For DeSande R, art is the equivalent of a heartbeat. It keeps her alive. 

“It’s just part of me,” she says, sitting at a desk that’s covered in paint brushes, Sharpies, damar varnish and linseed oil. “It’s like breathing. That’s what I do. I paint, I draw, and it relaxes me.” 

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R was only 5 years old when her pieces first started receiving recognition. “You draw so well,” her classmates would echo – a compliment that fueled her to continue perfecting the craft in grade school, and later high school, where she began to design covers for romance novels. 

“I just always liked drawing,” she says, reflecting on her journey. “It was something I could do. I didn’t know it was a big deal, you know, it’s like making a sandwich. It was so easy for me, so I just decided to stick with it.” 

But there was another reason she decided to continue painting: Her mother encouraged her to go to college. Excited to leave the suburbs of Chicago – the only place she ever knew – she started her undergraduate journey at Northern Illinois University.

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“I only stayed like a year and a half,” she says. “It was just too much of a culture shock for me, not being anywhere except at home, and then all of a sudden, I’m thrown into this independent life, and it didn’t go too well.” 

R decided to take a hiatus from college. She got married, had two kids, and then moved to Carbondale, finishing her bachelor’s degree and completing a master’s in art at Southern Illinois University. 

“I don’t like to be a quitter, and I was determined to get my degree,” she says. 

Determined rings true. It’s a cold evening in February when she invites me into her house, 55 years after her days of drawing pictures in kindergarten. In true artist fashion, materials are scattered everywhere. Her house is a small but cozy space that radiates the presence of a creator. Paintings and photographs on the walls pass us by; some gifts and others her own work. She shows me her smaller, more intimate studio, then leads me to another room with windows overlooking the snow covering the back porch. This studio, where she agrees to tell her story, is home to her latest works, including a commission she’s been working on for years now. 

“I like to have the essence of the person I’m painting,” she says. “I want it to show through the painting, almost like it’s talking to you or speaking to you.”

I examine the easel behind her. To make a long story short, she’s taken a photograph of three young girls on a beach and turned it into a masterpiece. I ask her if creating personalized paintings for others has become the norm lately. 

“Sometimes, yeah, sometimes,” she says. “I’ve been working so much I haven’t had a lot of time to do artwork. It’s slowed down a little bit, but I’m in the process of picking it back up again.” 

She uses her weekends to catch up on her artwork, and sometimes late nights. She said she finished pieces for her latest art show at two in the morning. Her days currently consist of working a 9-to-4:30 job at an insurance firm, checking emails when she returns home and talking with her mother on the phone. “That’s my highlight of the day, calling my mom,” she says. “Because we crack jokes all through the conversation.” 

Before this, R was a part-time instructor at John A. Logan College. She worked there for 21 years after graduating from SIU. She taught an art appreciation course, and she says it was rough. “I’m not used to standing in front of a crowd and talking, but I had to get used to it,” she says, later adding that was able to manage it. 

But “manage” might be an understatement. I talk with one of her close friends, Janice Kirksey, just three days later, and find out her daughter was one of R’s students. “She said ‘That’s the best art class I’ve ever been in, Mom,’” Kirksey says. “My daughter said, ‘And the teacher made you feel so relaxed and at ease, and if you made a mistake, she would just say, ‘It’s not a mistake. That’s just an opportunity to perfect your art.’ So just knowing that, that you could make mistakes, was very calming to my daughter. And by the way, she aced that class. I still have her portfolio that she did for DeSande.” 

The duo first met around 15 years ago, when R brought her daughter to the afterschool program Kirksey was teaching at. They lost touch when summer came around, but they reconnected 10 years later. Kirksey said it was shortly after she lost her mom. 

“I was in a, oh, kind of a depressed state, and we met at a function, I can’t remember what, and so that’s what rekindled our relationship,” Kirksey said. “And we made a date to go out to have lunch…and had the best time. She was so comical. Come to find out that we were both from somewhat of the same area, from the Chicago area…and we just began to talk about the different things that Chicago offered. And I said, ‘Mhm. Isn’t that something?’ And we just laughed and laughed, and it was the most laughing I had done since my mom had passed. And when we parted that evening, I was in such a good spirit. And from then on, we’ve just been close. We make sure we meet every so often, and we now attend the same church, and we just have a good time. She’s a wonderful person. She can be very comical, keep you laughing, but I was so surprised at her artwork.”

Many of R’s paintings and photographs are currently being displayed on SIU’s campus. Her work runs in a Labor of Art exhibit at Sharp Museum. The exhibit is concurrent with the National Black History Month theme of “African Americans and Labor,” which according to the month’s founders, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, “focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people.” 

“I consider it a privilege,” R says when I ask her how it feels to see her work displayed this month. “You know, not everybody gets to do that, so I’m very thankful for SIU asking me to do this show. I consider each one to be unique, and I enjoy showing my hard work and sharing with the others.” 

R credits several Black artists for influencing her work, including Laura Wheeler Waring, Archibald Motley Jr. and SIU professor of studio arts and art history Najjar Abdul-Musawwir. 

She says that throughout her journey as a Black woman in art, the main challenge she faced was trying to book shows. “It got easier as the years went on, because I’m more recognized, more heard of, so it’s not as hard,” she says. “Now I’m not with the bigwigs, but I hope to be someday.” 

Increased recognition for artists is what she’d like to see change in the industry. “This is not a hobby. This is my life,” she says. “I eat, breathe and sleep artwork. You know, everything’s a photograph to me. And then, I think about ‘Oh, I wonder how that would look but (as) a painting.’ Like, I can see you as a portrait…I always see each person as a portrait.” 

On Friday, Feb. 21, a reception was held for R’s exhibit, which Kirksey attended. Kirksey says she witnessed visitors engaging in long conversations, expressing what it was they took away from the artwork. 

“These (art pieces) were different workers – some in factories, some in coal mines, but you could feel the character come through, and you would have thought, ‘Wow, this must have taken a month or two to get all of these different expressions out on paper,’ and it hadn’t taken her long at all, a few days, but the drawings looked as if they had taken a month or two because of all the different impressions and expressions that come through,” she said. 

In the near future, R is looking to finish her painting of the girls at the beach. She’s also working on another commission, but it’s being gifted to someone as a surprise, so she wants to keep that one off the record. Her talent is something that continues to surprise her, despite having a three-series painting of singer Billie Holiday sell for $3,000 recently. 

“I’m surprised at what I turn out. I’m like, ‘I did that?’” she says, letting out a laugh. “I’ll be surprised that I was even able to paint this or draw that. And so, it’s a miracle to me. It’s God’s gift, and I honor that in that fashion.” 

The Labor of Art exhibit will run through April 5, 2025 at Sharp Museum, which is housed at Faner Hall on SIU’s campus. 

News editor Carly Gist can be reached at cgist@dailyegyptian.com. To stay up to date on all your southern Illinois news, be sure to follow The Daily Egyptian on Facebook and on X @dailyegyptian.

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