“Daughter” is really the last painting I worked on in 2007. It’s one of my magazine collage/acrylic combos, an approach to painting that I began experimenting with around 2005. I found the pictures of both the girl on drums and the old man painting in front of his garage among separate ads in whatever magazines were lying around, and they wound up pasted to a piece of paper together with acrylic medium in my studio. Months later I accidentally discovered this unfinished collage among my clutter, and resumed work on my forgotten child. I am both a musician and a painter, so it’s little wonder I chose them as potential characters and they ended up together: the father admiring the progress of his careful attention and encouragement. The great surrealist Marcel Duchamp once said that if an artist marries or has children, he is unwisely dividing his focus and attention on achievement, that one cannot create great art of with one foot in familial commitment, and the other submerged in the filthy business of uncompromising vision. I don’t know if Duchamp had children, but he was a merciless champion of modernity, and a professional smartass, which I admire in a man.
