Lindsey DeMayo and Taylor Smith-Hams describe themselves as “two young individuals who have been very concerned with global warming,” and they market themselves well.
The pair have a gimmick: a babysitter and her protégé, inspired to spend a summer painting for an auction to benefit the fight against global warming. They also have the business skills – the young women have found gallery space, solicited publicity and prepared fliers to advertise their philanthropic venture, as well as producing 22 works of art, as of last week.
On Aug. 10, the fledgling artists’ works will premiere at Linden Tree Children’s Recordings & Books in downtown Los Altos, and the girls aim to raise $1,000 through the show and from profits from a lemonade stand they have been running on the side.
“For a New Year’s resolution I said I would raise money for a cause,” Taylor, 12, said. While researching global warming online, she learned about Polar Bear International, a non-profit dedicated to research and education for the preservation of polar bears and their habitat. A Time Magazine article and the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” had gotten her fired up about global warming prevention.
“It’s really scary, what we’ve done to our world,” she said. “A lot of people take it all for granted and don’t think it’s a serious problem.”
With Lindsey, Taylor has formed the group Kids against Global Warming. The pair came to know each other when Lindsey, 18, a Los Altos Hills resident, was hired to watch Taylor, a Los Altos resident, for the summer.
“We were both really into painting, and when her dad hired me we started painting,” Lindsey said. “She’s got me going. I think it’s crazy – she’s 12 years old and so passionate.
“In getting this job, I had the idea of doing regular babysitting stuff. So I was glad you’re really into this,” she said to Taylor.
More than a passion for painting has been required to achieve their goals. Finding a gallery interested in their project was, at first, a major hurdle.
“We walked into every single gallery downtown and no one would take us. Then we saw Linden Tree and said, let’s just go in,” Lindsey said. “We were really relieved to find nice people who cared about what we had to say.”
“Not a lot of people would listen to us – we were feeling rejected,” Taylor added.
Now that space at Linden Tree has been secured, their next mission is to find a lot of easels to hold the paintings, and a lot of art patrons. They’ve composed a letter to send to everyone on their parents’ e-mail lists and handed out fliers for store windows downtown.
Their canvases (many of the paintings are actually acrylic-on-wood) are bursting from Taylor’s studio, tucked in a corner of the family room. The girls work side by side, collaborating on almost every painting. They do take on commissioned work, although for the most part they collaborate on developing their own ideas. They are planning a portrait of Taylor’s 17-year-old Maine Coon cat Smokey, but “we can’t get him to lie down on his bed,” she said.
Each also did a portrait figure of the other, and then they swapped paintings, doing the backgrounds on the image of themselves. Taylor’s depiction of Lindsey shows the young woman seated on a white chair, apron-clad, gazing out from the painting as though she sees past the viewer to some distant object. Lindsey finger-painted a maelstrom of color behind her seated figure.
Taylor said that she has always loved painting and views it as part of who she is, and as a hoped-for future career. “But I also like cooking and basketball,” she said. She will be a seventh-grader at Pinewood next year and aims to play basketball for Duke.
Lindsey, who just graduated from Los Altos High School, plans to attend Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles this fall and focus on fashion.
“I want to do runway – artsy, outrageous things that no one on the street would think of wearing,” she said.
Visitors to the Kids against Global Warming ART Gallery can anticipate bright, collaborative acrylic works that combine modernist brushstrokes, mixed media and abstract, still-life and portrait works.
For more information, e-mail Lindsey DeMayo at [email protected]. Linden Tree is located at 170 State St.
