3 bobby Heads
3 Bobby Heads 1999 oil on linen 10x8” collection of the artist
I was the last boy of my father’s family that could have a male child – my cousins did not have children so there were no more boys whose last name was Stitt.
Because girls are ubiquitous and boys so rare on the Stitt side of our family, I thought I wouldn’t be able to have a boy, but I could live with that... my daughter was wonderful. But when Zoe told me we were going to have Bobby, I got misty-eyed. I felt so lucky that I, too, would get to have a little boy. Someone else would carry on the family name in my patriarchal mind.
There was now another, my son, Bobby. Zoe came down to the studio while Audrey was at day care and nursed him while I painted him looking over her shoulder. He'd go back and forth between wakefulness and sleep, and I caught his head in these positions.
