Portrait of me by Mark Milroy, November/December 2008. I am wearing a $20 dress I bought on Delancey and a fur wrap from a thrift store on the Eastern Shore. And no shoes! Also, the background is inspired by Van Gogh's The Postman, which he didn't even know that I love (although in re-reading that original post it's clear that I was a little bit feverish that day from having been driven to Philadelphia in a Ferrari).
Recently, after we met at a party, Mark Milroy asked if he could paint me and of course I said yes. Today I got to see the finished portrait and I look forward to one day when I am suitably rich and can track it down wherever it ends up, probably to quote my friend Carrie (quoting Sylvia Plath in an unrelated note last night), spirited away in a "Corsican monastery -- reachable only by donkey." After I stopped by the studio, Mark and his wife Kelly McMasters, author of Welcome to Shirley, and I went for lunch at a Polish diner in the East Village and there were these big, fat snowflakes falling down while we sat and laughed at the counter and walking home I thought of all those stories you hear about later-famous people kicking around New York like sixty years ago when everyone was just doing their thing and you can hardly imagine these people of universally recognized monumental talent and stature doing anything so mundane as eating and laughing and walking around and that's how I feel about those two. Anything but mundane.
It's glorious, gorgeous, strange, beautiful and intriguing and it doesn't begin to capture your beauty. What more could one want in a portrait? No Dorian Gray fears here: let me say it on the day of it's unveiling: Lauren in life is even more amazing than this cool painting. xxx --Anne
Posted by: Anne Fernald | December 16, 2008 at 05:30 PM
oy. its. sorry.
Posted by: Anne | December 16, 2008 at 08:49 PM
No, I think you were right the first time? I am no grammarian, you know. And thank you for the kind words. You can see the glow I had from having just come from breakfast at Balthazar (or lunch as you might call it!) with you before my first sitting. XO LC
Posted by: Editor | December 16, 2008 at 08:54 PM