. This piece was inspired by a young woman I met in Mexico City, whose face conveyed, for me, an almost Bodhisattva-like quality; which led me to depict her as a mystic saint.

I settled on Santa Rosa de Lima, the first canonized saint of the "New World." Santa Rosa was a 17th-century mystic, much given over to visions. She experienced divine love as the heart struck by lightning, or as the heart aflame with a fire that does not consume.

Rosa also had a series of dreams wherein demons attacked her, and from which God chose not to deliver her. She came to understand, in conversation with her contemporary San Martin de Porres, that this was a test, to see if she would love a god that did not deliver her. Hmm. To mark her eventual defeat of the demons, they are here tied to little stakes.

Below, in the background is a landscape of Lima, with its 17th-century cathedral, surrounded by tiny Indian thatch-roof huts.

Santa Rosa de Lima

by J Michael Walker, 1993 Color pencil on paper, 50"high x 38"wide