For as long as I can remember, I have seen the world as swarming with invisible people. As a small child, I imagined that as I got dressed or undressed, in the moment when I pulled my shirt over my head, the legions of living beings that hid themselves in the nooks and crannies of my bedroom, behind the old illustrated copy of Treasure Island or among the tribe of stuffed animals collected at the end of my bed, would swarm out around me, just for that brief moment when my head was covered. Then as soon as my head found the neck of my shirt and poked through the hole, the translucent, flitting people would hide themselves again.
I’ve been drawing people since about three. My grandfather used to work for the phone company in the 70s, and would pass reams of printer paper on to me to draw on; the old fashioned kind with the holes running down the sides and all the sheets connected by perforated lines. My parents tell me I used the holes in the sides of the paper to represent heads. That is to say, the hole would be the head, and the rest of the body I drew hanging from the hole. The hole was an eye and a head at the same time, and also a mouth. The head was the portal to the world the beings issued from.
Years later, while sleeping over at my cousins’ house, in the wee hours while they were still sleeping and I was longing for company, I drew, of all things, a cyclops. It immediately terrified me. I could feel its evil presence buzzing harshly through the room. I folded the drawing over and tucked it into the back of the closet, where it could not lay its eye on me, but I could still feel its insidious radioactivity. I felt at once terrified and powerful to have invoked such a being simply by laying my Crayola marker to paper.
In 4th grade I drew a portrait of my (embarrassingly) imaginary husband Michael Jackson, in dark sunglasses and a sparkly military jacket with epaulets. I was careful to leave open areas in the sunglasses to signify reflections. To me, this made him feel alive. I got up to sharpen my pencil and when I returned a classmate had colored in the reflections, which seemed to me to kill the drawing. I was furious. They had killed my Michael, my saint, by blacking out the reflections in his bug-eye glasses!
I later learned at the Tibetan Buddhist museum in New York City that when tanka artists create their drawings of buddhas and bodhisattvas they leave the eyes for very last. The addition of the eyes is accompanied by a prayer that brings the being into the painting. I have seen painters of the Vodou Lwa do the same.
And so it seems whenever I draw a face or a human form. It’s like creating a person, or perhaps giving an invisible person somewhere to live.
The other day I picked up my paint brush and began to work the graywash layer on an icon of Lazarus that is part of a mural of (mostly Catholic) icons connected with Vodou lwa in my studio. The idea is to invite their invisible counterparts into my studio, to pierce my space with their eyes, watching over readings, cleansings, herbal preparations, candle manufacturing, tattoos. Vodou peristil are often painted with divine personages, and this is where I’m going— I am certain that one day I will play a central role at a Vodou temple— so I figure I’ll start here.
I love painting the lwa. Each painting I do is a conversation between myself as a sevite (someone who serves the spirits), the spirit, and the traditional icon it is connected with. They teach me through the process, inspire me to add details, to experiment, to question. In doing so, I feel I may be retracing and continuing the steps of earlier sevite; the ones who first connected Catholic images with African deities, and all those who have imaged them since. There is no way for me to know, of course, what inner paths they traveled while making these images. But, much like each card aggregates meaning over decades of working with the tarot, through seeing it in all its placements in an infinity of situations, each iteration of the image seems to add to the life of the spirit.
Legba is such a spirit. As the guardian of the portal between the human and spirit worlds, several Catholic images are associated with him depending on the house (traditional Vodou is organized in “houses” that signify traditions passed on within a family) and also on which aspect of Legba is being addressed. Sometimes he is seen as Saint Peter, because of the association with keys. At times, he is associated with Saint Anthony of Padua- the Franciscan monk holding the Christ child- perhaps invoking his childlike nature, more prevalent in Santeria (where he is called Elegua) than in Vodou. One houngan (Vodou priest) did explain to me, however, that he really should be associated with the OTHER Saint Anthony, the Abbot, because he walks with a crutch, and that’s Legba’s defining characteristic.
In my house, however, we use Saint Lazarus to represent Legba. In the traditional image, Lazarus is sick man, supported by a crutch or crutches and encrusted with sores, which two dogs are licking. He stands between a church on one side and a wooded area on the other.
There is, of course, Christian lore associated with this image. But those who chose it as a port of communication with Legba may have been unaware or apathetic about the saint’s official backstory, and more interested finding their own deity in the image. They might have been working solely off of the image and the associations it brought up for them; after all, Vodou a visual and oral tradition, not a written one.
However, because these stories DO feed into the fleshing-out of the spirit as we learn them, I’ll give a little background: Lazarus is a poor, sick beggar. The neighborhood dogs lick his sores. He feeds himself off of the scraps from the rich man’s table, but when he dies, he goes to heaven and the rich man goes to hell. There’s another story about a Lazarus who Christ raises from the dead, but scholars don’t seem to think this is the same person. Once people start confusing them, however, there's already a link between the two. Either way, there’s already a narrative of death, resurrection, and afterlife in this image. The dogs are sometimes seen as healing psychopomp angels that care for Lazarus in his afterlife journey. I'll come back to this later.
This story was in the back of my subconscious as I set out to give the next layer of life to the painting, overlaying the rough chalk sketch and the pencil draft I had laid down weeks before.
Habituated to working out from a corner from years of tattooing, and from being left handed and having to avoid smearing what I just painted, I shade with acrylic graywash from the top down, from right to left. Working in this scanner-like manner, it’s always clear which choice I’m making next.
