A Brush With Greatness?

Perhaps if she didn’t believe in angels, destiny and the pure, immigrants version of the American dream, Alexandra Nechita might be surprised by her success.

Within nine months, she’s had 16 solo exhibits of her paintings, at least $1.5 million in sales. There’s a growing list of people who have paid $10,000 deposits toward the purchase of whatever she paints next.

Maybe, you think, she would be a tad overwhelmed. TV crews trail her. Vanity Fair has shot a mini-spread. A book of her art, “Outside the Lines” (Longstreet Press), is on the shelves. The Gap wants her to model.

Collectors of her work tend to cast praise in near messianic, spiritual terms. Her agent, whose background is in telemarketing, says future exhibits in the world’s great museums--the Met, the Tate, the Louvre!--wouldn’t be out of line.

Except the shock, the often paralyzing sinking-in, hasn’t happened yet. Even though Alexandra Nechita is already 10 years old.

She speaks of the past, of rounding the corner on 9: “I didn’t know anything about art deals or business. . . . I painted. My parents were the ones who took care of business. It’s still not my thing. I don’t need to know. I’m still a child.”

Alexandra shuffles past her works in progress in the family room-cum-art studio of the Nechitas’ Norwalk home. Just outside the door, only a wall separates the backyard garden from Interstate 5.

She’s wearing her “magic slippers,” so grungy that their floral design has wilted. Her T-shirt and sweatpants are splotched with paint. As she talks about her work, the confidence of her tone, her carriage and poise, evoke a maturity almost eerie to behold.

Alexandra seems to realize this too. As if on cue, she runs to grab Elmo, of “Sesame Street” fame, for a hug. “I do everything a 10-year-old does!” she says. “I like doing stuff that 3-year-olds do!”

This is one of the points that Alexandra’s admirers like to make. They quote Picasso--”I knew by the age of 18 that I could paint like Michelangelo, but it took me 60 years to learn to paint like a child”--and boast that Alexandra is just that much more efficient than he was.

She’s filled some 350 canvases with abstracts that her promoters compare to the best of Picasso, Kandinsky and Matisse. She usually finishes a painting in a few days, working on several at once. And summer promises to be an even more prolific time for Alexandra Nechita Enterprises--the corporate name known to her accountant, tax advisor and attorney--without the distraction of the fifth grade.

“I always say that God was in a very, very good mood the day she was born,” says Ben Valenty, the former coin telemarketer-turned-art publisher who is marketing Alexandra to the world.

“It’s all unfolding exactly as I envisioned it. When I met her and got to know the art, I was convinced that she and it were as special as anything in life.”

*

Sprawled atop his daughter’s Pocahontas bedspread, Alexandra’s father, Niki, speaks of the old days as if he were honing a family legend for his unborn grandchildren.

He escaped Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania in 1985, leaving his pregnant wife behind. After six months in Yugoslavia, he arrived in Hollywood and subsisted for a month on white bread and catsup soup before finding a job. He had his doubts about the Promised Land.

Viorica Nechita and toddler Alexandra arrived in 1987, and the family settled into a rented Whittier townhouse. They lived paycheck to paycheck to keep their precocious daughter supplied with coloring books, then watercolors and washes and finally, by age 6, canvases and paint. Alexandra’s art was consuming entire rooms.

“It was hard knowing my bedroom was going to be taken over by Alexandra’s paintings,” Viorica says. “But even before that, we were so sentimentally attached to the paintings. We never wanted to sell them. But we were suggested by friends that we could sell them to buy more supplies.”

So, sell the Nechitas did. The first Alexandra painting brought $50 during her first solo exhibit at the Whittier public library. It opened on April Fools’ Day 1994, the day 8-year-old Alexandra became a U.S. citizen, and the day her mother found out she was pregnant with Alexandra’s brother, Maximillian.

Niki tells of an art teacher who approached him at the show to ask the price of a particular painting. He said $175. “She thought I was crazy. But I explained about the price of materials, the canvas alone was $30, and plus, the price of her work.”

The woman didn’t buy. She did return a few months later, to an exhibit in Norwalk, to purchase the painting. “But I told her that the price would be $5,000,” he says, grinning. “But now I don’t want to sell it. It shows her artistic development.”

The family’s financial development has also been on an upward curve.

“When she was 8, I start to knock on the different doors, art dealers, galleries,” Niki says. “There was a lot of appreciation, but because of her age, they weren’t interested.”

So last year, Niki quit his job as manager of a prosthetics factory to become a lab technician in Beverly Hills. He chose the job for its location. On his lunch hours, he would try, once again, to interest gallery owners. After all, Alexandra had had two exhibits that grossed a total of $45,000.

But the job switch proved unnecessary. In August, Valenty signed Alexandra to an exclusive four-year contract. A client who had seen her work on display at a Whittier bookstore suggested that Valenty take a look.

“Maybe some of the big firms on Rodeo Drive passed on her,” Valenty says. “The art world tends to be really snooty. . . . It feels good, I won’t deny it. There’s a great level of pride in knowing that I got in my car to Whittier, where I hadn’t been in my life.”

First off he mounted an exhibit of 35 paintings at his Costa Mesa gallery, International Art Publishers. Six hundred people attended. At $8,000 to $12,000 per piece, the entire inventory sold out in 19 minutes.

Today, Alexandra’s paintings range in price from $30,000 to $60,000, although one just fetched $80,000. Bids--all of them refused--for works in her private collection have hit $150,000. Another show will be held Saturday at the same gallery. And her book tour starts in June, after school is out.

Valenty declines to discuss his contract with Alexandra, but her father spells out the terms: International Art Publishers gets 68.5% of all her earnings and pays promotional expenses. She is guaranteed $600,000 over the four years.

