This is the only digital work I ever made — and the last painting I completed before closing my physical studio for what I thought would be forever.

Created during a challenging period of my life, it began as a frantic late-night experiment on a new Wacom tablet: a deliberate attempt to externalize angst in a medium that felt as unmoored as I did. The snarling monkey and the collapsed figure are not illustrations of a story; they are the story itself, rendered in electric color and fractured mark-making that only the computer — and then my hand returning with real paint — could achieve.

After this piece I left traditional painting behind for twenty-five years and stepped entirely into virtual worlds, where I designed psychological spaces for others instead of excavating my own.

“Shock the Monkey” is therefore both an ending and a hinge: the final scream of the first act, and the first whisper of the digital second. It remains singular — unrepeated, unrepeatable, and the bridge between everything that came before and everything that has come after.

Beverly G. McCarter