The Kid Who Didn't Fit In Made a World Where He Did.
Growing Up Glitter-Free in Southern Illinois
I grew up as the sensitive, creative kid in a small rural corner of southern Illinois — a place of strange, redneck people, flat land full of cornfields, and approximately zero glitter. I tried very hard to fit in. I did not. Not even a little. I stayed tucked away in my bedroom with music, friends on the television, coloring books, sketchpads, and a holy trinity of women — my mom, my aunt, and my grandma — who saw the creative spirit in me and nurtured it.
Life at home was heavy and complicated. Sometimes sharp in the way that only childhood pain can be, but with an abusive, distant dad that messed me up for the rest of my life. Art was my escape hatch, my pressure valve, my private universe. By high school, the art room had become less of a classroom and more of a witness protection program. I showed up every day, changed my identity slightly, and survived.
Surrealism found me the way the right things always do. It felt like my native tongue, the perfect place to stash secrets, build dreamscapes, and construct strange, beautiful worlds where I got to decide the rules. In the real world, things happened to me. On canvas, I happened to things.
The Canvas as a Trustworthy Friend
I've been painting for over twenty years now, and every single year it's taught me something new about what it means to be human. Painting taught me how to feel — really feel — and how to give dignity to emotions that don't have names yet. The ones that live in the chest and don't come out in words.
I learned to approach the canvas like a trustworthy friend. Honest. A little messy. No pretending. A place to spill secrets, stitch up the broken bits, and wander through the unseen parts of myself without a flashlight. No sketches, no plans, no staying inside the lines. Paper and linen held my grief, my questions, my unnamed aches. They still do.
My hands moved on instinct, guided by feeling rather than foresight. I learned how to feel my way through a painting, not think my way through it. There's a profound difference. Life, I've found, tends to make sense to me in surreal images — wild, layered, strange pictures that hold more truth than a straightforward explanation ever could. Drawing and painting is how I translate life's tangled, beautiful language. Especially the obscure sorrows. The grief that doesn't have a name. The joy too big for words. The love that outlasted the person.
Every piece I create is an emotional paper trail back to myself — but not the whole story. Think of it like sacred trails winding through wilderness. Each piece marks a place I've been, a fire I've sat beside, a weight I carried for a while. But no single painting is the whole map of who I am. My scars are woven into every brushstroke, not as wounds on display, but as proof that I've walked through fire and come out the other side.
Wolves, Wilderness, and the Things That Keep Your Heart Online
As I moved through my twenties, I discovered that staying whole required more than a studio. Writing found me. Photography found me. And then the wilderness found me in that bone-deep way that makes you wonder how you survived without it.
My husky, Levi — equal parts wolf, philosopher, and full-time drama queen — became my most loyal studio assistant and adventure companion. He reviews all my work with the critical gaze of someone who has Opinions, communicates them primarily through dramatic sighs, and has never once been wrong about when it's time to stop working and go outside. Wise creature.
Together we've wandered into wild places I didn't know I needed. Falling asleep beside a crackling fire under mountain sounds — wind through pines, the occasional owl conducting its own small midnight symphony with the coyotes— has healed parts of me that no paintbrush could quite reach. I've recovered pieces of myself on those trips.
The wilderness has become my greatest creative inspiration. Mountains don't perform. Rivers don't pretend. There is something deeply clarifying about spending time in places that have no interest in impressing you.
The Plot Twist Nobody Asked For
In 2016, life handed me a script I didn't audition for: Lyme disease. And not the tidy, resolved kind you read about. The kind that unraveled everything — my energy, my clarity, my sense of being someone who has a future they can rely on. The climb back has taken years. Stubborn, unglamorous, expensive years. More treatments than I can count. More money than I care to think about. More mornings than I'd like to admit where getting up felt like a small act of war.
But here's the thing about people who have learned to feel their way through a painting: they tend to feel their way through the dark, too. Slowly. Messily. Without a map. But forward.
