charming,
dishwashing,
compassionate,
orderly,
blockading,
circumlocutions,
perjure,
backaches,
Kant,
spaceships

In my own odd case, the comet trajectory I followed as I worked, truncated now by my own choice, I attained it maybe a couple of times. Having withdrawn voluntarily from the frontline trenches of those who battle to fill the walls, halls, and floors of the world’s galleries and museums, I’ve had now five years to ponder the question. Five years of sitting, summers on my porch, winters by my window, watching the St. Lawrence flow and freeze, flow and freeze.

Already critics and curators are whittling away at me, forcing me into their consensus pigeon hole where my works and I will reside in perpetuity. Not a pretty sight, let me tell you. A messy process probably better appreciated from the empyrean.

A public career, any public career but especially one in art, is a way for the gifted but insecure person to plot points on the graph of her life, more cleverly then allowing others to fill in the line connecting the points, making a sensible, understandable curve. The danger that no one tells you about (though it is obvious from history) is that you become a prisoner of your own curve. You think: Oh yes, clearly the next point goes just here, and the next one here. After a while, it gets tiresome. Profitable (Picasso!) but tiresome. Pointless, so to speak.

I came to yearn for that: a pointless life. I don’t know about the rest of his stuff, but Buddha was right about rivers. Living an idly affluent life on an island in a great river is at the least great therapy. At most? Well, if you’re worried about the most, even Mr. Buddha was hard put to get into specifics. All he would do when pressed was point and say, "Koi paraga. Koi paraga." The other shore, the other shore.

I watch the river. In winter, I get to watch the reflection in the double-glazed window of me watching the river. Of an evening, childishly bored with the river, very maturely bored with my thousand satellite channels and the Klein bottle teraflops of my Internet links, I read my clips for comic relief.

September 21, 1985. [My first show, in my mother’s Hallmark shop in East Hampton. She hung some of my 8th grade paintings in the back and prevailed on friends and friends of friends to get a stringer from the Bridgehampton weekly to come look and write something.]
"One of the South Fork’s own has done something to be proud of. Go take a gander at local school girl Laverne Maillot’s oil paintings now on display at Cards ‘n Stuff. This girl has an eye. When asked, she modestly says they are "oceanscapes." Not like any ocean this longtime Bridgehampton resident ever saw, but they are lovely. Mauves and greens and blues going this way and that. If you need something to brighten that dark corner in a den or living room, young Ms. Maillot’s energetic pieces may be just the thing for you! And they’re reasonably priced too!"

March 14, 1988. [My second show, in a short-lived gallery on Staten Island. By now I was already spending weekends in Manhattan, networking like crazy. A blow job and a promise of more got four pieces hung here, and noticed in the fine print in the Voice.]
"Off the main room in this industrial space, in an alcove that must’ve once been a changing room for workers—rusty lockers run down one wall, is the surprise that makes the trek out here worthwhile. An artist identified only as "LM" has four works which remind the viewer that oil and canvas can still open windows to other realities. LM combines vibrant patches of photorealism with swatches of abstract energy and the barest outlines of bravura strokes straight out of Chinese calligraphy."

September 20, 1990. [Here’s where it starts. The Lower East Side. One-woman show. A third string critic from one of the major publications found me. Though I had passed, barely, my freshman year at Columbia, I already knew I would be attending no more classes. The pursuit of craft had me well in its clutches. Both crafts, really, because, as this young critic noticed, something was happening between my brush and the canvas. And of course my well-known chameleon self, always changing my working name, was already in full flower.]
"…one of the works in particular has a power to dominate the space. You move to the other paintings and find your eyes drawn back to "Dawn 14." At first you are convinced that Her is only mimicking or (more generously) paying homage to the great "light" painters, trying to do a later 20th century Turner, perhaps. A second look reveals layers of color and form that Her has half hidden beneath her easy, soft washes. Eventually you see that Her’s intense abstraction is only a cover, because, yes, dimly revealed, Her’s fully realized nude figures fill the bottom of the frame. Sprawled, on a beach perhaps, they wait passively, contentedly for the shower of color from above to envelop and transform them, yet it is only Her who has magically touched them…"

November 3, 1993. [A Soho gallery. The initial review was followed by a Sunday Arts and Leisure think piece.]
"…an old theory held that isolated instances of beauty might exist in nature, but always mingled with claws of various sorts. The artist would have to combine them into a form that nature could never match. The nineteen-year-old Her Womb has done this, not once, but repeatedly. Her Womb’s remarkable nature paintings, which sold out of the show that just opened last week, are the hottest art property in New York today. Already talk on the street is of the beginning of a whole new school. Her Womb not only combines several classical techniques, she deploys them with consummate skill, producing an effect which in the end can only be termed (against all current orthodoxy) beautiful…"

October 15, 1995. [The Guggenheim. The last show. So much absurd attention to a 26-yeard-old. Yes, the craft is there. Occasionally, I think, both crafts. However much ability I had, I was confused. Rich (by that time) and confused. I changed my name yet again—one last swipe—and let the opening happen.]
"…just when American, nay, world art seemed dead on the vine, Her Womb Bleeds Cold Blood appears from nowhere, bestowing provocative, stimulating new work, showing that old, long fallow fields are still fertile. Dynamism, scale, handmadeness, all unite with absolutely confident brush control at the Guggenheim in these path-finding works from the young hands of Her Womb Bleeds Cold Blood…"

You would surely agree, no matter how good the art, that was quite enough. We sold everything. Every last piece. Most, she said smirkingly, fetching the high sixes and low sevens. I kept nothing. The walls of my St. Lawrence cottage are bare.

I sit. I watch the river, trying to learn.

People come, or try to come, though the island natives are good about mis-directing the curious. Few get to me. Usually an autograph gets them to leave. I sign the same name which, I told my agent, if I ever show again, I will use:
Charming Dishwashing Compassionate Orderly Blockading Circumlocutions Perjures Backaches on Kantian Spaceships.

END

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