Month: April 2025

Home

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A painting by artist Lauren Raye Snow called “Home.” A female presenting figure in the foreground, ambiguously young, with an olive complexion, orange-red lips, flushed cheeks bordering on burning, dark hair in braids, dark brown eyes, and a slender build, wearing a black satin fantastical confection of a dress, like a nun turned into a gothic cupcake. In the background a giant thunderhead looms heavy and foreboding in the turquoise-blue sky, itself bright and unnaturally orange. Flanking the woman in the background are two live oaks barren of leaves, and the ground is green but singeing a yellow-brown from the extreme weather. The woman clutches an armadillo, like a precious relic, or as Mary to a baby Jesus; her face is ambivalent, tense, afraid, sad. She is crowned with the blown out wildflowers native to Texas.

My latest, “Home.” When home is hostile, beautiful but brutal.

My bittersweet love letter to my home state of Texas. The landscape of my life, the centuries-long open wound of colony from whence I came, the broken body of malign governance and treacherous climes. How bright the beauty, how sharp the knife.

 

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The Gate (Anima Sola IV)

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“The Gate (Anima Sola IV” is fourth in my series interpreting the figure of the Anima Sola, or Lonely Soul, in traditional Catholic devotional iconography. The Anima Sola is the soul trapped in the fires of purgatory, serene but captive and alone.

The Ecstasy of St. Joan

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A femme bodied person, illuminated by blue, pink, and gold light, wears steel plate armor and stands facing front, eyes gently closed and head slightly turned into their own hand, which is caressing their face. They have medium brown skin and black hair, and entwined in the fingers of their hands are devotional beads. Around their head is a circular halo, upon which is written “I am the angel and there is no other.” Within the halo there are many lush flowers, and these flowers surround and caress the head of Joan. There is prismatic light suffusing the scene with a background of subtle indigo, and small, graceful, glowing motes of dust, or stars, or glittering orbs of violet and golden and chartreuse light, surrounding the figure.

The Ecstasy of St. Joan. Completed July 15, 2022.

From the transcript of the trial of Jeanne D’Arc: “Jeanne replied she would not receive the Eucharist by changing her costume for a woman’s; she asked to hear Mass in her male attire, adding that it did not burden her soul.”

Bodily autonomy as Holy Edict. Freedom unyoked by God or State. Self-Divinity, whole, joyous,  and eternal.

Bodily autonomy has been weighing heavily on me (and on most women, trans, & queer people in the US). Joan has always been a figure of devotion for me. Most don’t know that she was executed as a relapsed heretic *because* she refused gender conformity. I paint Joan (or a Joan-like figure) free from God or State, in the power and joy of the fullness of their expression.

“Her judges gave her hope that she would be allowed to hear Mass if she would finally put off man’s dress and wear female attire, as befits her sex. She would not agree, and preferred not to take Communion and the holy offices, rather than abandon this [male] dress.”

“We questioned her to find out [why] she had resumed man’s dress and rejected woman’s clothes. Asked why she had resumed it, and who had compelled her to wear it, she answered that she had taken it of her own will, under no compulsion, as she preferred man’s to woman’s dress.

The charge: “The report has now become well known that this woman, utterly disregarding what is honourable in the female sex, breaking the bounds of modesty, and forgetting all female decency, has disgracefully put on the clothing of the male sex, a striking and vile monstrosity.”

One of her final words before her execution was this: “I was the angel, and there was no other.” This (though likely referring to her martial success for France) drew me into a beautiful possible world for Joan, where she could be her own Holy Angel.

Purgatorio (Anima Sola II)

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A femme figure appears as if lit from below by firelight; she stands in front of a solitary mountain, its single peak backlit by the setting sun, or the first rays of dawn - in this liminal space, it is hard to tell. The figure has cropped dark hair, a pale olive complexion, and she raises her right hand, palm open, which has a bright red-pink blistering burn wound. Her left hand gently grasps her right wrist, and her left pointer finger rests in the center of her right palm. She wears a classical white robe, her shoulders bare. On either side of her, serpentine chains dance on their own accord. The terminal link of each chain has been broken. On the mountain, in the distance, eight iridescent lights scale up the peak. Stars dimly twinkle in the liminal sky above.

With apologies to Mr. Alighieri. Presenting Purgatorio (Anima Sola II), completed October 2022.

Look: she lingers at the bottom. A far cry from the contrition of the blessed souls Dante encountered on his winding way up the mountain; indeed, watch as she creeps down again. Don’t pray for her! She chose this, and is marked by it. She’s looking for something.

130 Cinque volte racceso e tante casso
131 lo lume era di sotto da la luna,
132 poi che ’ntrati eravam ne l’alto passo,

133 quando n’apparve una montagna, bruna
134 per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto
135 quanto veduta non avëa alcuna.

Five times rekindled and as many quenched
Had been the splendour underneath the moon,
Since we had entered into the deep pass,

When there appeared to us a mountain, dim
From distance, and it seemed to me so high
As I had never any one beheld.

–Inferno 26, The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

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