thanks, st. anthony & st. francis!

good news!  our boy came home yesterday!

yay!  looks like he is finally out of the woods!

i have been praying to st. anthony, but somehow my dorky mind got him all confused with st. francis.   i know, i know, i should know these things. after all, my aunt claire had a shrine to st. francis on her property.  a big concrete statue of him in the middle of a flower bed, surrounded with animals.  duh.  did i mention that my mother's name is frances??? well, i guess the brown robes got me confused.  or the fact that i was out of my mind with worry.  so thanks to both saints, for sorting out the confusion, and getting the right prayers to the right places.

in honor of vinny's homecoming, i decided to do a blog post about my favorite friends, the saints.  i have written about my fascination of the saints before. growing up in a catholic family made the saints easy to come by.  i had a great aunt who was an artist, and she made sculptures of them.  they floated around the houses of my relatives in baltimore, and i remember a brown-robed one in my own house.

my grandmother also had some saints, plastic in nature, perched on her high dresser.  i would go in her room, and peer at them, thinking that they were somehow powerful.  i don't think i ever asked her about them.  i just wondered.

it's all kind of strange, this saint attraction.  i am not incredibly religious.  i can't remember the last time i sat through a mass.  but there is still some sort of magic that the exude for me.  i am still curious about them 45 years later.

the saint theme repeats itself time after time in my work.  i sometimes wish i could understand what they are trying to say to me, but usually don't analyze too much.  i just let them out when they need to be released.  the virgin mary, in many forms, shows up frequently.  i was looking through my sketchbooks the other day, and found more than a few in each one.

last week junk-hunting,  i found the best saint collectible, ever.  it's a picture of saint lucy, whose name comes from the latin "lux", meaning "light".  she is the patron saint of the blind.  she is usually shown with a plate holding eyeballs.  there are several stories about lucy.  in the 15th century, texts start telling that she was tortured by eye-gouging, and that god restored her eyes.

here she is, plate full of eyeballs and all!  oh those saints, who couldn't love them?