William Walmsley was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama in 1923. After serving in Europe in World War II, he studied art in Paris, first at the Académie Julian and later at the Atelier of Edmond & Jacques Desojobert, which was a meeting place for artists, especially those discovering lithography and its powerful experimental nature. Walmsley earned his BA and MA at the University of Alabama and began teaching at Florida State University in the early 1960s, where he taught lithography because, as he once said, "there was no one else to teach it." From the beginning Walmsley earned a reputation for impressive technical ability (he was the inventor of flourescent lithography) for the overt irony, humor, and puns found in his prints through his "alter ego" Ding Dong Daddy (based, Walmsley said, on a popular song "I'm a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas, and you oughta see me do my stuff." Walmsley holds the record "for the longest series of prints in the history of art," from the 1960s through the turn of the century. In the last decade or so of his life, he continued his self-exploration with a series of "self-portraits," with titles such as "Death of Art" and "Oh Joy, Garbage Day." His works are in the collections of the Chicago Art Institute, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Gallery (London), Brooklyn Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, to name only some. Thomas Deans Fine Art represents the artist's estate.