"I was a figure artist," she said. "I was carrying on the heritage. It's not that anyone asked me to do it, but I felt it was my responsibility. After five years of psychoanalysis, I realized I was sitting in a prison."
A health crisis pushed Lelia to act on that realization: she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Because her mother died of ovarian cancer, she elected to have a double mastectomy. While recovering over the next 18 months, she couldn't paint at all. When she did pick up a brush again, she couldn't bring herself to create her signature formal landscapes. She began painting women's shoes, to represent femininity apart from faces and bodies. And now she's moved completely away from figurative art, painting vivid, large-scale abstract pieces with titles such as You Did Not Say Goodbye and Royal Pheromones. Her Web site proudly states, "Everything I have done, every exhibition, where I studied, who I am related to... all those have no significance today."
Lelia's transformation severed a link in a long chain of impressionist mastery. "I'm not sure I really understand what she does now," says Hughes-Claude, who has always had a close relationship with Lelia. "I'm happy to see her doing things with vitality and passion. That's more important than my opinion." The man who started it all, Camille, was a pioneer who broke from the artistic conventions of his day. Lelia is, in that sense, his truest heir.
Lelia is also the first woman in the family to achieve critical acclaim, a fact that made her own mother burn with jealousy. Along with a bias toward men, the clan also lent more status to the blood Pissarros than to in-laws, Lelia says. "Once they had a family exhibition and didn't include any of my mother's paintings, because she wasn't a Pissarro. She was furious. She said to me, 'You wouldn't be here if it weren't for me.' I'm very respectful of my ancestors, but I don't want to feel special simply because I am a Pissarro. My mother married into the family and made it her future, whereas I was born into it but escaped it."
Lelia's never taught her own children how to paint, though one is set to study art and another, art history. She doesn't believe that genetic talent helps the developing artist very much—if the blood Pissarros are more successful than Pissarros by marriage, perhaps it is because more was expected of them. "What it takes to be a good painter is patience. You have to sit and stand for hours, looking at colors, analyzing in silence. And when something comes from the depths of your stomach and you can put it on the canvas, it's a tremendous pleasure."
THE BROWNS | A Horizontal Dynasty
If anyone wanted to talk on the phone at the Browns' place, he had to go outside. That's because at any moment, three or four pianos would be ringing out inside their modest house. The siblings who now make up the piano quintet the 5 Browns—Desirae, Deondra, Gregory, Melody, and Ryan—were the first family to simultaneously study at the Juilliard School. They've now accomplished the Holy Grail for a classical group—they're pulling in large, young audiences. (Their third album, Browns in Blue, was released in 2007.)
The Brown kids are not legacy preservers as much as breakout beneficiaries of a music-loving line. Their success shows how an ability can be honed over time: The raw talent and casual music making of their grandparents ingrained a more refined appreciation for music in their parents, who then brought up a brood of virtuosos.
Their father, Keith, recounts that his grandfather had an amazing tenor voice and that his 12 great-uncles all sang very well. Their mother, Lisa, says her own grandmother banged out Irish and Scottish tunes by ear, and Lisa was the first in her family to take music lessons. "When Keith and I got married," she recalls, "we got a little 1939 Steinway upright for $1,000. It was the first thing we bought."
"There was no master plan," says Keith. "But unbeknownst to us at the time, there were probably 15 major decisions that were made along the way, and had any one of those gone differently, none of this 5 Browns stuff would have happened." His part-time hobby of investing in European sports cars, for example, became a way to pay the bills, which gave him the flexibility to homeschool the kids, which became the only way for them to practice and have time to pursue other interests. And when the family moved to Utah from Houston, "We went from this loving Russian teacher who was creative and artistic to this whip-cracking, it's-got-to-be-perfect stickler. If either of those teachers had had different styles, or if their order had been reversed, the kids wouldn't have made it this far."
The financial burden of supporting five growing musicians was heavy. "In Utah, the piano lessons were 30 percent more than our monthly payment for the house," says Keith. "And then we had to sell the house to pay for two more pianos and move into a rental. But we didn't think that was so terrible."
Lisa would sit at the piano bench next to each child, reinforcing the lessons, for a total of seven hours each day. "There were days when it was a joy— things were clicking, we were connecting—and there were days when it was really hard. I had this feeling that I have to give the same amount to the oldest as to the youngest, and so sometimes it was only out of obligation."
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