Daughters belongs to the postwar generation of American painters who came to fine art from the working commercial-art world, a cohort whose technical discipline, design sensibility, and practical knowledge of color reproduction shaped a particular approach to easel painting, and whose late twentieth-century New Mexico landscapes carry forward the visual identity of the original Taos Society into a contemporary register.
Daughters came to art through one of the most disciplined commercial training paths of postwar America. The combination of his early job at the St. Joseph Museum, his studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, and his subsequent partnership in a Kansas City advertising studio gave him nearly two decades of practical experience in design, color reproduction, illustration, and the delivery of finished imagery under deadline. The numerous awards he accumulated through that period from the National Society of Art Directors and other industry organizations marked him as one of the leading commercial artists of his region.
The decision to walk away from that career came after a long period of summer and weekend painting trips to New Mexico. The move to Santa Fe and then to Taos consolidated the shift, and the studio he established in the historic Berninghaus house, the home of one of the founding members of the original Taos Society of Artists, placed him in a direct physical lineage to the earlier Taos painting tradition.
His mature work concentrated on the New Mexican landscape: the adobe villages of the upper Rio Grande, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in changing light and weather, the cottonwoods and chamisa of the high desert, and the colonial mission churches of the region. The paintings combine Impressionist attention to color and atmosphere with a more deliberate, almost graphic treatment of structure and silhouette derived from his commercial-art background. His own term for this approach, "composist", captured his commitment to the careful underlying composition of a painting rather than to the spontaneous gesture of pure expressionism.
His use of strongly contrasted light and dark areas, which he sometimes likened to the ancient Asian enamel technique of cloisonné, gave his paintings a distinctive optical structure that distinguished them from the more atmospheric handling of many of his contemporaries. The technique allowed him to organize complex landscape compositions around clearly readable form, and the resulting paintings were immediately recognizable as his own.
His later decades produced a steady body of work for galleries across the Southwest, and his standing within the contemporary Taos and Santa Fe scene was confirmed by the 2004 Master's of the Southwest Award. His position today is that of a senior contemporary representative of the Taos painting tradition, and his work has continued to be exhibited and collected steadily since his death.