Glenn Ferguson Update

I’ve been asked quite frequently about how my friend and fellow caricature artist Glenn Ferguson is doing with his recovery. In case you missed the story, Glenn is an award winning caricaturist and a leading artist at the caricature art concession in Universal Studios, Florida. On Jan 1st a disgruntled co-worker whose contract had been terminated the day before came back to Universal Studios property and attacked Glenn with a pair of scissors. Glenn suffered serious brain damage from the attack, and his immediate survival was in doubt. Thankfully, after over 5 hours of surgery, Glenn survived and began a long, arduous road to recovery.

I’m very happy to say Glenn was released from the hospital this weekend and is back home. His injury has affected many things from his speech to his vision to his coordination and cognition. He still has a lot of hard work, time, and care needed to claw his way back to being able to function normally and eventually get back to doing what he loves and is exceptionally good at… drawing caricatures. Brain injuries are filled with questions and unknowns. However his progress so far has pleased his doctors and therapists, and there is no reason to doubt that his positive progress will continue. Like I said it will be a long road but there is every reason to hope Glenn can fully recover from this.

As you can imagine, this is all going to cost a lot of money. Glenn is a self employed individual, and his health insurance was of the privately purchased variety (translation: not very extensive). The caricature community is a tight knit group, and immense support has been ongoing to help Glenn and his wife JoAnn through this tremendously difficult time. Not only has a GoFundMe campaign raised a lot of money to help, but caricature artists like Alex Hughes and Celestia Ward have organized benefit events (i.e. “Glennefits”) in places like Massachusetts and Las Vegas to raise money. The image above is a screen capture from a video of the Las Vegas “Glennefit” organized by Celestia that I was lucky to be able to participate in a week ago Sunday. You can see the full video here… sorry it’s only on Facebook so I cannot embed it here and you might have to have a Facebook account to see it. If you can’t or don’t see it take my word for it, it’s a wonderful example of how people can come together and help those that need it.

In case you haven’t already done so, you can help out by visiting Glenn’s GoFundMe page and giving whatever you can afford. Every little bit helps.

Rock on, Glenn. I’m looking forward to seeing you back behind the drawing board soon.