Becoming a Shaman

Medium: Watercolor
Date: 1986

There is a moment in every transformation when the one being transformed has no way of knowing whether the hand guiding them is lifting them up or holding them under. That moment is what I set out to paint.

Becoming a Shaman shows a shaman and his acolyte — a figure who has spent years walking toward a threshold he cannot yet see past. The shaman wears a mask carved into the likeness of a horned animal, a snake coiled across its brow. In his mouth he holds a smaller figure: the acolyte himself, still mid-transformation, his eyes grown large and luminous, casting beams of light out into the dark. Whether the shaman intends to deliver him across that threshold or consume him before he arrives is a question I chose to leave open — because in real transformation, it always is.

Symbolic Elements and Visual Design

The mask is the painting's center of gravity. Horns and serpent together are among the oldest pairings in symbolic art — the horned figure as a bridge between the animal and the divine, the snake as the creature that sheds its own skin to survive. I didn't choose them for their familiarity but for their instability: both symbols have carried opposite meanings across different traditions and centuries. A horned figure can be a god or a devil. A serpent can be wisdom or temptation, healing or venom. I wanted the shaman's power to arrive already unresolved, so the viewer has no comfortable place to land.

The acolyte's large, radiant eyes are the one part of the composition that reads as unambiguous hope — proof that something real is happening inside him, that the process is working. But held as he is, inside the shaman's mouth, that hope sits directly against threat. I placed the rays of energy, so they pour outward from the shaman's concentration, not toward the acolyte specifically, but through him — as if he is less a person receiving power than a vessel it happens to be passing through on its way somewhere else.

Artistic Technique

I worked this piece in watercolor, letting the pigment bloom and bleed at the edges of the energy rays rather than containing them with hard lines. Watercolor resists total control in a way that suited the subject — you can guide where the water goes, but you can't dictate exactly how it settles, which mirrors what I was trying to say about spiritual transformation itself: something you can submit to and prepare for, but never fully command. The mask, by contrast, is built with tighter, more deliberate strokes, giving it a carved, almost sculptural solidity against the looser wash of energy surrounding it — object versus force, form versus dissolution.

Emotional Resonance

I want this piece to sit uncomfortably. Most depictions of spiritual mentorship default to reverence — the wise guide, the grateful student, the clean ascent from ignorance to enlightenment. I don't think that's how it actually feels from inside the process. Real transformation involves surrendering control to someone or something whose intentions you cannot fully verify, and trusting that the version of yourself that emerges will have been worth the risk. That trust is not comfortable. It shouldn't be, in a painting or in life.

Reflection: A Life Lesson

“Sein oder nicht sein, das ist die Frage.” — To be, or not to be, that is the question. Hamlet's line has outlived its play because it names something universal: the moment before an irreversible change, when going forward and staying still both feel like a kind of death. The acolyte in this painting is standing in exactly that moment. He has already given up who he was. He does not yet know who he will become. And the only way through is to trust the mouth that holds him — even without proof that it means to let him go.

I think most of us have stood where he stands, in smaller ways, more times than we'd admit. A career left behind before the next one is secure. A relationship ended before we knew who we’d be without it. A belief abandoned before a new one has fully taken its place. Transformation rarely announces its outcome in advance. It only asks that you enter the mouth.