This is a funny little story….

For most of my career, I made art I could never physically touch. A life-threatening allergic reaction to traditional materials meant I spent years working exclusively in digital mediums. Then in 2018, a new medication changed that. I could finally pick up a brush again, but it also meant starting completely over: new tools, new surfaces, new muscle memory, while trying to hold onto a career I had spent decades building. For those years the work became about catching up, about skill and survival, and somewhere along the way the joy got quiet.

By October 2024, I was tired in a way that felt bigger than rest could fix. Twenty-plus years of being your own brand, your own business, your own standard-keeper takes something out of you. So I did something a little absurd. I invented someone else.

I created an Instagram account for a fictional artist named Calliope Lark. No history, no reputation to protect, no one watching to see whether the new work fit the old work. She just painted folk art cats and other animals and posted them. People responded. Her following grew. Her paintings began to sell.

What I did not expect was how much that anonymity would unlock. Without the weight of my own name on it, I started painting differently in my visible professional work. Looser, stranger, more like myself than I had been in years. And slowly, Calliope’s voice and my own began to sound like the same thing, because they were. When the two bodies of work started visibly converging, I knew it was time to stop keeping them separate because the crossover was starting to become quite obvious. I stepped out and announced who Calliope really was.

Those paintings became Folk Yeah Cats: work made in a quiet season of having nothing to prove.

These little friends make my day, I hope they make yours!