Artist & Writer

In the beginning, there was a void; In that darkness, Atabey, the mother of all, created herself,the universe and the everything in it.

"She could be a portal to something bad," my pastor said.

I looked down at the painting of Atabey. A month before, in Puebla, Mexico, a museum conservation artist taught me how to coat a slab of wood with clay, thinly, one layer at a time. I etched her image on its surface. Then, he helped me mix egg tempera to surround her form with a vivid cobalt blue, and carefully explained how to apply gold leaf. I left his office in the back of the museum, hurried to my studio hidden in a small courtyard, and began gilding her sky with golden stars.

“Syncretism,” he later said to me amongst the museum's religious paintings, "it's why we have The Virgin of Guadalupe. We had to hide our truth to survive."…