Artist’s Statement

I love art. I love books. Those two concepts define my life experiences as a book artist. 

My life changed forever on November 22, 1989, simply getting into the car for a family visit. For the next six years, I spent most of my days flat on my back in severe, chronic pain. Embracing technology was the only path leading toward the eventual continuation of my career. Little did I realize that the new technologies would become the perfect tools for me to uniquely combine words and images. Though my condition persists, my once desperate choice has blossomed into an invigorating artistic journey.

Over the last twenty-five years, I have created an original body of satirical comic stories composed of kaleidoscopic quilt-like patterns inspired by banned 1950s American horror and crime comics. Our society is still battling over the post-WWII issues from my formative years in the 1950s: gun violence, civil rights, nuclear annihilation, racial inequalities, women's rights, the fear of youth culture and more. The WKWELHMW Project focuses on book censorship and the notorious American (comic) book burnings held from 1948-1952 concurrent with the communist
Red Scare. 

My comic art is a stinging indictment of the self-appointed culture wars critic of the 1950s, psychologist Dr. Fredric Wertham. He was the author of the bestseller, Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed horror and crime comics caused young people to go on delinquent, crime-filled sprees and perverted sexual escapades.
I take Wertham's disproven quasi-scientific arguments to the extreme by applying his same bogus method of removing micro-sections of the era’s horror and crime comics in order to criticize their creators. (This "parsing" of content is the same tactic right-wing extremists use today.) The words and pictures in my images come directly from these same 70-year-old comics. 

As a book artist, I enjoy temporarily putting work in unique environments so that an individual or small group of people might "bump into the installation" and contem-plate the meaning of the project as we have done throughout the United States,
Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and, most recently, in Iceland.