Valenty also negotiated Alexandra’s book contract, which promised a $25,000 advance plus royalties of 8.5%, Niki says.

Before entering the art world, Valenty, 41, telemarketed rare coins, precious metals and, more recently, vintage movie posters as investments. But his Costa Mesa coin venture went bust in 1991, leaving more than 800 unsecured creditors holding the bag. Three years later, the Federal Trade Commission targeted his La Jolla firm, National Art Publishers, for marketing vastly overpriced movie posters from the 1920s and ‘30s as lucrative investments. Valenty and the FTC reached a settlement requiring that he stop telemarketing investment products.

Of his art venture, Valenty says, “Money and profit is a byproduct, believe it or not. We want to expose Alexandra to the world.”

*

Judi Webb, who holds the largest collection of Alexandra’s work, recalls her first look at the paintings, at the same used-book store where Valenty first saw Alexandra’s work.

“I wanted to see the art, never thinking that I was going to buy any,” she says. “But when I looked at those paintings, I started to get the chills. I went into the ‘Twilight Zone,’ the ‘Outer Limits.’

“I knew this was an old soul. Sometimes I am very psychic. What I felt--how should I tell you?--I think she has the soul of Picasso or Matisse or somebody. I feel like Picasso is in her. . . .”

When the bookstore owner told Webb that the family had little money to buy art supplies, she wanted desperately to help. “When I bought [the paintings], they were like $100. I bought these paintings when they were nothing. I had them on layaway.”

Webb now has about 30 pieces, including “Sunflower Fields,” a large acrylic on canvas. Alexandra says the inspiration for it came after driving past a field where trespassers were picking the towering flowers. The painting depicts the agony of parent sunflowers being separated from their babies, she says.

Today, the Nechitas consider Webb, a single mother and office manager from Granada Hills, a good friend. “I think because I wasn’t selfish, and I really wanted to help her, look at what God has done for me,” Webb says. “Here I am just a little nobody, and look what my paintings are worth.”

To some observers, that commercial interest is cause for concern.

“This kind of phenomenon immediately commodifies a young person’s creativity, and I find that troubling,” says painter Puth Weisberg, a professor of studio arts at the USC School of Fine Arts. “There is a talented young person at the center of this whose gifts could be damaged by all this exploitation.”

Alexandra’s first art teacher, Elmira Adamian at Barnsdall Junior Arts Center in Hollywood, was the first to tell Niki that his daughter had “a talent given from heaven.”

“It was supposed to be like this,” she says of the acclaim now heaped on Alexandra. “She’s so genuine, so young. She doesn’t copy. She is too young to copy.”

But Adamian also worries about her former student: “I feel sorry that the business world took her over and is trying to make money out of her.”

Roger Shepherd, chairman of the fine arts department at New York’s Parsons School of Design, has never seen Alexandra’s work, but he doubts a child could convey the depth of life experience inherent in great art. “The sad thing is, she really should be left alone to mature,” he says. “She needs another 20 to 30 years to continue to work. To have people paying that kind of money for her work, creating this phenomenon. . . . I think the confusion is really about us as appreciators.”

Under the shield of anonymity, a well-known Los Angeles museum curator is far more blunt. “It’s a hoax,” he says. “This is a young child who has been exposed to Chagall and Picasso and has some talent. What it does is feed into the classic argument that drives us all crazy in the art world, that my 10-year-old could have done it. It’s really a travesty.”

Alexandra’s admirers praise her work in equally impassioned tones. They say sniping from the art establishment stems from the almost heretical notion that a 10-year-old could command prices that many widely regarded artists may never reach.

Author William Emboden, professor emeritus of the California state university system and a former museum research director, says the criticisms of Alexandra’s work are predictable.

“Many of the same accusations that are hurled against Alexandra Nechita were also thrown up against some of the greatest artists in the history of painting, that she is too young, that she’s a copyist. She doesn’t copy. . . .

“I think she is in a great tradition of painting. She understands color and form and understands them simultaneously. She understands pictorial space, much better than those who have received accolades in recent years. . . . And she knows how to modulate color, and it seems to be instinctive.”

In a recent article about Alexandra’s work, Emboden writes: “As an original artist, Alexandra Nechita has taken us beyond our mundane perceptions and has opened a world so new to us that we are hardly prepared for it. We must dismiss her age and regard the works for what they are--revelations.”

*

Alexandra is gushing about Ellen, her new friend. This would be Ellen DeGeneres, the star of the eponymous television series.

“She had on the coolest Nikes on earth!” she says. “And she has the purest blue eyes.”

Alexandra and Valenty have just returned from delivering two paintings, “It Wasn’t Easy” and “Eve,” to the actress’ home. Valenty says DeGeneres selected the paintings, for $65,000 and $45,000, from Polaroids. “They sell so darn fast that we usually don’t have time for 35-millimeter,” he says.

If prompted, Alexandra will rattle off the names of other celebrities who have bought her work, of others she’s met, and joke about the “good connection” that gets her free tickets to Laker and Kings games. But she is not boastful.

Her fifth-grade teacher, Melisande Maytorena, says Alexandra’s modesty and good humor make her a leader in school. “She’s able to handle her stardom very well. She enjoys it at school, where she can be like a kid.”

Says Alexandra: “Painting doesn’t deprive me of my childhood. Instead of playing outside all day, I choose to paint.”

And if all the hubbub ended tomorrow? “I know what I have is a gift from God and Jesus and the angels,” she says. “Everything could stop and finish today. I wouldn’t care. If people hated me and my paintings, I wouldn’t care. I’d still paint.”

* Times librarian Sheila Kern contributed to this report.