Beastie has been with me for years. He is a creature of my own making — a costume worn by many different people, yet always unmistakably himself. He began as an embodiment of childhood imagination: not the soft, comfortable parts, but the full expanse of it — the fantastical, the frightening, and everything that lives at the edge of the known world.

I have always been drawn to the way cultures across time and place give form and symbolic weight to mythical creatures — the protective spirits, the shape-shifters, the guides who appear at thresholds. Beastie lives somewhere in that lineage, though he belongs to no single tradition. He shows up everywhere: in the woods, at the water's edge, at a bar or a theater, or Mark Twains House.

He is part of my world and I keep bringing him into new ones. In some ways he is an alter ego. In others he feels entirely his own.

Currently on view at the Mark Twain Museum, Hartford, CT (through summer 2026) · Previously exhibited at the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT (2024)