Title: "Demiurge Creates Freestanding Metaphors" Unframed: 23" x 18" Signed Lower Left Madison Museum of Contemporary Art: Duane Brissette was born in 1932 in Cloquet, Minnesota, a community with a current population of about 14,500 residents that lies twenty-two miles west of Duluth. Forestry industries have been an important source of employment and economic development from the time that the city was incorporated in 1894. Brissette?s father, a gifted musician, worked in the mills to support his family. Brissette attended public grade school, but was sent to the preparatory school at Saint John?s Abbey to complete his high school education with the parental expectation that he would enter religious service. He enjoyed the woods and lakes that surrounded the abbey and discovered illustrated manuscripts in its library. By the time he was eighteen, he knew he wanted to be an artist and soon left the abbey to pursue schooling at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He left the university after a few years and went on to a successful career as a creative director for various advertising agencies as well as a writer and designer of advertising for newspapers. Throughout his life, he has continued to make paintings that incline toward surrealism with their heightened sense of reality and use of idiosyncratic symbolism. He resided in Sauk City, Wisconsin for nearly 30 years until his death in 2018.