writer's Desk
What the Portrait Cannot Hold
On art, psychology, and the humility of seeing another person
I have been spending a great deal of time looking at faces.
Not simply looking at people, but studying the details that make one face different from another. The distance between the eyes. The shape of the nose. The way a mouth rests when nobody is smiling. The lines around the forehead. The places where light settles and where shadows begin.
When I am preparing a portrait for pyrography, these details matter. A small change in the position of an eye can alter the entire expression. A shadow placed too heavily can make someone appear older, angrier, or more tired than they actually are. A line that seems insignificant can be the very thing that makes the person recognizable.
There is something humbling about that kind of work. You can spend hours studying a face and still get something wrong. And even when you get everything right, you have only captured the face. Not the person.
That distinction has been occupying my thoughts lately, because I wonder how often we do the same thing in our relationships, our churches, our classrooms, and even our behavioral health systems. We study what is visible. We identify patterns. We assign meaning. We reach conclusions. And somewhere along the way, we begin confusing what we can observe with what we actually know.
How much of another human being can we truly see?
The photograph is not the person
When someone gives me a photograph to turn into a wood-burned portrait, the photograph becomes my reference. I study it carefully. I look for proportions, contours, light, and expression. I try to understand how the different features relate to one another.
But a photograph is a moment. It tells me what someone looked like when the image was taken. It cannot tell me what happened before the camera appeared. It cannot tell me what that person was thinking. It cannot tell me whether the smile was genuine or something offered because somebody asked for it. It cannot tell me what the person fears, what they regret, what they believe, or what they have survived.
I might produce an accurate likeness without knowing a single meaningful thing about the person represented.
That does not make the portrait worthless. It simply establishes its limits. The portrait can reveal something true without revealing everything.
I think that is an important distinction, particularly for those of us who spend our lives trying to understand people.
Accuracy is not the same as understanding
Psychology has given us valuable ways to study human behavior. We can examine patterns of thought. We can measure symptoms. We can assess functioning. We can study relationships, motivation, personality, learning, development, and the effects of trauma.
These tools matter. Without careful observation and measurement, we risk replacing knowledge with assumptions.
But I have become increasingly interested in what happens when we forget that our measurements are representations of human experience rather than the entirety of it.
A depression score may tell us something important about a person's symptoms. It does not tell us everything about their grief. A trauma assessment may identify experiences and responses that deserve clinical attention. It does not automatically explain what those experiences mean to the person who lived them. A veteran's medical record may describe a diagnosis accurately while saying almost nothing about the questions he asks himself when he is alone. A student may earn a poor grade without the grade explaining what happened in their life that week. A father may appear emotionally distant without that observation revealing whether he is indifferent, overwhelmed, frightened, ashamed, or simply struggling to communicate.
The observations can be correct. The conclusions can still be incomplete.
We can accurately describe what we see and still misunderstand what we are looking at.
Sometimes we decide what a person means too quickly
Human beings are remarkably good at constructing explanations.
Someone becomes quiet, and we decide they are upset. Someone avoids a conversation, and we decide they do not care. Someone speaks confidently, and we assume they are secure. Someone asks too many questions, and we interpret it as resistance. Someone stops attending church, and we decide something about their faith. Someone struggles to trust an institution, and we assume they have a problem with authority.
Sometimes those interpretations are correct. Sometimes they are not.
What interests me is how quickly an interpretation can become a conclusion. Once we believe we understand someone, we may stop asking questions. We no longer approach the person with curiosity because we think we already know the answer.
That can be especially dangerous when we occupy positions of authority. A parent. A pastor. A clinician. A teacher. A leader. Our interpretations carry weight. They influence how we respond to people, what opportunities we offer them, what responsibilities we assign, and sometimes whether we believe their experiences at all.
The danger is not simply that we might be wrong. It is that we might become so confident in our interpretation that the other person loses the opportunity to tell us who they are.
The wood teaches patience
There is a particular quality of pyrography that I appreciate. Once the wood is burned, the mark is difficult to undo.
You can sand. You can carve. You can sometimes soften an area or incorporate the mistake into something else. But the surface has changed.
That makes patience important. A dark line cannot always be made light again.
