The Meaning

I created this “Book Cover Illustration” for a book that was inspired by all the different sketches and paintings of my life that I have done since 2003. They started to come together, and I began to draft this book around 2017 and I finally finished it around 2020. The editing took a lot longer than I expected and “The Secret That Kills / Spirit That Saves” was finally finished in 2022.

Miraculous Process

To be quite honest, writing this book was a difficult and exhausting process so I had to rest and take many breaks in between writing each chapter. There were so many traumatic events that happened in my life, which had been suppressed since childhood, I thought it was quite miraculous that I could purge them in this book. I chose the image of the angel holding up a soldier who had been wounded (from a painting I did in 2019) to represent how God held me up during the writing of this book.

What seemed normal in relating to my parents growing up as a child and into adolescence, I realized later in adulthood, was not normal or healthy. The reality of my parents’ true sadistic nature was difficult to face and work through, but it did help me understand and let go of what God had never intended for my life in the first place.

The Process

I found it quite interesting that I was able to capture the abuse and fear I experienced in my early childhood by using childlike jagged red lettering.

Expressing Abuse and Fear

After drafting this lettering, I went over it with a red hue and then continued to fill in the background with Mars Black paint. I left just a small amount of room inbetween the red and black paint to help the lettering pop with the original color of the canvas.