Marla Olmstead

Last updated
Marla Olmstead
Born2000 (age 23–24)
Binghamton, New York
OccupationArtist
Parent(s)Laura and Mark Olmstead

Marla Olmstead (born 2000 in Binghamton, New York) is a painter of abstract art who, by the age of four, caught international media attention for work purportedly hers. Abstract artworks painted by her have been as large as five feet (1.52 m) square and have sold for tens of thousands of US dollars. [1] A 2005 60 Minutes II story on Olmstead that first brought her publicity led to speculation that the works supposedly created by Marla were in fact created in collaboration with her father, [2] which was further examined in the 2007 documentary on her, My Kid Could Paint That .

Contents

Painting career

According to her parents, Marla Olmstead began painting just before her second birthday in early 2002 when her father, Mark, gave her paint to divert her from distracting him from his own painting. Mark painted for a very brief period after his father died, and makes no claims of being an artist of any variety. [3] Eventually, her work was on display at a local coffee shop. Soon after a customer bought one of the paintings for $253, a local gallery owner was shown one of her works and eventually organized a show at his gallery. From that point forward, Olmstead's paintings began to sell frequently. [4]

In 2013, she gave an interview at "The Intersection", which is a one-day gathering of innovative thinkers. [5]

Media attention

Her work increased in popularity after her first gallery showing, with many of the paintings selling for tens of thousands of US dollars.

The skill demonstrated in the paintings has prompted critics and media to draw comparisons to abstract artists Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock. [3] Marla has attracted media attention from The New York Times and Time magazine. [6] [7]

Controversy

In February 2005, a report by CBS News' 60 Minutes II raised questions about whether Marla created the paintings on her own. 60 Minutes enlisted the help of Ellen Winner, a child psychologist who studies cognition in the arts and gifted children. Winner was impressed with Marla's work, and indicated that Marla was the first child prodigy she'd seen paint abstractly. The Olmsteads agreed to permit CBS crews to set up a hidden camera in their home to tape their daughter painting a single piece in five hours over the course of a month. When Winner reviewed the tapes, the psychologist said, "I saw no evidence that she was a child prodigy in painting. I saw a normal, charming, adorable child painting the way preschool children paint, except that she had a coach who kept her going." Winner also indicated that the painting created after CBS's hidden camera looked "less polished than some of Marla's previous works." [2]

The 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That, by director Amir Bar-Lev, examines Marla Olmstead, her family, and the controversy surrounding the art attributed to her. The film does not explicitly take a position on the question of her works' authenticity, but Bar-Lev is heard during his interviews of Marla's parents and in a piece included as an extra on the DVD expressing doubts about whether Marla created the paintings herself. It includes excerpts from start-to-finish videos of two of Marla's works and questions whether the two works, the 60 Minutes painting (known as "Flowers") and "Ocean," are of the same quality as other works attributed to her. After Bar-Lev expressed these doubts and began filming Marla to capture her painting a work of similar quality to paintings previously sold in her name, she is seen repeatedly asking her father to help her paint a face on the painting or paint it himself - the exchange taking place during playful banter between Marla and her father.

The Olmsteads did not attend the film's official premiere, having felt that Bar-Lev, who doubts that Olmstead created the paintings attributed to her, made editing choices that portrayed them in bad light. In December 2015, 15-year-old Olmstead stated that she had never seen the film, and had no intention of doing so, saying, "I don’t want to watch things on myself." She and her brother did see the film's trailer, and found it "a bit ridiculous and funny", in particular a shot of Laura tearing as she said, "What have I done to my children?" [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Frankenthaler</span> American painter (1928–2011)

Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexandra Nechita</span> Romanian-American painter

Alexandra Nechita is a Romanian-American cubist painter and philanthropist. At age 12 she was dubbed the "Petite Picasso" by the media and the art community. She has been praised for her paintings and vision of art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Wyeth</span> American visual artist, primarily a realist painter(1917–2009)

Andrew Newell Wyeth was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He believed he was also an abstractionist, portraying subjects in a new, meaningful way. The son of N. C. Wyeth and father of Jamie Wyeth, he was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century. James H. Duff explores the art and lives of the three men in An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art. Raised with an appreciation of nature, Wyeth took walks that fired his imagination. Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, and King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) inspired him intellectually and artistically. Wyeth featured in a documentary The Metaphor in which he discussed Vidor's influence on the creation of his works of art, like Winter 1946 and Portrait of Ralph Kline. Wyeth was also inspired by Winslow Homer and Renaissance artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Krasner</span> American abstract expressionist painter (1908–1984)

Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American painter and visual artist active primarily in New York whose work has been associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, transitioning to war propaganda artworks during the War Services era.

River Akiane Kramarik is an American poet and painter. She began drawing at the age of four. Kramarik's best-known painting is Prince of Peace, which she completed at the age of eight.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stella Vine</span> English artist

Stella Vine is an English artist, who lives and works in London. Her work is figurative painting, with subjects drawn from personal life, as well as from rock stars, royalty, and other celebrities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carolee Schneemann</span> American visual experimental artist (1939–2019)

Carolee Schneemann was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneeman was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, saying: "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London National Film Theatre, and many other venues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walter Keane</span> American plagiarist (1915–2000)

Walter Stanley Keane was an American plagiarist who became famous in the 1960s as the claimed painter of a series of widely reproduced paintings depicting vulnerable subjects with enormous eyes. The paintings are now accepted as having been painted by his wife, Margaret Keane. When she told her side of the story, Walter Keane retaliated with a USA Today article that again claimed he had done the work.

