Ned Shwartz

Mariah Carey "The Emancipation of Mimi"

"I did this drawing of Mariah Carey’s “The Emancipation of Mimi” because it was the #1 best selling album of 2005 selling nearly 6 million copies."

Born with no hands, Ned Schwartz participated in a fledgling hand transplant project in Norway the year of 1986. Under Dr. Alesund’s astute direction, a team of manacular transpologists worked assiduously in a 14 hour operation to attach a set of donated hands to Ned’s stumps. The result was not an immediate success. Dr Alesund had taken into account the fact that Ned would still be growing, while the hands most likely would not. With this in mind, the team had decided to attach a pair of full grown man’s hands to Ned, which made his teenage years awkward and clumsy. He was subjected to the constant scrutiny, litany and abuse of his peers, who often called him stinging names such as “Knucklebuck” and “Big Hands”. To make matters worse, Ned had limited control over his behemoth fingers, and would often drop things like pencils, glasses of water, and plates of food at buffet tables. He was unable to even hide his hands in his pockets—the pants of a boy being no use to the hands of a man. But as Ned grew, he found his hands suited him more and more—those very hands he cursed began to be nimble and dextrous, and he found he was able to utilise pens, pencils, and erasers in an almost semi-normal fashion. With newfound confidence, he took to the page and began drawing.