The Portrait Painter’s Youngest Daughter

by Brian Price, March 2026

Sound is conversation. And conversation is theater and satire and dialogue. Talking. That’s how I came to this group—mostly talking. I’ve often added musical scores and effects to my words, but the Electroacoustical Poetical Society encourages the fracturing of story, the splintering of the literal, the messiness of hearing more than one sound, more than one idea at the same time.     
 
The pieces that EAPS produce often seem to have just as much to do with abstract painting as they do with music, script, and soundscape.  Audio art is just that visual.  

When lanquido was suggested as the prompt, I think the other artists thought in terms of music, slow passages, languishing notes, but for me the word languid has a very specific visual meaning. Languid took me back to the ignored halls of the Freer and the side rooms of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. These were the places where I fell in love with the 19th century. Where I fell in love with the languid women of Whistler, Sargent, Thayer.

These artists painted their Ideal Woman. A winged Protestant Madonna, pure, transcendent, standing apart from corruption and modernity, lounging, half asleep, above, unable, uninvited to participate in politics and philosophy, the work of men.  
 
Who was this ideal woman? Why was she so tired—with a half-open fan on her lap?  Too many romps across the meadows?  Too much drawing water from the well?  Too much milking of the cows?  Too much childbirth?  Too many pedestals to climb?
 
I wanted to have a conversation. But with whom? The artist? The father? The minister? The soldier who never came home.
 
Naw. I wanted to have a conversation with the Angel, the girl with the wings.

The Portrait Painter’s Youngest Daughter, Brian Price, 2025

 
My favorite actor in the world, Irene Ruderman Clark, played the part with perfect care and intuition.

From producing, editing, and reviewing audiobooks to comedy monologues, directing science fiction satire to writing/producing award-winning radio drama to finally finding I have to attend open-mic nights and read my stuff myself, I have been around sound most of my life.  Find more at Great Northern Audio Theatre.

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