A Young Painter Who's Really Skipping Ahead

Stuart Simpson, who opened the StuART Gallery in Encino, happened to be in Binghamton on business (he is a contractor-engineer of sound studios). He bought four Marlas. He says he was blown away by her work. "I hear regularly from people: 'My grandkids could do this.' I say give it a shot. Because they can't. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I think most people struggle all their lives to know what they should do. Marla knows what she should do."

Simpson references Monets and Matisses. One of the paintings he bought, called "Bottom Feeder," hangs in his home. Simpson said, "I'll have a glass of wine and look at the painting, and see something in the painting one night, and another night, I see something else."

His wife, Marte, said that "when he told me he had bought the paintings of a 4-year-old, I said: 'Great, they're going in his office, where I don't have to see them.' But when I looked at the Marlas, the size of the paintings, the colors and placement and texture, this is a kid's painting, but it's painting of gift and talent."

Marte Simpson calls Marla "an old soul."

In February 2005, "60 Minutes II" ran a Charlie Rose-anchored segment that raised questions about the Marlas. The producer got the family to agree to install a hidden camera to watch young Olmstead paint a canvas start to finish.

On the video, one can hear her dad saying: "Psst. Paint the red. Paint the red. You're driving me crazy. Paint the red. . . . If you paint, honey, like you were --"

Marla: "Please."

Dad: "This is not the way it should be."

Okay. This doesn't look good. Laura Olmstead explains to us that the hidden-camera scene was not ideal, that her husband said what he said ("It did look like he was coaching her," she says), but Laura swears that the Marla paintings were all painted by Marla, that the parents never laid on a hand on the canvases except to prime them for painting.

"She's not a coachable child," Laura says.

To rebut the skeptics, the couple produced a long-running video of Marla painting "Oceans," and in the 20 minutes we watched at the gallery (along with a handful of guests), the child is doing all the paint splattering, smearing, squirting and brushwork. She selects colors out of a tube, applies them and works the colors together on the canvas, using brushes and spatulas. She is wearing her PJs while she does this, and brother Zane watches.

"Those paintings are all Marla," says Laura.

The proceeds of her work, says Mom, go into a college fund. The couple estimate that the daughter has produced about 90 works, and more than 60 have sold.

Early on during the first night of the show, no paintings have sold. A couple of patrons stand before one of the works, titled "Everyone's House," and wonder aloud:

"Is that a rocket ship?"

"Or a crayon?"

"Or a weird bug?"

Art, they say, it is in the eye of the beholder.

The artist Marla Olmstead, herself, is not saying. She is eating an ice cream cone.