"Art isn't a hobby for me. It's a lifeline — the thing that gives shape to the shapeless and keeps me tethered to the life I'm still rebuilding. I've regained enough strength to dream again — genuinely, generously dream. Joint pain, fatigue, and brain fog still like to make daily cameos, showing up uninvited like that one acquaintance who never reads the room.
When you buy a piece of my work — a painting, a card, a sticker — you're not funding a billion dollar corporation with a marketing department and quarterly projections. You're helping one guy in the mountains rebuild a life after some genuinely hard chapters, and keep doing the only thing he's ever been certain he was meant to do. That means more than I know how to say properly, so I'll just say it plainly: it means everything. Truly.
Creating From Joy (A New and Deeply Suspicious Experience)
Since moving to Flagstaff, Arizona in 2023, something unexpected has happened: life has been kind to me. I've been experiencing real, giddy, can't-believe-this-is-my-actual-wonderful-life joy — the kind I used to think was for other people, the ones who had it more figured out than me. It turns out I just needed mountains. And a wolf-dog. And a fresh start in a place where the sky does extraordinary things at sunset and the air smells like pine and possibility.
My artwork has been evolving because of it. These days I work primarily on my iPad in Procreate, usually spending two to four weeks on each illustration — building worlds in layers, chasing the exact feeling, refining until the invisible puzzle conjures into place. But the biggest shift isn't technical. It's emotional. For the first time in my life, I am creating from joy instead of survival. From abundance instead of ache. I never dreamed my life could be this good. That I'd be running my own art business, creating my own holographic sticker shop, making things because I love making them — not because making them is all that's keeping me afloat.
Both are valid. But this one tastes better.
An Ode to Stickers (A Love Story)
Now. The stickers. We need to talk about the stickers.
These are pure, uncut, unabashed joy. No deep meaning required — though they do have their own peculiar magic. My inner child is a '90s kid through and through, and if there is one thing I never outgrew, it is the sheer, ecstatic delight of a good sticker. Slapping them on notebooks, skateboards, water bottles, the back of a laptop, this was the childhood flex. The ultimate accessory. The silent declaration of personality.
I lived for scratch-and-sniff. I lived for glow-in-the-dark. But the holographic ones? The ones that shimmered and shifted with magical colors were practically sacred. Mystic little rectangles of possibility.
Now I get to make them. Now I get to bring that specific, wonderful nostalgia back into my world, and absolutely no one can tell me no. These stickers are little bursts of personality — fun-sized rebellion. Tiny declarations of color and shine in a world that sometimes forgets to shimmer. Some things from childhood are just too good to leave behind. Holographic stickers are one of them. Fight me.
The Moment I'm Making Everything For
Here's what drives all of it — the paintings, the illustrations, the stickers, the late nights, the early mornings, the stubborn insistence on doing this even when it would have been so much easier to stop.
I've reached a point in my art journey where I understand, with great clarity and some relief, that it was never just about me. My stories were the beginning — the starting place — but they were never meant to be the whole point. The whole point is the moment when you see a piece of yourself in my work. When something stirs inside you — not as advice, not as a lesson, but as recognition. As the feeling of being understood by something that didn't even know your name.
We've all had dark nights. Long roads. Heavy hearts and mornings that felt impossible. We've all had the particular exhaustion of carrying things that are too heavy and too private to explain. My work is for those moments. Not to fix them — nothing fixes them except time and grace and sometimes a very dramatic husky who demands to go for a walk — but to sit with you in them. To say: I know this place. I've been here too. And I promise, it's just a bad day. Not a bad life.
I don't want my work to be decoration. I want it to be a spark — something that catches when you need it most. A shared understanding between strangers. An invitation to feel something real in a world that sometimes moves too fast for feeling.
The friendships I've built with my collectors are among the greatest gifts this strange creative life has given me. I don't take them lightly. I strive, in everything I make and every exchange I have, to build a legacy of integrity, loyalty, and genuine human connection — one piece, one conversation, one holographic sticker at a time.
If something I create makes you feel a little less alone, a little more alive, a little more seen — then our stories have collided in exactly the way I hoped they would. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting a living, breathing, still-becoming artist. It matters more than you know.
— From me and my wolfish, deeply beloved sidekick.