The influence of family runs deep in the work of Fidencio Durán. He has credited his father, a farm laborer who migrated from Mexico in the 1920s, with instilling in him and his siblings a sense of family history. Around the age of thirteen, inspired by his older brothers who were dabbling in the arts, Durán began to channel his expression of personal history into drawing and painting. His interest grew, and during high school he enrolled in art classes and practiced drawing on his own, encouraged by his school district’s artist in residence, Ricardo Hernández. Durán received his B.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. Commissions and residencies quickly followed. In 1996 he was awarded the Dozier Travel Grant by the Dallas Museum of Art, enabling him to travel to Europe and the USSR to study the works in the Louvre and the Hermitage. “It is important for me,” he told a journalist, “to have the opportunity to be able to see my own work in relationship to the art of the past and to see how it relates to other contemporary artists.”

Dejo flores y canciones depicts a uniquely Mexican or Chicano moment of courtship during which the male arranges for his sweetheart to be serenaded. The work depicts the serenade within the comfortable and secure setting of the woman’s home and contrasts that familiar setting with her singular status. While on the one hand the table in the foreground highlights the ordinary nature of the home (and possibly the offerings of the suitor), by virtue of the serenade the novia has been singled out not only by the serenaders surrounding her but by her female companions as well, who are treating her like ladies-in-waiting primping a noblewoman.

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