Salut Mental

How I have responded to commissioned sensitive issues.

I don’t want to be so arrogant and pretend that my ‘speciality ‘ has become to respond to the visualization of the human struggle but I having being ‘label’ for being ‘So dark’, I believe it is Johnny Cash that was called ” the man in black “, but lets face it he had the guts to go and sing in jails song critical off the incarceration establishment – I don’t know if I will have ever the courage to volunteer teaching art in such a places even so it is possibly the most needed…lets face it art schools and art gallery are the privilege of a small segment of an’elite’ population. This is in part of the reason why my ‘art work’ lays out in newsprint rather that inlaid into silver or gold. If you want to see it go and get the newspaper in a recycling bean, it has no restriction of access …but it would not indulge you, flatter you …and rarely lie to you otherwise what would be the sense, and like a very dear and close friend would say : ‘ you may as well die!’

It is the “dying” theme that has invited me to start this page, not to be a party ‘pooper’ but rather because to respond to a new assignment on  ‘ suicide ‘.

I have handle so far assignments on: dead, diseases, rape, torture, alcoholism, of course depression, ‘natural’ and not so natural environmental disasters, ‘terrorism’, jail riots, one of the worse being starvation…

In fact many years ago I already got an assignment on similar ‘suicide’ theme.  It came [at the time by fax] from Paris a 3:00 am, it was on a morning of Dec. 24. it was snowing in New York City and everything would have seem almost normal except for the fact that 2 hours before a friend [who had surgery the day before] and I barely made it out alive from her building fire escape , the entire place was burning.

From an endless list on the subject:

  • “Salud Mental” -El Mundo, Madrid, Spain, published on March 16, 2008
  • alcohol dependency for women” – Rutgers University, April 2011.
  • Jesus in America” – Utah State University Press,  September 2009.
  • “Terrorism in Canada” University of Montreal, Canada,September 2009
  • The Civil Rights Reader – This book cover has been chosen for the Association of American University Presses’ 2009 Book, Jacket and Journal Show in the jacket and cover division. The linocut was commissioned by Georgia University Press; publication date: December 2008
  • “le climat change, les epidemies progressent” -Courrier International magazine in May 2009 (No 965), Paris, France
  • “At Home Anywhere” University of Notre Dame, October, 2010.
  • “Darfur Fleeting Moment “the New York Times Week in Review, May 21, 2006
  • “Save the Gnostics “ “In Iraq, a 2,000-year-old culture is about to be eradicated” – the New York Times, October 6, 2007.
  • “Guantánamo by the Numbers “ –  the New York Times, November 10, 2007.
  • “Seeing Climate Policy for Tree ” Make forestry credits a bigger part of the Kyoto Protocol” – the New York Times, November 4, 2006.


Drawings, linoleum cuts, photographs and texts copyright Raymond Verdaguer, 2012.