Cryptids, Creatures,
and the Unknown

In the painting Crawl, something moves at the edge of the frame. A tail slips through the grass at the treeline, serpentine and ambiguous, almost indistinguishable from the undergrowth. The creatures in Night, For Now belong to a lineage of folkloric danger: Appalachian skin-walkers, the Salvadoran myths like La Siguanaba or the Cadejo, which appear at crossroads to travelers far from home. My father, who often traversed between the U.S. and El Salvador, swears he saw it once, on a road in Mexico, and has told that story many times! These are figures that live on the edges. Never fully seen, they exist in the corner of your eye and disappear the moment you turn to look.

These figures that move through darkness, that watch without declaring themselves, that threaten the vulnerable and the innocent, are not only creatures of folklore; they also echo the lived experience of people who cross borders, who move through terrain that was not made for them, who understand that danger does not always announce itself.

But The Mimic (8 × 10, oil) adds complexity. Rendered in the same visual language as the figures I began painting early on, the Mimic carries a sense of interior life, perhaps even sorrow. If the monster is painted with tenderness, who is the monster?

José Guadalupe Posada understood that the figure society renders inhuman is often the one that carries the most humanity. To villainize what you do not understand is its own form of violence. These creatures can then be seen as symbols, even mirrors. The figures quietly ask a simple question: why does the unknown feel so threatening to us?

Hugo Regan,
March 2026