Tom Martin's autobiography communicates to us the power of the human spirit as he continued to paint and live his life with great humor after stricken
with chronic progressive multiple sclerosis. The powerful and whimsical paintings that enrich his autobiography often slash through the arrogance and
self-importance of his subjects to communicate their content with power and color. That Tom ever painted at all and that he continued to paint after stricken with a debilitating neurological disease were a struggle against odds that should have discouraged the strongest of us. In the face of great adversity, the comic spirit of his art communicated through the vibrate colors and the intense but simple themes cut to the core of the human psyche.
Meggs, Susan Martin: - Susan Martin Meggs holds an MS in Educational Administration from Fordham University and an MFA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin. In New York City, she lived for thirty years in the vibrant SoHo art district and worked as an exhibit designer, commercial artist, educational administrator, and professor at The Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Western Connecticut State University, New York Institute of Technology and College of New Rochelle. She was Curator of Exhibits and Education for the National Museum of the American Indian and was a guest lecturer in Native American Art and Culture at colleges throughout the east coast. After Tom Martin's death, Susan moved to North Carolina, where she joined the faculty in the Department of Art at East Carolina University, served as a member of the Honors College Faculty, and is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Interior Design. Over 30 of her research publications have focused on service-learning, interdisciplinary pedagogy for art and healthcare, and the use of virtual reality as a learning environment. She has presented scholarly papers nationally and internationally at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sapienza University in Rome, and Glasgow and Chester Universities, England, among others. Honors include the Marquis and the Covington Who's Who in America and the East Carolina University Scholar-Teacher and Wall of Fame Awards. Her creative work is in the permanent collections of Chase Manhattan Bank and Maytag Corporation, as well as numerous university and private collections here and abroad. In New York, she exhibited at Sotheby's, the Drawing Center, and A.I.R. and was represented by Barbara Toll Fine Arts. Her paintings and drawings have been featured in numerous national juried exhibitions.
Meggs, William: - William "Bill" Meggs is a physician, scientist, and writer. He received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Syracuse University, where he became close friends with Tom Martin, an MFA student in the Art School. He received a National Science Foundation Post-doctoral Fellowship to do research at C.E.R.N. in Geneva, Switzerland. He was also a research physicist at Rochester and McGill. In a major career change, he received an MD degree from the University of Miami's Ph.D. to M.D. program and returned to Rochester for an internal medicine residency. He did subsequent training in clinical immunology at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center and medical toxicology at New York University. He is currently a professor of medical toxicology and emergency medicine at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. His non-fiction book for the general public, The Inflammation Cure, published by McGraw-Hill, was favorably reviewed in the New York Times and the Library Journal. He co-authored The Inflammation Cure Cookbook, Health, and Safety in Farming, Fisheries, and Forestry, and Biomarkers of Immunotoxicology, published by the National Academies Press. He has published over 60 research articles in the physics and medical literature.
