I had been spending the day at my mom’s house during the summer of 2020 just working on some paintings. I was exploring a local piece of architecture as my subject matter, a building known as Saint Augustine’s Cathedral. One reason I was exploring this was because it felt important to me, almost iconic as a Tucson landmark. I had been making an effort to incorporate more local influence into my work. This buildings influence continued turning out almost automatically in various drawings and paintings I had been working on at the time. I had even used this in the background of "The Hierophant" card in what was a somewhat Sonoran influenced Tarot deck I was working on. I had also later read that there had been some strange hauntings, reports of apparitions and a faceless nun seen levitating in the courtyard here which had caught my curiosity.
So, that particular day I was trying to do a better painting of the building and my mom took a peek at what i was working on. She said, "Oh you know your great great grandfather built that building". I did not believe her, not because she would lie to me, but it was just too weird of a statement. So, I looked it up and there it was, Quintus Monier, my grandmother’s grandfather was indeed commissioned to move from France to America to work on a series of what has become some fairly iconic architectures. Also, I had found that in order to build this, as there was no brick company to use resources to build with, he established Tucson’s first brick company. As a Tucsonan i find this quite fascinating to learn about and have included one of the few bits of information on this which I could find in the link below.
