“Corrosion Hazard”
30” x 40”
Oil on stretched canvas
2006

“Corrosion Hazard” was featured again in “THE HORSE BACKSTREET CHOPPERS” and was the first piece that I was forced to change for publication. Originally having a Swastika on the gas tank I was forced to remove it because the magazine was sold in Wal-Mart. Being that Wal-Mart is an important distributor for the magazine and has a long record of refusing to carry a publication for having subject manner that they do not approve of, I was unable to use the Swastika.
  My reason for using the Swastika in my original concept was to be a homage to the outlaw motorcycle culture of the 60’s and 70’s. The original use of the Swastika in the “biker” culture had little or nothing to do with the “white supremacy” image it has today. Originally it was worn by the soldiers that had fought the Nazis when they brought the motorcycles they road during the war back to the U.S. and started the whole biker scene. They wore the insignias to represent the “spoils of war” taking the emblems from the fallen Nazis they had been fighting, not because they believed what the Nazis stood for…that came later.
  Having to remove my original image from the gas tank I replaced it with the censored version of a swear word in its place. The “Eat the Rich” on the models shirt was directly aimed towards the people that can control what we are allowed to view because of the amount of capital they have. I really hate Wal-Mart as well as censorship.
  The “CORROSION HAZARD “neon was never actually in the image when I first started. About half way through the under drawing I decided to see if I could add a separate light source of neon and pull it off visually without making it look “added".The words don’t really mean anything…I just thought they looked cool.