"The Writer and Her Eclectic Muse"
Oil - 25" x 18"
2008
Metro Montage IX - Marietta/Cobb Art Museum

This is a portrait of my daughter made soon after she took her master's degree in Professional Creative Writing.

I had not done a portrait of her since she was about 5 years of age.  At this juncture in her life I truly needed to make one.  I wanted it to be more than just a figure against a gradient background.  I wanted it to somehow tell her story.

I settled upon my interpretation of Salvador Dali's Surrealism.  With that I could create a space which she could inhabit that contained almost all of the influences that has made her a writer through either formal or informal education from the time she was a toddler.

Five of these symbols are not immediately self explanatory.

• The small pouch and the soiled apron hanging at the entrance to the room are from her character at the annual Anime Festival.
• The fossil leg bone is the hind leg of Tyrannosaurus Rex.  Like most children of her generation she had a love of dinosaurs and has followed the developments of that time period through all of the current knowledge in their science.

• The painting fragment beneath the bookshelf is from the first painting that she ever fell in love with at a museum.

• The red columns and the volcano are from the Minoan Civilization of the ancient Aegean Sea.  It's legends come  down to us from Homer's The Odyssey and Plato's account of the fabled Atlantis.  The civilization was destroyed when the volcano on the island of Santorini blew up circa 1,500 B.C. 
• I first put her on a computer as soon as she knew how to interact with animated characters in a game called Donald Duck's Playground on a Commodore 64. It was a learning game that taught how to earn money and use it to buy things. She's used a PC as a learning and creative tool for most of her life. Thus the floor tiles at the foundation of the building are a computer keyboard.