The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens Page A

and we’re living our lives, so we’re not paying much attention to the quality of what she’s doing.”
    When Lauren was thirteen, she saw Marla Olmstead, a then-four-year-old artist with big eyes and chin-length hair, on
The Jane Pauley Show
. She was riveted by the girl’s story and even more so by her paintings. “It was filled with a lot of micro-detail and smaller areas,” Lauren said of one of Marla’s works, a large, fiery piece punctuated by dark splotches. “It was kind of 3-D, kind of like creepy in a way.”
    Lauren sought out more images of similar artwork. During breaks at school, she went to the library and studied the abstract paintings on artists’ Web sites. When she got home, she did the same thing, poring over artists’ Web sites and examining art books until she was spending two and a half hours a day inhaling art. “I absolutely became obsessed,” Lauren said.
    She abandoned the landscapes she had been painting and tried her hand at abstracts (“using my fingers, using my hands, just kind ofexperimenting with paint”).She quickly moved toward cubism, depicting objects as composed of—and alongside—an array of geometric shapes or, as Lauren put it, “breaking things down to their simplest form.”
    She hustled to the art room during lunch and free periods; she stayed after school to paint. The school art teacher called Doug and Nancy after she saw Lauren’s early abstracts. She thought their daughter had a gift. After that, the Voierses bought Lauren paints and the large canvases she wanted. She completed fifteen, some as large as three by four feet, that year.
    Her production accelerated once she started high school. She spent six hours a day painting, then seven, eight, nine hours a day. Her other activities—tennis, basketball, schoolwork—fell by the wayside. She pieced together a couple of hours of painting at school; study hall, lunch, any extra time she had went toward her artwork. But she did the bulk of her painting at night, after everyone had gone to bed. Doug converted their attic space into an art studio for Lauren during her junior year of high school, and Lauren stayed up past 3:00 a.m., past 4:00 a.m., sometimes not sleeping at all before school and then crashing during first and second periods. “I went kind of crazy on it,” Lauren remembered.
    Her artwork again spilled over onto the walls, this time the walls of her own room, which she decorated according to a different theme every year—sophisticated jungle, “hippy dippy trippy” murals, metallic green with graffiti.
    There were a series of victories. Her painting
Sisters,
a crimson-and-orange work in which two girls appear to be embracing (“showing the love I have for my sister”), was a regional finalist in the 2006 Ohio Governor’s Youth Art Exhibition. The next year,
Transparency,
an autumnal-colored piece in which a woman is visible among an array of shapes (“a more stained-glass effect . . . with many layers and dimensions”), won Scholastic’s National Gold Key Award. A friend’s mother commissioned her to paint a landscape of their house. A Cleveland art dealer sold a few of her pieces, including
The Cellist,
anine-by-four-foot bronze-and-violet cubist piece that spanned three canvases (“one of the best paintings I ever made”). To the Voierses, though, art still felt more like a hobby than a viable career. “Everyone knows artists are starving,” Lauren said. “The odds of becoming an artist that can actually make a living at it is—I don’t know what the odds are, but they’re ridiculous.”
    A phone call changed everything. When Lauren was seventeen, a California art agent contacted her parents. He had seen an image of
Sisters
that Lauren’s mother, Nancy, had posted online. He wanted to take Lauren on as a client. “Our first