Published on the occasion of the exhibition Forrest Bess at The Fridericianum, Kassel, My Own Personal Bess is an artist’s book by Richard Hawkins. It is composed of collages, for which Hawkins combined reproductions of paintings by the visionary artist with selected text fragments and advertisements from the article “His Name Was Forrest Bess,” published in 1981 by Texas Monthly magazine. The book empathically approaches both the artistic work and biography of Bess, whom Hawkins discovered in his youth and considers to be a pioneering figure. Today Hawkins’s own work has likewise become an important point of reference for a younger generation of artists.