Little Marla Olmstead is an artist. She paints heart-gripping abstracts and actually manages to sell them. And these abstracts? I like them. Visit her website: www.marlaolmstead.com to see her work and order prints.
The story goes that Marla Olmstead began painting when she was two. She, like many children, became fascinated with the colourful mess of painting that her father, Mark, was making and wanted to do it, too! Being a good dad, he gave her a brush, some paint and a piece of paper. Things progressed as they can and Marla was producing gorgeous works of art.
The 60 Minutes spot, which was included in this documentary, took the mother from being a reluctant bystander to someone in desperate need to prove her own worth. At no time did I think Lauren was ever dishonest and the very idea of her integrity ripped to shreds really tore her heart apart. Mark... well... as the documentary progressed and the controversy broke, I had my doubts about him. Did he paint for Marla Olmstead? No. I don't believe he ever did. Telling the kid to use more red isn't painting for them. You can't direct an abstract. But I think admitting this technicality, admitting that he might tell her to use the spatula instead of a brush or give her ideas on what to paint, would send the media spinning that they had some confession of fraud. I think it's likely that the dishonesty I sensed when watching him on the documentary was a matter of him just wanting to say, "I helped her by making a few suggestions. So what!" And, yeah, that's really "so what".
No artist produces in a vacuum. You can hardly expect a child to produce without influences. Why can't that influence be her father, instead of that art professor from college or that mentor from SoHo? She's a child. If she didn't have any influence and painted in a vacuum, then her abstracts really were nothing but meaningless blotches. I'm not willing to call the paintings meaningless blotches. I can respect her influences and I think it's wonderful that collectors find their own personal meanings in her artwork. That is what art is about, isn't it?
What the media seemed to be missing was that Marla Olmstead is not a child prodigy. She's a regular kid. They miss the importance of this fact so much that when it was highlighted on 60 Minutes that Marla isn't a child prodigy, it was regarded by the media and community as a bad thing. Regular kids can produce a lot of crap artwork. It's unrealistic to expect that everything this child would ever create would be worth $20,000. Her mother described the initial success as a fluke and, to some extent, I think there's a lot of truth to that. In the same vein, I think there's a lot of truth in any masterpiece being a fluke. Our skills can only take us so far and not everything is going to be the best of the best. We just keep at it, even if we, as professionally striving artists, produce nothing more than mud. Why would we be surprised that a child would occassionally behave like a child? The burden that Marla Olmstead's parents carry is that they have to keep it fun and make sure their daughter isn't scarred by the whole otherworldly experience of the art world. Professional adults know the score and we know that we have to continue to work at what we do, regardless of what we feel. Marla Olmstead has no such personal stock in her painting and her parents, especially her mother, have prioritised her happiness and comfort above everything else.
None of that changes that the pieces Marla Olmstead has created are beautiful and that the owners of those pieces have works of art with an origin unlike any other.
I'm glad that the Olmsteads did this documentary.
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