Carlee WrightTimmy BeWell has a phrase for his art style: “psychedelic Saturday morning cartoons” with a mathematical yet spiritual undertone.
It’s a fitting description. Timmy’s work is vivid, geometric, and packed with color, often built around mandalas, symmetry, and the sense that everything is somehow connected. It feels playful and intentional with its airbrushed clouds, saturated shapes, exposed wood, and glossy finishes.
But getting to this stage took time. For years, it was cooking that paid the bills. Timmy built a career in restaurant kitchens, eventually taking on leadership roles. Art happened, slowly.
“I’ve always had an avoidance behavior when it comes to creating my art,” he said. “I thought I had to be in the right state of mind.”
Then, in late 2021, his life changed.
After a serious crash, Timmy woke in the hospital with a spinal cord injury. He was paralyzed from the chest down, spent months in the hospital, and used an electric wheelchair for close to a year. Recovery meant physical therapy, pain, and relearning what his body could do.
Timmy took the accident as a sign. “It was the universe saying, ‘Hey, stop what you are doing. You are not living your true purpose.’”
While in the hospital, he made a promise: “If I got the use of my hands back, I will use them to create every day.”
For roughly three years, Timmy spent his recovery in his garage painting, experimenting, and learning how to turn pain into something tangible. He developed new techniques, took on commissions, and began building his style.
“I think inspiration and pain create good art,” Timmy said. “A huge part of my recovery was being able to sit with the pain and learn how to transform it.”
Eventually, that work led him to Chemeketa Community College’s visual communications program, where his practice shifted again.
School taught him how to move between handmade and digital processes, use thumbnails and mood boards, think about where a finished piece will live, and create work that can adapt to different surfaces. He still hand-cuts wood, sands, gessoes, paints, masks, airbrushes, and finishes pieces in epoxy. But now the process begins with more intention.
“I always just thought of myself as a painter,” he said. “Now I feel like I am more of a multi-mode artist and designer.”
And with all Timmy has been through, those experiences now show up more fully in his work. He describes the mandalas that appear throughout his pieces as a kind of meditation, their symmetry carrying an underlying message of connectedness. Color, largely absent from his early drawings, is now expressed in full saturation.
Timmy’s work is playful. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, but the ideas underneath it are serious: resilience, mindfulness, connection, and what we choose to do with the life we have.
Or, as Timmy puts it: “Using our powers for good.”
BeWell Design Studios
This story originally ran in Press Play Salem issue 29 (Fall 2026)
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Author: Carlee Wright
Carlee Wright is a community instigator with a grand love for Salem and notably fashionable shoes (Hello, John Fluevog!) who turns waste into wearable art in her "spare" time.
The Instigator
