Cosmic Unions & Celestial Battles
Samela St. Pierre is an illustrator and community artist working in Framingham, Massachusetts. Deriving inspiration and great wisdom from the folktales of Pre-Columbian cultures in South America. Her path in life is to illustrate and tell these tales to the best of her ability. With the goal of elevating these myths to their rightful place next to the famed mythologies of the Egyptians, Greeks and Norse.
atac: Samela, it's so exciting to chat with you! Why don’t we start at the beginning?
Samela St. Pierre: I grew up as a young child in the home of my paternal grandparents, immigrants from Peru. So, my first language is Spanish and I wasn't really allowed to go out past the backyard as they couldn't communicate with the other parents or put me in extracurricular activities. Mostly I spent my time reading, coloring, and exploring my mother's garden.
atac: Would you say it has always been your dream to be an artist?
SSP: My "dream job," as illustrated in a second-grade school assignment, was to be "a writer in the woods" away from other people and living at peace with the animals and trees. I've always had a lot of energy, but I learned at an early age to channel that into drawing and writing, which I was always encouraged to do more of by the adults around me.
atac: Your art is very versatile! Do you have a favorite medium?
SSP: I can't remember a time before I was drawing, it's simply the most accessible medium because you can do it with a crayon, pen or even a stick in dirt. That idea of making art on the go and without limitations of location led me to watercolor, my true love. I experimented with many mediums in college, including iron casting, welding, woodwork and printmaking, and though they were all fun pursuits, watercolor has been my one devotion.
atac: I know you’re quite the yogi, how has yoga impacted your life and craft?
SSP: By the time I was a teenager and living fully with my parents and siblings, I was VERY rebellious and confrontational. That reflected heavily in the artwork I was making at the time, and really finding a yoga studio in those years was the only thing that kept me grounded and sane.
atac: In addition to yoga what else has inspired your art over the years?
SSP: The best exhibit I've ever experienced, and the one that solidified my need to be an artist is "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years" that exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in the summer of 2007. I was sixteen years old, and watching how people bent and weaved between the iron walls showed me how art can affect people in a visceral, physical way and influence how they move. I knew I wanted to make art that could move people in such a way, towards action, inspiration, and wonder.
atac: Inspiration can come in many forms. Sometimes it can give us insight into what we don’t want for ourselves or our art. Do you have any experience with that feeling?
SSP: My great mentor in watercolor, the late and wonderful Dennis Nolan, was a gifted children's book illustrator. So, of course, I felt that my path should follow his, and straight out of art school (I almost graduated) I pursued a career in just that. After illustrating six mediocre children's books for less money than would cover rent for two months, I realized my heart was not in this industry. I felt totally confined by the task of illustrating other people's stories, and worse: I felt like an absolute failure as an artist. I forced myself for the better part of my twenties to fit into a box, and really, what's the point of being an artist if we're gonna box ourselves in?
atac: That's a hard, but arguably necessary lesson to learn. How did you move on from that?
SSP: I took a break from accepting children's books and dabbled in illustrating coloring books, taking pet portrait commissions and book covers for poets and entrepreneurs all while making art for myself about things that interested me. At this point, I've really stepped away from client work and focused on my own big project, where I get to tell my own stories of my own culture through my Tarot of the Incas Deck. I feel complete freedom in this venture and I've never had so many requests from organizations to exhibit my work. I used to pay hundreds of dollars to enter art shows that I would regularly be rejected from, now the gallery owners come to me! I guess that's the magic of making work that is in alignment with yourself first: the audience for it appears.
atac: I’m sure that is very encouraging for artists of all ages to hear. Do you have any other advice?
SSP: My advice to any artist is to make more. Being an artist is a hall-pass to dedicate everything, every experience, conversation, meal, song you've heard, to your art. Everything in your life can inform your art, and I believe it should. No effort is wasted.
atac: With that in mind, circling back to the start of our conversation, how do you think your cultural background has informed your art?
SSP: Something that is not often mentioned or talked about is the intentional attempted erasure of Pre-Columbian cultures in South America. The whole continent in general is often passed over here in the United States as little more than a third world place that sends its poorest to our shores. Besides resenting and rejecting that idea wholly, I think there is so much opportunity to share and celebrate the people, foods, and stories from there. Great mythologies and cosmologies existed there (and do to this day) before Christianity forced them into the underground. But we rarely, if ever, hear of Inti, Viracocha and Cha'askar. Cosmic unions, celestial battles, and dragon-filled love affairs abound, but the tapestries and pottery depicting such were destroyed in an attempt to erase a whole people's identities. I believe it is our job, and mine, to resurrect the old gods and share their knowings with the ailing modern world.
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Samela St. Pierre’s Tarot of the Inca Kickstarter launches next year (2024)! Until then look out for watercolor workshops and tarot reading events leading up to the big day.
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