He was associate professor at the Ohio University School of Art from 1957 until 2014 and is best known for his black-and-white art accompanied by esoteric writings inspired by William Blake, and the founding of a "Church of William Blake" not far from his home in Athens, Ohio.
[1] Prior to teaching, he was a college football player at the University of Michigan, an officer in the U.S. Navy.
[3] Eldridge is listed in the Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes,[4] which characterizes his works as "self-described 'invective pamphlets' are both cryptically pedantic, and at times autobiographical, all within his own mythopoeia.
Similar to the texts accompanying his images, his class lectures are themselves works of art.
Aethelred weaves playful, sometimes invective speech tapestries with outlandish word associations, electrically charged phonetics and scrambled catchphrases that succeed or fail with his often baffled listeners.