Confessions of a Lowbrow Storyteller

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For thirteen years, I’ve been trying to push my art up the Fine Art Mountain. You know the one, all white walls and quiet reverence, where everything smells faintly of varnish and ambition.

I thought if I just climbed hard enough, refined enough, and framed my digital collages just so, I could make it to the top. Maybe, one day, I’d hang in a gallery where people whispered in front of my work, their hands folded behind their backs as if they were standing in church.

But somewhere along the way, I realized something: That mountain wasn’t mine to climb.

The Long Climb

When I started making digital collage, I was desperate for legitimacy.

I layered my photographs and antique ephemera into surreal fairy-tale worlds, and every time I showed them, someone would inevitably ask, “But is it real art?” I’d smile, nod, and talk about composition and color theory, about narrative structure and symbolism, anything to convince them (and myself) that what I made belonged in the same conversation as oils and marble and canvas.

For years, I submitted to juried shows, reworded artist statements, tried to speak in the dialect of Fine Art. I wanted to belong. But Fine Art never wanted to belong to me.

And that’s okay.

The Moment I Stopped Apologizing

It happened quietly, as these things do.

I was at a market, surrounded by prints of my strange little dream-worlds, and someone stopped in front of one. She smiled, tilted her head, and said, “This reminds me of my grandmother’s stories.”

Something clicked. That moment, that single connection between one person and one image, mattered more than any curator’s approval ever could.

That’s when I realized: I don’t make Fine Art. I make story art. I make the kind of pictures that whisper, “Once upon a time, but not quite.”

And that’s beautiful in its own way.

Lowbrow, but Proud

So here I am, a self-declared lowbrow artist: a teller of small stories in a world obsessed with grand ones.

My work may never hang in the Louvre or the Met, but it hangs in kitchens, in hallways, in the quiet corners of people’s lives where it can make them pause and feel something.

That’s its own kind of sacred.

Art doesn’t have to be high to reach deep. It doesn’t have to be sanctioned to be sincere. It just has to tell the truth as we see it.

And my truth is this: I make digital collages that blend folklore, whimsy, and a touch of the uncanny. I stitch together worlds that shouldn’t exist but do, if only for a moment.

That’s not “fine.”It’s mine.

The Small Impacts That Matter

Art isn’t only about the history books.

Sometimes it’s about the woman who stops and smiles at your booth because your collage reminds her of home. It’s about the child who points at a fox in a waistcoat and asks what his name is. It’s about the tiny connections that ripple outward, quiet and personal, like candlelight shared from one wick to another.

That’s the art I want to make, and the life I want to live.

So here’s my declaration: I am a lowbrow artist. I am a storyteller in pixels and texture and myth. I am not climbing the Fine Art Mountain anymore. I’m walking the crooked, moss-covered paths at its base, listening for stories in the wind.

And that’s exactly where I belong.

Meet Lucien Devereux

If my collages are stories in still life, then Tongue of the Serpent is what happens when the pictures start to move, when the ghosts in the frames begin to whisper back.

Lucien Devereux was born out of that whisper.

He’s the curator of The Krewe of the Morningstar, a strange little shop tucked into the French Quarter where every object is haunted by a story, and every story wants to be remembered. He’s part ex-mortal, part collector, part reluctant guardian of all the things that shouldn’t exist, but somehow do.

Lucien is what happens when beauty and ruin fall in love.

He walks through New Orleans like a man half in shadow, carrying pieces of heaven he can’t return and pieces of hell he never asked for. His shop is his sanctuary and his confession. Every cursed trinket, every haunted portrait, every deal struck at the crossroads says something about him. About us. About the way we all keep the past, even when it burns.

Through Tongue of the Serpent, I get to explore the same thing I do in my collages, the strange beauty of imperfection, the poetry of the haunted ordinary. Lucien’s world is full of broken saints and beautiful monsters. People who can’t quite escape what they are, but still try to build meaning from the wreckage.

He’s not a fine-art kind of man. He’s a storyteller, just like me.