Sometimes the most important decision is not where to burn. It is where to leave the wood untouched. Those unburned areas create highlights. They preserve the appearance of light. They give darker areas something to work against. If I burn everything, I lose the distinction that gives the portrait its form.
I have been thinking about that beyond the studio. Sometimes understanding another person requires knowing when not to add another interpretation. When not to explain. When not to diagnose. When not to correct. When not to offer the lesson. When not to turn someone's experience into an example of something we already believe.
Sometimes we need to leave enough space for the person to reveal something we could not have supplied ourselves.
That requires patience. And patience can be difficult when we are accustomed to being the person with the answer.
A person is more than the worst thing you know about them
There is another problem with the way we interpret people. We often allow one piece of information to become the organizing principle for everything else.
A person has an addiction. A person has been incarcerated. A person has experienced psychiatric hospitalization. A person committed a serious wrong. A person abandoned a responsibility. A person failed publicly. A person was unfaithful. A person made a decision that caused lasting harm.
Those things may be significant. Some require accountability, boundaries, treatment, or consequences. Understanding the whole person does not mean minimizing what happened. But neither does accountability require pretending that one event contains the entirety of a human life.
This is particularly relevant to my interest in moral injury. Some people carry profound distress because of actions they committed, witnessed, failed to prevent, or experienced as betrayals of deeply held values. The event matters. Responsibility matters. The moral meaning matters.
But there is a difference between acknowledging that something happened and insisting that the event is the only truth left about the person.
I think people can become trapped inside the most painful interpretation of themselves. They stop seeing a life. They see a verdict. And sometimes the people around them reinforce it.
We have to find ways to take wrongdoing seriously without abandoning the possibility that a human being can continue to develop morally. Otherwise, we leave very little room for repentance, accountability, restoration, or change.
Faith asks us to recognize what we cannot see
There is a passage in 1 Samuel that has stayed with me. When Samuel is considering who might become king, God reminds him that human beings look at outward appearance, while the Lord looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7).
I think we sometimes read that passage primarily as a warning against judging people by physical appearance. It certainly includes that. But I believe there is a broader lesson about the limits of human perception.
We do not see as God sees. We see behavior. We hear words. We observe decisions. We interpret expressions. We examine evidence. We construct explanations. And we should do those things carefully. But we do not have complete access to another person's inner life. Even people we love deeply remain, in some respects, beyond our full understanding.
That should produce humility. Not indifference. Not an unwillingness to make necessary judgments. Humility — the recognition that our understanding is always partial and that we should be careful about treating it as complete.
For me, this is one of the places where psychology and Christian theology can have a meaningful conversation. Psychology encourages us to examine evidence, question assumptions, and remain open to better explanations. Christian theology reminds us that human beings possess dignity that does not depend upon our ability to measure, explain, or approve of them.
The doctrine that people are created in the image of God does not mean every human action is good. It means human worth cannot be reduced to a diagnosis, a role, a mistake, a disability, or an accomplishment. There is more to the person than the category.
Our children deserve to be rediscovered
I think this is especially important in fatherhood. Parents develop an understanding of their children early. The quiet one. The stubborn one. The sensitive one. The independent one. The responsible one. The difficult one.
Sometimes those descriptions begin as harmless observations. Over time, they can become identities that children are expected to maintain.
The problem is that children change. A child who was timid at seven may become confident at seventeen. A child who struggled academically may discover an extraordinary capacity in an environment that fits them better. A child who seemed irresponsible may have been struggling with something the adults around them did not recognize. And a child who was always dependable may eventually need permission to stop being the person everyone relies upon.
If I am not careful, I can become so attached to my understanding of my children that I fail to recognize who they are becoming.
That is a difficult possibility for a father to accept. We spend years trying to understand our children. We learn their habits. We anticipate their needs. We remember the experiences that shaped them. But familiarity can become its own kind of blindness. Sometimes we stop asking who they are because we are convinced we already know.
Perhaps part of fatherhood is accepting that our children must be allowed to become people we did not completely anticipate. And perhaps loving them well requires the humility to keep meeting them as they change.
