Saints Be Praised!

...and pass the fabric softener

Photo by Stella Spera - Topsail Design and Studio LLC

My son came to visit last week. My family all live 750 miles away, so the visits are infrequent and cherished. My son is in his late 30’s, single, and completely self-sufficient, but he still brings his laundry when he visits. There are a couple good reasons he does this (I write, as my husband rolls his eyes), and he doesn’t expect me to do it or anything, but it has definitely become a running joke when he arrives to ask how many loads are in the car.

What I really want to talk about is not the laundry itself, but the pantry/laundry room-and-art gallery. When Joe hauled his baskets in and thumped them on the floor this trip, he said, “Mom, it’s a shame all your saints are in here where no one can see them anymore”. Yeah, it is a shame, and maybe even a bit undignified, but it’s the space I have.

You see, a couple years ago, I had a crazy notion to paint a series of mostly obscure martyred saints, with a couple living legends thrown in. There were 30 all together. Several have gone on to new homes, and a few new ones commissioned by patrons (thank you patrons!), but I still have a sh*t ton several in my possession.

The only place in my house I could hang them all together was, you guessed it, the pantry/laundry room-and art gallery.

Now, I totally understand why a person might not want St. Lucy holding her eyeballs in her hands hanging in their living room. I can see that (pun intended).

I get that St. Bartholomew with his flayed skin might not work with most people’s decor. Though he does now hang in my son’s living room.

And poor St. Appollonia. Pray to her when you have a toothache.

I can agree that a headless St. Denis probably doesn’t appeal to the masses.

But I love these guys!

It was their stories that got me in the first place. It all started when I was 7, preparing for my First Communion and Sacrament of Reconciliation (confession). Every kid in the CCD class received a small book called “The Lives of the Saints”. Each spread told a short story about the saint’s life and death on one page, and opposite it was a usually gruesome classical painting of the saint in agony. St. Sebastian, in particular stayed in my nightmares all these 50 years, tied to a tree wearing only a loincloth and shot full of arrows.

Who gives books like that to kids?

Anyway, here I was, all those years later, and I’m thinking to myself, “This can’t be true, at least not all true. It just can’t.” I mean, I know, miracles and all, but really. So, then I thought that the stories probably happened like the telephone game. You know, one person whispers something to another, who tells it to someone else, and by the time the last person in line gets it, it bears no resemblance to what the first person said. And then I had to make up my own stories about what more plausible explanations of events might have been. Yeah, I think these things. Wanna spend some time in my head? I thought not.

Painting of my Mother, wondering where she went wrong with me.

To me, the most bizarre thing about these martyr stories is that these poor souls became the patron saints of the instruments of their torture!

• Bartholomew, flayed alive: patron saint of tanners and leather workers.

• Sebastian, shot through with arrows: patron saint of archers.

• Appolonia, teeth smashed out by an angry mob: patron saint of dentists.

Holy twisted sense of irony!

Olga of Kiev, Patron saint of retribution. I painted her when Ukraine was invaded.

Really, I was trying to exorcise some R.C indoctrination from my psyche, and it worked pretty well.

I told myself my version of the stories and then I painted them. Or sometimes I painted them, and then they told me their story. Or sometimes I painted them and someone else told the story: I enlisted the aid of my friend, author and so much more, Deb Bowen to write short bios for the gallery cards posted beside each saint when I had a solo show of the whole gang. She actually sat three or four paintings around her living room and had chats with them. You can find out more about Deb here. And this is a painting I made of her as The Seer of the Shores. She’s no martyr, but she is a legend to me.

The show was fun, a month long in a Wilmington, NC gallery run by the local Arts Council, and I got to meet a lot of people and tell a bunch of saint stories.

But then it was over and the martyrs needed a place to live, so on to the pantry/laundry/gallery they went. At least now there is someone to talk to while I wash, dry, and fold.

Homeless Saints and Martyrs

If any of the folks in this post strike your fancy, drop me a message and we can talk about them.

Thanks for reading along, supporting me and connecting!