I was an odd child. Nowadays, I’m still odd—just bigger.

A short time after my fourth birthday, three things became apparent to my mother: 1) I had taught myself to read without her knowing, 2) I was a precocious baby artist, and 3) I was obsessed with fairy tales and creepy stories.

The effect of these three qualities was compounded by the fact that I also had childhood epilepsy—specifically, temporal lobe epilepsy. A trademark of this type of epilepsy is hallucinations (auditory, visual, and olfactory). The hallucinations I experienced as a child fed my imagination. Even though I could distinguish between the seizures and the “real” world, I became hyperfixated on drawing the things I saw and the emotions they aroused within me.

Cut to the present, I no longer experience seizures. Even without them, my interest—or fascination—with the bizarre, strange, uncanny, and otherworldly persists, and it's where the inspiration for my art comes from. Regardless of the subject matter, I aim for my work to feel familiar but alien—to be pleasant to look at but unsettling.