Slate: My Kid Could Paint That
“Marla Olmstead made her first abstract painting while still diapers, crouching on her parents’ dining-room table. She was not yet 2. Her big break came when she was 3, and a family friend hung her paintings in a coffee shop in her hometown of Binghamton, N.Y. By the time she was 4, she was scarfing down cookies at the packed opening of her first solo gallery show. A local reporter covered the story, and the New York Times picked it up. Soon, news crews from all over were rushing to report on the adorable blond moppet and her colorful canvases, calling her a “budding Picasso,” a “pint-sized Pollock.” Within a few months, she sold more than $300,000 worth of paintings. And then, just short of her 5th birthday, the bubble burst. In February 2005, 60 Minutes aired a report by Charlie Rose implying that Marla’s father, a night-shift manager at a Frito-Lay plant and an amateur painter himself, was guiding her compositions. Sales of the paintings quickly dried up, the family was barraged with hate mail, and the New York Post gleefully piled on the puns, reporting that “the juvenile Jackson Pollock may actually be a full-fledged Willem de Frauding.”
(…)
“In his new documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, director Amir Bar-Lev traces Marla’s sensational rise and fall, focusing on the media feeding frenzy and on the Olmsteads’ efforts to prove that Marla created her paintings unaided. Whatever the degree of parental coaching, Bar-Lev’s footage reveals a child who clearly enjoys painting. We see her squeezing gobs of thick acrylic paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, smooshing it around with brushes, fingers, and spatulas, and using plastic squeeze bottles to add delicate squiggles and swirls. Yet, when Bar-Lev tries to film her creating a single work from start to finish, the camera-shy toddler grows silly and restless, and in one incriminating scene, begs her father to draw a smiley face on her picture. (He declines, grinning nervously.)”
Zie ook marlaolmstead.com en de Charlie Rose’ 60 minutes.
