When he was invited to create a mural at the Joan Miró Foundation in 2010, the American illustrator Brian Rea was working full-time as an art director for the opinion section of the New York Times, a stressful job that caused him a lot of anxiety. A compulsive list-maker, Rea had started writing down in his diary all the things that caused him stress with the goal of reducing his anxiety. The list grew and grew until Rea had the idea of turning it into one of the murals to paint at the Joan Miró Foundation, the piece Fears. “It was a wall of words, and I remember how the public looked at it and how they reacted,” explains Rea. “People crying, people laughing, people pointing at parts of it. As an illustrator, you don't have much contact with your audience. Yes, someone would tell me once in a while that they liked a drawing of mine, and that was it. So seeing people's reactions in real time was very important to me. But, at the end of the day, it was a text-based work, and I decided to work on achieving that level of emotional resonance in my visual works.”