John O'Reilly Exhibition at Miller Yzerski Gallery

The War Years Collages are and old man's reflections on what he imagines he has experienced as we boy living at the New Jersey coast during World War II. His childhood imagination was inspired by seeing soliders patrolling the beach and torpedoed ships and debris scattered along his seashore palyground. These remembered feelings are now collapsed through the sensitivities of chidren's pencil drawings, fused with the bold violence expressed in their coloring books. The source materials are children's school drawings and coloring books, how-to books, and storybooks form the 1880's through the 1950's.