The first concrete object I landed on in this process was the cathedral. I was torn between copying a cathedral from a reference and reassembling one from my memory. One from my imagination would be flawed and childlike, but might add an unexpected dimension of meaning to the picture. I opted for a quick glance at a reference, and the shading did indeed end up rather lopsided and awkward; something I will probably fix in successive layers.
But the position of the cathedral on the hill, and the path traveling down the valley behind and to Lazarus himself, who is hobbling away from the cathedral and toward the woods, gave me a lot to contemplate- yet unresolved. The master of the Road is moving away from the house of God, as if banished from the house of the Great God Bondye, into the dry valley of humanity… I did see that the grass on the hilltop would be verdant and turn to yellow dust as we travel down… but he is moving toward the hilltop of nature, of Earth Mother energy. I wondered, what it would communicate to echo the cathedral’s rose window in his halo, to both make he himself the cathedral and to say that he’s taking it with him?
Fleshing out the image of Lazarus, on which I had drawn rough areas for sores and lesions in the pencil sketch, I found I was inclined to make the sores either vaginal or eyelike shapes. Rather than try to switch it up (it’s kind of a no-no to include any shape in a tattoo that might resemble a sexual organ, because once your client’s pervy friend points it out to them they’ll never unsee it), I rolled with it. What would it mean if Lazarus’s lesions were vaginal? That they are sensitive, penetrable; that his affliction is a portal to the mysteries of sex and birth. What would it mean if such a vagina-covered being were an image of Papa Legba, the great Lwa that stands at the portal between the human and spirit worlds, who opens or closes the portal at will? A vagina knows when it’s ready to open and when not to.
Or what if the sores were eyes, likening Lazarus to Argos, the eye-covered Greek monster who acted as a watchman for Hera? Is there a connection between Legba as the guardian of the threshold to the divine and Argos who protected the interests of the jealous goddess?
I moved on to the canes, the supports of the crippled Lazarus. I once read in a (Milo Rigaud?) book that Legba is connected with the arc of the sun in the sky. Interestingly, in Africa, Legba was more often depicted as a virile young man, whereas in Haitian Vodou, he is most frequently seen as old and walking with a cane. In whatever I read, this was connected with the riddle of the Sphinx, “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs in the evening?” The answer (spoiler alert) is Man, and the Haitian Legba is seen as on his last leg, either on two wobbly legs supported by a cane or missing a foot entirely and supported by two crutches. He is in the evening of his life and weakened by the journey, which may point to the long hardship of the Haitian people since their capture in Africa.
But I would never depict Legba in a dusky environment. To me, Legba is high noon at a dusty crossroads. The brutal and direct Texas sun. I am not sure why, maybe it’s something else I read or heard long ago lodged deep in my subconscious, or maybe it’s because his dark reflection Mèt Kalfou represents the crossroads at midnight. Or perhaps it’s because, despite the desperation of Lazarus’s situation in the original icon, the setting is a vibrantly-sunlit midday. So as I work the shadows into the icon, I try to think about where they would fall with the bright sun straight above. I have never been great at rendering realistic shadows, and have decided it’s not worth my time to study them literally. I’m only interested insofar as their direction or omission imprints the viewer with emotional information, whether conscious or unconscious.
The dogs were next. In the original icon, Lazarus’s sores are being licked by two dogs. In my original sketch I included three dogs, mostly to balance the composition, but as I reached this latitude of the painting I remembered hearing that the dogs are linked with no more or less than two Egyptian deities, Anubis and Orisis, both associated with death and the afterlife, much like the Christian interpretation of the dogs as angels of God bringing Lazarus to heaven. Sometimes connections between African traditional religions and Egyptian religion seem historically suspect to me, and this is one of those cases where I can’t find another source to corroborate this theory. However, as I said, every bit of lore, true or untrue, becomes folded into the spirit. And so I decided to completely do away with the third dog and add a rooster.
It was a hard decision! Roosters have an association with Legba through Saint Peter— he’s the one who denied Christ three times before the cock crowed— and also because of the solar association. Traditionally, however, there’s no rooster in this image. I’m sometimes surprised when a Vodouisant corrects me after instantly recognizing an iconographic inaccuracy in my artwork, e.g. “LaSyrenn needs a mirror AND a comb!” Or “Make sure Freda has seven swords in her heart!” Or “I don’t see any corn in this picture of Kouzen!” I know I’m speaking Vodou iconography as a second language and that any change to the image affects the grammar and meaning. However, I decided to take the risk as a learning opportunity, and see what came out of including the rooster.
The remaining two dogs, as I worked my way across, were a challenge. Again, I struggled with whether to look up dog references or to go with my imagination. I thought about how awkward and charming medieval depictions of animals could be, since the artists were often depicting beasts they had only seen fleetingly, if at all, in real life. I HAVE a dog, and she’s gorgeous and well proportioned, but I still didn’t trust that I would remember all of her curves… anyway I decided in the spirit of letting go of perfection to just raw dog the dogs without a reference and see what they ended up communicating. Again, to me, the emotional quality is more important than literal accuracy.
Finally, I came to the missing foot on the bottom. It had really ended up being cut off due to compositional considerations, but I decided it was perfect that Legba was missing a foot.
I’ll be working my way through the gray shading on ALL my Rada and Gede spirits over the next few weeks, and then it’ll be on to the color phase, where I’m sure some surprises will emerge.
Thanks for reading!
