07/13/2026
Everything you need to know about why I paint monsters is hiding in these three books.
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This Little Monster
Oil, acrylic & mixed media on canvas
12 × 12 inches
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As a child, the world is poetry, storybooks, imagination… and monsters that only live under the bed.
“Home I return across the sea,
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear Land of Story-Books.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Land of Story-Books
Then come the years when you’re still figuring out who you are. I was in my twenties, newly transplanted from California to Texas. One of my favorite things to do was visit the rotating exhibits at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. After one of those visits, I brought home the From Renoir to Picasso catalog. I didn’t know it then, but it would become the bookmark for that chapter of my life.
My life at the time looked like one of those Impressionist paintings. The details hadn’t come into focus yet, but I trusted the picture that was emerging. I trusted where life was headed.
Then come the family sagas. The stories we inherit. The conflicting memories. The versions of the truth that never quite line up.
As I was styling this painting, I opened the cover of the poetry book I’d always believed had been given to me as a child. Inside was a handwritten inscription dated January 25, 1968. I was born in 1971. The inscription had always been there. I had simply never noticed it.
It wasn’t a life-changing discovery. It was a detail. But it reminded me that the biggest shifts in our lives don’t always come from finding something new. Sometimes they come from finally noticing what was there all along. How fitting that something I’d believed since childhood simply wasn’t true. Not every forgotten detail changes your life… but every one teaches you to look a little closer.
Maybe that’s what my monsters are all about. They were never really monsters at all. They’re people carrying histories we don’t always see. We all learn to soften the hard edges, put on a smile, and keep moving forward. The flowers don’t erase the sharp teeth… they just remind us that beauty and reality have always existed side by side.
