“I love music, especially the blues, and if I weren’t an illustrator, I’d be a musician. This series, titled Me + the Devil, was created for my Hartford MFA thesis and later published as a limited-edition book. My first artwork to be truly personal in style and content, the series marked a creative and professional turning point in my career. People saw that I was finally being myself, and there was such an amazing response to that honesty. The awards and work that came from this series—the pinnacle of which was its acquisition into the permanent collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum—validated my trust in myself. Although my work has evolved since then, I look back on that time as my own crossroads, where, instead of selling my soul, I found it.”