Bay Area artist Richard Wright was born in San Francisco in 1955. He joined the Creativity Explored studio in 2012, where he quickly became known for his intricate and mulit-textured depictions of mythical beasts, undersea creatures, ancient masks, and monsters from the world of cinema. In 2014 his signature renderings were an integral part of the stage design for a rarely produced one-act opera by Benjamin Britten — based on the biblical story of Noah’s ark — mounted by the San Francisco Girls Chorus on the occasion of its thirty-fifth anniversary. His now-iconic acrylic-on-canvas Exotic Alphabet (2014) was featured in Dwell magazine, which led to commissions of similar works, including a large-scale painting for the lobby of San Francisco’s Hotel G. Many of Wright’s works are accompanied by playfully elaborate titles, such as Xenomorpph Queen the Ugly and Scary and Mean Aliean Creature, which was featured in the 2017 Creativity Explored group exhibition “Bride of Monster,” for which the artist created a series of she-monster portraits in colored pencil on black paper.