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Daniel Ray Parker (born November 18, 1959) is an American wildlife sculptor and painter. Parker has won multiple awards for wildlife sculpture at major Western art shows in the United States. He is a resident of Kalispell, Montana. ==Early life== Parker was born on November 18, 1959 in Portland, Oregon. He is the son of Donald Edward "Don" Parker (1938–2015) and Joan Arlue Sievers (born 1939). The Parkers had moved to Portland in early 1959 from Kalispell, Montana, to find work but after less than a year in Oregon they moved back to Kalispell, their home town. Parker's great grandfather, originally from Maine, had moved to the Flathead Valley in 1905 from Parker, Minnesota, to homestead on a farm on the Flathead River, near Demersville, about five miles south of Kalispell and two miles north of Flathead Lake. Parker's father, who by 1963 was an aspiring country western singer and guitarist, met a woman nearly twice his age in a Kalispell night club and decided to eschew his marital and parental responsibilities by leaving town with her—abandoning his family—and headed for California where he thought he would become a famous musician but instead took construction work building a tunnel. After moving to Hendersonville, Tennessee, in 1966, Don did have some mild success when he toured with Tommy Cash and later recorded a single as the duet "Don & Carla" with 50 States Records, but long-term success would evade him due largely to an affinity for the bottle. The 45 record he recorded was not successful, selling only a few hundred copies. He did, however, succeed as a night club performer and headlined some State Fairs in the late 1960s, one such performance being in Missoula, Montana, at the Western Montana Fair, that was rained out. Daniel's mother, Joan, held out hope that Don would return to Kalispell to help raise his children but he never did, nor did he provide even a single dime in child support or alimony, so in 1964 she filed for and was granted a divorce. Daniel and his siblings grew up dirt poor, having been raised by a single mother on welfare who had been abandoned—along with her four children—by a husband who had no desire to raise his own children. Daniel's older brother, Mike, would say in 2015 after the death of their father, "unfortunately, he was only a sperm donor and nothing more." In the first 20 years of their lives, the Parker children would see their biological father only twice, and then only for a few hours on each occasion. Parker's mother would remarry three times, first in a short-lived 1967 marriage to Harold Schiele—a Ronan, Montana, carpenter—and followed that unsuccessful union by tying the knot in 1969 with Leo Arbuckle, a logger from Coram, Montana. Her final marriage came in 1975 to Herbert "Sonny" Strong, a used car salesman—son of the noted golf course architect Herbert B. Strong—who had moved to Kalispell in 1971 from Fort Pierce, Florida. Strong, who was a hunting enthusiast, taught Daniel the fundamentals of deer and elk hunting, an activity he continues to enjoy today. In 1975, during school summer vacation, he took a job as an apprentice carpenter building garages for Bill Williams, a Columbia Falls building contractor. The carpentry work in the summers was steady until Parker graduated from Flathead High School in 1978. He then took up a position as a carpenter working on the power generating station near the coal strip mining operations in Colstrip, Montana. He stayed on the job at the power station until 1980 when he returned to Kalispell. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Daniel Parker (artist)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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