Everyday Notes: Jerry Montoya’s Post-it Portraits
Color Local Gallery
Erector Square
315 Peck St., Building 3, 1st Floor, Studio D
Through April 24, 2026, Tues-Thurs 12-4 p.m. or by appointment
People keep giving Jerry Montoya post-its. Pink ones, green ones, classic yellow. They gift him stacks of the office supply with a simple, “Hey, you like these.”
He takes them, whatever color they might be; he’s not fussy. The Meriden artist uses his collection of post-its to record scenes from his life, mostly of his beloved family members. His intricate drawings and oil paintings give viewers a peek into what matters most to him.
I caught up with Montoya a day after his 40th birthday, at his show Everyday Notes, the first-ever exhibit at new gallery Color Local in Erector Square in Fair Haven. On the walls were rows of his post-it creations. Super-thin white highlights cut through the dreamy fuzz of thick graphite strokes. A center table held a collection of Montoya’s sketchbooks, duct-taped and decorated with treasures like a “Way to go!” sticker given to him by his daughter, Raya.
Workplace Distraction
“All you do is draw all day,” Montoya’s boss at an HVAC warehouse used to tell him. His sketchbook became a flashpoint in the workplace, a scapegoat for inefficiencies. So Montoya started leaving his sketchbook in the car, escaping to work on it only on breaks.
With the drawings went evidence of Montoya’s double life as an artist. One day, a coworker told him, “I don’t believe you draw. Prove it.”
The coworker showed a picture of his daughter to Montoya, who proceeded to make a portrait on a post-it in 15 minutes.
Was it a ploy for free art? Maybe.
Was it also the humble beginnings of a post-it phenomenon? Uh-huh.
Montoya kept going with the post-its, making more sketches and posting them one by one on his desk at work. His boss told him the company president didn’t like it — a conclusion later rebuffed by the president himself, who said the post-its were the whole reason he took regular walks around the warehouse.
By this point, the post-its were already gone from Montoya’s desk.
They were living a new life, on Montoya’s refrigerator at home.
Fridge Decor
Montoya once tried to keep a studio that was separate from his living space. “It was too much,” he said, to be away from his family. Now, he doesn’t even work in a different room. He needs to be, as he called it, “in the bubble.”
When Montoya’s post-its came down from his warehouse desk, the “bubble” was their next destination. He posted the art on his refrigerator, where they enjoyed a daily home audience.
Soon, the sketches multiplied beyond reasonable 2D display.
As “life became…life,” Montoya said, juggling kids, family, and work meant cranking out more post-it drawings instead of spending months on a large-scale painting. Montoya said it was a way for him to feel like “I did something today for myself.”
“It’s compulsive,” he said. Every single day, if he’s not scribbling in his sketchbook, he’s making yet another post-it wonder.
Not even the world’s largest fridge would be enough to hold it all. Montoya took the post-its down from his trusty kitchen appliance and stacked them in a box.
Box Life
One day, an art handler asked to visit Montoya’s studio. “I don’t have a studio,” Montoya told him. “I have a house.”
So the art handler came to the house. He poked around, asking Montoya if there was more to see.
“I don’t know, man,” Montoya remembers saying. “I got this box.”
Inside were 200 post-it notes. The art handler took a look and asked Montoya to make more. He needed enough to fill a gallery.
Gallery Walls
Now, Montoya’s post-its are in shows like the one currently up at Color Local. That doesn’t mean he views the drawings in a new light. He’s always seen what was special about them, since that first day in the warehouse.
Gallery walls do provide a bit more surface area than a workplace desk or a refrigerator. Jenny Krauss, who runs Color Local, counted how many post-its are in Montoya’s show: 287. Together with Montoya’s sketchbooks, they reflect the life Montoya has drawn together.
Many of the post-it portraits are of Montoya’s wife Amaris, who he met when they were both dishwashers at the Old Lyme Country Club. Montoya was making $10 an hour and taking home cuts of steak leftovers. Suds – I mean sparks – flew.
Now, the pair has been together 20 years.
They dreamed of having a kid. A couple years into their marriage, Montoya made a drawing of what he imagined their future child might look like. That drawing now lives on the first page of a sketchbook dedicated to Montoya’s drawings of their first-born, Esme.
“I gave him more hair,” Montoya said, comparing that sketch with a depiction of Esme’s first days, from when he was born four years later. When Raya came along, Montoya started a new sketchbook for drawings of her.
“I don’t comprehend what I feel for them, I just feel a lot of it,” he said.
As Montoya maps his world with post-its, he measures time by family milestones. When I asked him how long he’s lived in Meriden, he said, “Let me see, I know by my daughter’s age.” He thought a bit, then translated for me: 11 years.
When I tried to guess which post-its were the earliest ones, Montoya said, “If my daughter has glasses, it’s not as old.”
A year’s time can be measured by Montoya’s yearly drawing of his late father, who came to the U.S. from Colombia with Montoya’s mother when the artist was in the womb.
Not all of Montoya’s post-it supplies are gifted. They still come from the workplace as well, like they have from the start. Besides the warehouse gig, he has worked as a chef in restaurants across CT and NY, and now as a substitute teacher in Hamden and Cheshire and a science show performer. No matter the job, there’s a good chance his paper of choice is already there.
To this day, Montoya says he has yet to draw what Amaris really looks like. In his mind, he still hasn’t quite captured how beautiful she is. Same with his kids. He keeps trying every day.
Montoya doesn’t have to go far to find something deep to say in his art: “I have my kids and my wife.”
Hearing his stories and seeing the fleeting memories he rushed to render for post-it perpetuity, I got a sense of what that means to him. Raya losing a tooth, Esme drawing two eyes above his mouth and frowning, Amaris putting her hair up—these are all moments worthy of a 3”x3” sketch. In Montoya’s world of squares, raising a family looks like the adventure of a lifetime.
“You can invite people into your world,” he realized, “and people find that interesting.”