Leadership has the same responsibility
I see a similar danger in organizations. We identify someone's strengths. We assign responsibilities. We begin to depend upon what they do well. Eventually, the person becomes synonymous with the function.
The organizer. The creative one. The dependable one. The person who handles conflict. The person who keeps everything moving.
Those descriptions can be useful. But they can also become restrictive. A capable employee may want to develop an entirely different skill. A quiet team member may have leadership abilities nobody has invited them to demonstrate. A person who has always supported other people's ideas may have an important vision of their own.
When leaders see only the role, they may unintentionally prevent the person from growing beyond it.
Good leadership requires more than recognizing what someone can do for an organization. It requires remaining curious about what that person might become. That does not mean ignoring performance or abandoning accountability. It means remembering that people are developing human beings, not fixed collections of competencies.
The stories we tell can either reveal or reduce
Writing fiction has made me think about this from another direction. A character becomes interesting when the reader discovers that the first explanation was incomplete.
The person who appears strong is frightened of something. The person who appears cruel has a history that helps explain, though not excuse, their behavior. The person who seems faithful is struggling with doubt. The person who appears broken possesses a capacity nobody has recognized. The person who seems trustworthy may be hiding something.
Those contradictions do not make the character unrealistic. They make the character human.
I am drawn to stories where people cannot be understood through a single description. Perhaps that is because I do not think real people can be understood that way either.
One of the responsibilities of storytelling is resisting the temptation to make a person exist only to illustrate a point. Characters need motives, histories, contradictions, and the capacity to surprise us.
So do the people we encounter outside fiction. The difference is that real people are not characters we have the authority to finish writing. Their stories continue beyond our interpretations.
Perhaps the most important skill is remaining curious
I do not think we can live without making judgments. We have to interpret the world. Parents must make decisions. Clinicians must assess. Teachers must evaluate. Leaders must choose. Communities must establish standards. And sometimes we have to act before we know everything.
The answer is not to abandon judgment. It is to recognize the difference between making a necessary judgment and claiming complete understanding. One is part of responsible living. The other can become arrogance.
I am learning that curiosity may be one of the more important expressions of respect. Not curiosity as interrogation. Not the assumption that everyone owes us their story. But a willingness to recognize that there may be more than what we have seen. That the person across from us has an internal world. That our first explanation may be incomplete. That someone can change. That our categories are useful but limited. That understanding sometimes requires listening longer than we intended.
And that not every silence needs to be filled with our interpretation.
Some parts of the portrait must remain untouched
When I work on a portrait, there comes a point when I have to decide whether another mark will improve the piece or damage what is already there.
That decision is not always easy. There is a temptation to keep working. Another line. Another shadow. A little more contrast. Another correction. Sometimes those additions improve the likeness. Sometimes they make the portrait worse.
I am beginning to think that understanding people requires a similar kind of restraint. We can study. We can observe. We can ask questions. We can examine evidence. We can listen. We can learn. But eventually, we have to accept that there are parts of another person we do not possess, and perhaps were never meant to possess.
Their inner life is not ours to control. Their story is not ours to finish. Their worth is not ours to assign.
We can know someone deeply without knowing them completely. We can love someone without explaining every part of them. We can hold people accountable without reducing them to what they have done. We can recognize patterns without treating those patterns as destiny. We can offer guidance without claiming ownership of another person's becoming.
That may be one of the more difficult forms of humility. To look carefully. To take what we see seriously. To acknowledge what we cannot see. And to leave room for the person to remain larger than our understanding.
I will continue making portraits. I will continue studying psychology. I will continue writing characters, raising children, working with veterans, and trying to understand the people whose lives intersect with mine. Those pursuits all require observation. But I hope they also continue teaching me restraint.
Because there is something dangerous about believing we have finally figured another person out. The moment we become certain that we know everything worth knowing may be the moment we stop seeing them.
And perhaps that is the lesson I keep finding in the wood. A good portrait does not require every inch of the surface to be burned. Some of the light has to remain. Not because the artist has nothing more to say, but because knowing when to stop is also part of learning how to see.
Jamaal Russell is a U.S. Army veteran and a doctoral student in psychology. He writes from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. This essay is a personal and scholarly reflection, not clinical advice. If you are a veteran in crisis, contact the Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1.