Susan Krieg is an American artist known for her mixed-media collage paintings and murals. She created a series, "Archetypes of the Feminine," that consisted of more than 400 mixed media paintings. She has created murals and facilitated the creation of murals, including the Hollywood Walk of Fame Doors Project and Judy Chicago's Pomona Envisions the Future. Her works have been shown on television programs and have been on display at two Trump buildings in Atlantic City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Mitchell</span> American painter (1925–1992)

Joan Mitchell was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clementine Hunter</span> American painter

Clementine Hunter was a self-taught Black folk artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana, who lived and worked on Melrose Plantation.

Marla is a female given name in English. It is a variant of the name Marlene, which comes from Mary Magdalene, the biblical woman to whom Jesus Christ first appeared after his resurrection.

<i>My Kid Could Paint That</i> 2007 American film

My Kid Could Paint That is a 2007 documentary film by director Amir Bar-Lev. The movie follows the early artistic career of Marla Olmstead, a young girl from Binghamton, New York who gains fame first as a child prodigy painter of abstract art, and then becomes the subject of controversy concerning whether she truly completed the paintings herself or did so with her parents' assistance and/or direction. The film was bought by Sony Pictures Classics in 2007 after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival.

Amir Bar-Lev is noted for his work in directing documentary films. His debut, Fighter (2000) (director), was named one of the top documentaries of the year by Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice. Fighter won six international festival awards and was called “brilliant,” by The New Yorker, “enthralling” by the New York Times, and “one of the best documentaries of this year or any other” by Rolling Stone.

Lou Zhenggang is a prominent contemporary Chinese artist. Trained in calligraphy from an early age, she attained national fame as a child prodigy, was sent to a government-sponsored fine arts academy and trained by China's masters of calligraphy and ink painting. She won numerous competitions and exhibited both at home and abroad. At the age of 20, Lou moved to Japan, where she soon had several highly acclaimed exhibitions, wrote illustrated columns for prominent local magazines and was featured regularly on a national television program for three years. Though Lou's work is best known in China and Japan, it has been shown in Paris and New York and is held in numerous collections, both public and private. She continues to live and work in Tokyo.

Amanda Dunbar is a Texas-based artist who gained acclaim at an early age for her oil painting skills. Amanda Dunbar began painting in an after school art class at the age of 13. Her spontaneous and advanced works acquired significant interest immediately. Dunbar is currently listed as a prodigy of the visual arts in the current textbooks for advanced university education entitled Child Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michal Na'aman</span> Israeli artist

Michal Na'aman, is an Israeli painter. From the point of view of values, her work is characterized as conceptual art and deals with such subjects as the limitations of language and sight, the possibilities for expression, and gender issues. Using the techniques of collage, Na'aman has created works that examine the visual way of thinking as opposed to the verbal way of thinking. In 2014 she was awarded the Israel Prize for Plastic Arts for her work.

Sophie Alexina Victoire Matisse is an American contemporary artist. Matisse initially gained notice for her series of Missing Person paintings, in which she appropriated and embellished upon, or subtracted from, recognizable works from art history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Autumn de Forest</span> American painter

Autumn de Forest is an American painter from Las Vegas, Nevada. The Discovery Channel referred to her as “an artistic genius” when she was eight years old. Members of the art community and other media outlets, such as the Huffington Post and Forbes, have referred to de Forest as a prodigy. Her paintings have sold for a total of $7 million.

Caroline Kent is an American visual artist based in Chicago, best known for her large scale abstract painting works that explore the interplay between language and translation. Inspired by her own personal experiences and her cultural heritage, Kent creates paintings that explore the power and limitations of communication. Her work, influenced by her Mexican heritage, delves into the potentials and confines of language and reconsiders the modernist canon of abstraction. She likens her composition process to choreography, revealing an interconnectedness between language, abstraction, and painting. Kent's artwork showcases an evolving dialogue of space, matter, and time, resulting in a confluence of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and performance, blurring the lines between these mediums.

References

  1. ↑ My Kid Could Paint That Director: Amir Bar-Lev, 2007
  2. 1 2 Leung, Rebecca. New Questions About Child Prodigy: Charlie Rose Reports On 4-Year-Old Artist Marla Olmstead, 60 Minutes II , February 23, 2005
  3. 1 2 Child art prodigy wows New York BBC News , 29 September 2004.
  4. ↑ York, Michelle (September 28, 2004). "A Portrait Of the Artist As a Young Girl: Early Ability on Abstracts: 4-Year-Old Paints With Flair". The New York Times .
  5. ↑ "Marla Olmstead: Artist". People The Intersection 2013. Archived from the original on May 31, 2015. Retrieved May 22, 2015.
  6. ↑ Sachs, Andrea (September 6, 2006). "The Downside of Being a Child Prodigy", Time
  7. ↑ Caplan, Jeremy. (November 8, 2004) "Pint-Size Picassos". Time
  8. ↑ Basler, George (December 27, 2015). "Catching up with child art prodigy Marla Olmstead". USA Today .
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.