Chico Montecristi — Original Oil Paintings

The Artist

Chico
Montecristi

Born in Santiago, Dominican Republic in 1988, José Chavez — who paints as Chico Montecristi — grew up in the South Bronx. He completed his B.S. in Public Health and M.S.Ed. in Spanish Education at the University of Rochester, where he lived until 2019.

He is a painter, writer, and educator. His work has been exhibited across Arizona at Arts HQ (Surprise), Raíces Taller 222 and &Gallery (Tucson), and First Studio Gallery (Phoenix). He is a recipient of the Arizona Commission on the Arts Creative Youth Grant and a finalist in the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.

He paints people — mostly women — without sentimentality and without reduction. The frames are handmade. The surfaces are chosen, not given. The subjects look back.

Maternity portrait in front of painted mural

Maternity portrait · Original oil mural backdrop · Tucson, AZ

Public Work

Commissioned Murals

In 2022, Chico completed a commissioned mural for the Amphitheater School District in Tucson — bold, colorful, architectural. That same year he founded the Rita Indiana Student Art Center, a free arts program for low-income youth in the neighborhood.

Commissioned mural — Amphitheater School District, Tucson, AZ · 2022

7 Days of Coffee · Oil on Panel

A Bunch of Coffee

Honoring one of my oldest patrons, Claire Bunch!

"Coffee has been a part of my life ever since I was a boy. I can still remember the aroma of toasting, grinding the beans with a wooden plank and sipping from a small tin cup my mother would pass to me at 5 AM, every week."

— Chico Montecristi

Oil on panel · 7 × 5 inches · Original, signed · $25 shipping included · Click any painting to learn more

Novella

The Hunt

The
Hunt

Chico Montecristi

A Novella

Available

Novella · ~25,000 words · 7 chapters
Dark psychological thriller / Southern Gothic noir
Set in small-town Colorado

About the Book

Gertrude Barrow — beloved teacher, community pillar — is found dead. Her husband John is questioned, defended by a hotshot New York lawyer, and eventually released. The town gossips. The sheriff investigates. And Michelle, Gertrude's daughter, watches it all with the quiet patience of someone who already knows the ending.

Because Michelle killed her mother. At eight years old. And has spent her whole life becoming exactly what she always was.

A Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards Finalist — University of Arizona, 2020.

$9.99

PDF · Digital Edition

Non-editable

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Prose · 2017–Present

Writing

Literary fiction in Spanish, English, and Mandarin Chinese. Three manuscripts in development: a novella rooted in the South Bronx and Dominican Republic, a short story collection set between the Dominican coast and New York, and a collection of letters written across a December.

Recoleta

una novela corta

Chico Montecristi

Spanish · Novella

Forthcoming

Recoleta

Novella · ~11,600 words
Literary fiction in Spanish
South Bronx & Dominican Republic

A narrator who sleeps to avoid waking. An uncle called La Comadreja, counting his amputations. A basement apartment on Fulton Avenue that becomes, somehow, the whole world.

Recoleta is dedicated to all mothers. It's a story about what boys inherit from the men who raise them — in the South Bronx, in the Dominican Republic, in the spaces between.

Seeking publication. Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards Finalist, 2020.

Contact About This Work

Noches
de Maya

cuentos

Chico Montecristi

Spanish · Stories

Forthcoming

Noches de Maya

Short fiction · 9 stories
Literary fiction in Spanish
Dominican Republic & New York

A woman who doesn't notice her husband has already died. A man counting the bones of someone who left. Two strangers who cross a river and don't come out the same. Nine stories written in Spanish, each one turning on a moment of irreversible attention.

The collection opens in the Dominican Republic — the sea, the salinas, the dark — and ends in the Bronx, with a death close to Fordham Road. Mueren dos is the last story.

Seeking publication.

Contact About This Work

Mi Pájaro
del Río

我河口的鸟

Chico Montecristi

Mandarin · Letters

Forthcoming

Mi Pájaro del Río

我河口的鸟

Letter collection · 9 pieces
Written in Mandarin Chinese
December 2017, Rochester, New York

Nine letters written in Mandarin to a woman I called my river mouth bird. I am Dominican. I learned the language because of her. I kept writing after she was gone.

Dumplings. Baijiu. Montauk in December. A postcard I never sent. The smell of sesame oil that still makes me cry.

A collection written in a borrowed language — the foreignness is real, and intentional.

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Custom Work

Commission a Painting

Every commissioned work is an original oil painting, made to your specifications. The process begins with a conversation — a reference, a memory, a face you want preserved.

Pricing

Small (8 × 10 in): $250
Medium (11 × 14 in): $400
Large (16 × 20 in): $600
Extra Large (18 × 24+ in): $900

Custom framing available. Shipping included for US orders.

Process

Send a reference photo and your vision. A 50% deposit secures your slot. Completion time is typically 3–6 weeks. You receive progress photos throughout the process. Final payment before shipment.

What You Receive

An original oil painting, signed by the artist. A certificate of authenticity. Carefully packaged for shipping. And something no print can replicate — a surface that holds light differently every hour of the day.

Begin a Commission

From the Studio

The Letter

Issue No. 6 March 31, 2026

There is a bird in one of my paintings that nobody painted. I mean I put it there, yes — a silhouette, dark against blue-green — but I did not plan it. My hand moved and the bird appeared, and I left it because it knew something I did not.

The painting is The Dreamer. A woman looking upward, chin resting on her fist, the kind of pose you fall into without realizing it. Behind her the background is lush — deep blues and greens that feel like the air just before rain in the Caribbean, thick and alive. And above her, that bird, drifting. She is not watching it. She is somewhere else entirely. The bird is for us, the ones looking in.

I painted this one in Yuma on a Sunday when the heat had broken just enough to open the windows. There was a stillness in the room that got into the work. The brushstrokes are looser here than in most of my portraits — I was not trying to capture her so much as follow her. Wherever she was going in her mind, I wanted to be nearby. The fist under her chin is not tension. It is the way you hold yourself when you are thinking something you are not ready to say out loud.

I think about longing a lot when I paint. Not longing for a person, necessarily — longing for a version of the day that almost happened. A conversation that got close but turned. A place you stood once and knew you would not stand again. That is what I see in this woman's upward gaze. She is not dreaming of the future. She is remembering something that has not happened yet.

The collection is open and every original is one of one. If The Dreamer or any other piece has stayed with you, write to me at chicomontecristi@gmail.com. I like hearing what people see before we talk about anything else.

— Chico

Chico
Montecristi

A Woman's Touch