The Calling

“We’re supposed to be here at ten, right?” I ask. Amanda nods, stepping carefully around the palm fronds and fractured conch shells littering the front yard. We climb the steps to the front of the house. The door is open, and the house is silent.
“Miss Lassie?” I tap a tentative staccato on the door frame. “Hello?”
An ancient dog pads across the floor toward us, quizzical, rheumy eyes glistening. “Not much of a watchdog, are you?” I say, scratching his haunches, unleashing a cloud of shedding fur. Clothes and newspapers are piled everywhere, and the close smell of fried food is sliced by the tang of turpentine.
“Maybe she’s not here,” Amanda says. “Strange. She doesn’t have a car.” I say her name again, louder this time.
A tiny, copper-skinned, silver-haired woman shuffles, stocking-footed, into the room. She motions for us to sit. “I needed to close my eyes for a moment,” she says. She smiles at the dog, who is busy burrowing his nose into Amanda’s thigh.. “You needn’t be wary of Comfort. He loves visitors, ‘specially pretty ladies.”
Amanda and I have been working on a book about the Cayman Islands. We are here on this warm June morning to photograph and interview Miss Lassie. Miss Lassie is a nickname, given by her doting father to his youngest child. Her formal name is Gladwyn Bush. She is eighty-seven years old, a fourth-generation Caymanian and acclaimed visionary intuitive artist. Lacking any formal training, she began to paint twenty-five years ago. Here’s the story: one auspicious day, at the age of sixty-two, Miss Lassie was lying in bed half-awake and something took hold of her. “I knew it to be Divine Inspiration. I knew I had to paint.” She grabbed the only paint in the house- standard house paint- and commenced. “I rendered my vision on my front door, top and bottom.”.
Miss Lassie’s small stucco house- the house her father built, the house she was born in, the house she shared with eight brothers and two sisters, the house she loves and will never leave- has become a testament to the ferocity of what she terms her calling. Virtually every surface, every object, has been anointed in vivid pigment. Angels, birds, scrawled scripture passages, and the Holy family, always smiling, are common themes. Word of the transcendent simplicity of her work has spread beyond the four walls of her home, and beyond the shores of her beloved Cayman Islands. In fact, on a chair across from us is a wrapped canvas, addressed to the organization who commissioned it- the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.
Miss Lassie sits for Amanda’s camera. She smiles, leaning against the arm of the sofa in a housecoat made of shiny synthetic fabric featuring a pattern of big pink orchids. Spatters of oil paint dot her arms.
“Come, let me show you my place,” she says. Comfort lopes ahead. As with most old Caymanian houses, the kitchen is outside, joined to the main house by a covered breezeway. A stove, a set tub, racks for dishes, it is all out there, the turquoise sea a backdrop, just yards away. A rope hammock chained between two causarina trees sways in the breeze. Miss Lassie, still shoeless, takes us through the sandy yard, with its scattered accumulation of artifacts; tires, plastic bottles, old buoys, half a rowboat
She tells us about her husband. “Edward was a seaman. He served on eleven vessels in six years, from 1939 to 1945. When he came home after the last voyage, it was plain to see he was not in his right mind. His soul was strange. My son and I took care of him, though. We walked with him as he walked.” Miss Lassie dismisses our sympathetic murmurs. “You grow used to something you don’t bring on yourself.”
She leads us down to a yellow cinderblock guest house. “I had this built for my son, but he doesn’t live with me. He is my main sorrow. He is too fond of the rum.” She points to a broken window, now boarded up with plywood. “Thieves took my air conditioner. The Lord struck down my pride. But still… we have always been good neighbors here on Cayman. Now, it is the drugs and the drinking.” She shakes her head, then laughs. “I am still too full of sin myself! But by and by, when it is time for me to meet Jesus, I will walk through the Valley with a fearless tread.” I write down every word. To me, they sound charmingly archaic. To this near-ninety-year-old native of a tiny island where everyone attended church five days a week, it is just the way she talks.
She insists on serving refreshments. She pours tall glasses of Sprite and Comfort sits with us on her front steps. The ice melts faster than we can drink. We watch lizards sun themselves on rocks and abandon hope that we’ll catch even the smallest breeze. It is time for us to leave. We have another interview at one.
“Thank you so much for letting us speak to you,” I say. Miss Lassie looks almost bewildered.
“It gives me such pleasure, why shouldn’t I let you in? I thank you for your kindness.”
As we drive back toward George Town, I notice that the sunny day looks oddly dull. Perhaps it is by contrast to the place we have just left, a small universe both insular and expansive, a riot of line and color. It is a place free of ego, province of a woman who calls her art markings and cites God as her source. She names this force that speaks to her in her dreams, rousing her from her bed in the middle of the night and sending her scrambling for a paintbrush, a calling. I find myself beginning to contemplate what Miss Lassie already knows: the need to create art doesn’t begin, or end, with the artist.