Swallow Your Pride - SOLD !!!!

Painting Title: Swallow Your Pride

Medium: Acrylic on canvas, monochrome black and white

Year: 2015

Size: 18x24

Edition: Prints & Prints on Canvas Available in the Online Shop

Starting at $35

$10,000 - SOLD

Artist Statement:

A hollow skull stares out from inside a white ceramic bowl filled with Cheerios — the bright yellow logo now ghostly pale, the cereal turned to ash. This is Swallow Your Pride, my most frightening painting to date.

Someone once looked at me and said, “You’re too pretty to paint ugly paintings.” Those words cut deep. Instead of shrinking away, I created the ugliest, scariest image I could: a skull floating in the very symbol of childhood comfort and false hope.

The painting is a brutal mirror. It says exactly what that person — and so many others — refuse to see:

If you don’t swallow your pride, you will ultimately kill and destroy every opportunity, every relationship, and ultimately yourself.

People judge a book by its cover every single day. They see a pretty artist from Dallas and assume my work must be soft, colorful, and safe. They walk past this black-and-white nightmare without stopping. Good. This painting is not for them. It is for the rare ones who refuse to judge — the ones brave enough to lean in and ask for the story behind the skull. Those are my people.

Through art therapy and my own journey of trauma, rejection, and growth, I have learned that humility is the only path that keeps doors open. Pride closes them forever. As Charles R. Swindoll taught me: “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it.”

This scary little skull in a bowl of Cheerios is my loudest, quietest lesson yet: Be humble. Swallow your pride. Or watch everything you love disappear.

Ten years after it was painted, this work sold for $5,000 and was featured in Visual Arts Magazine — proof that refusing to give up turns judgment into legacy.