Why "Radial Drift"? 

I've always been a person who does things differently -- intentionally or not. 

As many of you know, I contracted Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis when I was in Kindergarten. It's gone now, but I still have much of the damage from those few years of the active disease. I was, and still am, very lucky to have relatively minimal concerns related to my childhood arthritis.

Interestingly, people who have arthritis often experience a deformity of their fingers -- a crooked bending to various degrees that causes the digits to "drift" outward, toward the pinky finger, in what is called "ulnar deviation" or ulnar drift.

I, of course, was different. When I was a patient at the Shriners Children's Hospital in St. Louis many years ago, I was called into a large conference room where a panel of doctors looked at me and pondered treatments. At one point, the presiding physician turned to me and asked a question for all in the room to hear: "Can you tell the doctors here what makes your hands unusual?"

"Yes," I replied confidently (because I knew my medical terminology at the time, including the clinical names for every single bone in the body). "My hands show a radial drift."

Yep, to this day my fingers bend not toward the pinky like most folks with arthritis, but instead toward the thumbs. Unusual, maybe weird, but I like to consider it unique and special. And, like swimming against the current as depicted in my logo, I just do things differently, independently, creatively.

Thus, Radial Drift Studio.

 © Kevin Worley and Worldwide Tiger LLC