The Big Thing: How to Complete Your Creative Project Even if You're a Lazy, Self-Doubting Procrastinator Like Me by Phyllis Korkki

Author:Phyllis Korkki
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-08T14:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Through the Ages

One day, when Autumn de Forest was five years old, she followed her father out to the garage at their home in Las Vegas, where he was refinishing some furniture. She asked if she could paint on a piece of plywood that was sitting there, and he gave her some brushes, a pair of gloves, and some water-based stain to work with. A short time later, Doug de Forest turned around and saw a painting that looked remarkably like a Mark Rothko. “Of course, I had no idea what a Rothko was back then,” Autumn, now thirteen, told me in an interview.

Autumn wanted to keep painting, and her parents, realizing that this was likely to become a serious pursuit, bought her gallery-quality paints, tools, and canvases.

Autumn wanted to paint BIG; her imagination was more expansive than eight-and-a-half by eleven. “I didn’t want to be confined in a smaller space,” she said. “I wanted to be able to let my ideas run free.” Soon she was working on paintings that were taller and much wider than she was. When I talked to her, she had already sold hundreds of paintings, many to seasoned collectors, for up to tens of thousands of dollars. She was also busy traveling the country giving speeches about art and motivation to collectors and school groups.

Autumn brings a youthful sense of play to her work, along with an artistic sensibility that is far beyond her years. You can see evidence of Picasso, Jasper Johns, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and others in Autumn’s paintings. But they aren’t copies. “I take a classic painting and put my riff on it,” she said. Her painting Barbie Marilyn, for example, owes an unabashed debt to Warhol, but in its resemblance to a Marilyn Monroe Barbie Doll goes off on a childlike tangent.

She paints with acrylic, or sometimes a material called encaustic, which involves adding melted beeswax to colored pigments (Jasper Johns did that). When she started painting, instead of using beeswax she melted crayons on a hot plate to achieve a similarly vibrant effect.

One of Autumn’s greatest assets, her father told me, is that “she doesn’t know what she cannot do.”

In Autumn, both nature and nurture are at work in a big way. She is related to the prominent American painters Roy de Forest (1930–2007) and Lockwood de Forest (1850–1932). She has never had an art lesson. When I talked to her she was working on a series of Alaskan landscape paintings based on Lockwood de Forest’s work, which was a refreshing change, she said, because she usually does pop art.

Doug de Forest is a composer, and Autumn’s mother, Katherine Olsen, is an actress, but they have given over their lives to support Autumn’s talent, managing her schedule and taking care of shipping, accounts, and inventory. Without their help, it would be impossible for Autumn to be so productive and creative. It makes you wonder how many other prodigies are out there whose parents don’t have the means or the motivation to nurture their child’s unusual gifts.

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