User:Mliu92/sandbox/William Walmsley (artist)

William Aubrey Walmsley (1923–2003) was an American artist who worked in Pop Art and invented the fluorescent lithograph; in addition, he was a professor of printmaking at Florida State University. His best-known works are a long-running series entitled Ding Dong Daddy, after the exploits of Francis Van Wie, which he started in 1962 and continued until his death in 2003.

Early life and education
Walmsley was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on October 9, 1923, and moved with his parents shortly thereafter to Pueblo, Colorado, where he graduated from high school.

Walmsley served in the European theater of World War II, where he would save the rationed treats (candy and cigarettes) and resell them to the other men in the unit after they had consumed theirs; he used the profits to fund trips to Paris during his free days, where he would absorb "all [the art] that was still available". After the war, he attended the University of Alabama on the GI Bill, but would spend his junior year at the Academie Julian, continuing to explore art in Paris. Upon his return to the United States, he studied at the Art Students league in New York, then took up graduate studies at Tuscaloosa, earning his BFA in 1951 and MA in 1953.

Career
He began teaching in the 1950s and joined the faculty of Florida State University in 1962, where he taught until his retirement in 1989. In 1962, he found and restored a 19th century lithography press and kicked off the Ding Dong Daddy print series, which depicts the eponymous character. As described by the Spartanburg Art Museum, "Ding Dong Daddy is a comedic character in Walmsley's work, who by adopting the nonsensical antics and origin story of a jester, is able to criticize, question, and send-up parts of American culture which would otherwise be fraught with controversy."