Origin Story

In search of my father's paintings, part 4

Today I’m sharing a birth story, in honor of my birthday week. It’s one in a series of posts about searching for my father’s missing or lost paintings. I’ve written about one I found and lost again, one I never knew about, and one I loved and haven’t (yet) re-found.

Earle Olsen, untitled (1950s). Private collection. Photo by its owner.

“You were a perfect baby,” my mother says at the dinner table in front of seven people. I cringe. It’s dark outside in the second winter of our pandemic lockdown. I’ve been revising my memoir about my father’s art career for months. We’re celebrating my youngest child’s birthday so we’re telling family stories, sitting at a long tiled table in the warm glow indoors. My mother tells the story of my birth, then each of my sisters’. She’s unusually voluble. “Then M. came home from her first day of kindergarten and was so happy that she had made friends with a girl who had the same birthday! Then we found out it was the same hospital and the same doctor!” I knew this story already. And everyone gets born somehow.

“Dr. B was so nice. He took paintings from your father as payment.”

I’ve come to relish how offhand comments like these can set my research spinning in entirely new directions, how a random puzzle piece reconfigures the whole. “The obstetrician accepted Dad’s paintings in payment for M.’s birth?” I ask, to clarify. “For all of you,” she says. “Dr. B came out to our house to choose her painting and said he had hung another on his dining room wall.”

Who does that? I can’t even imagine it. “He told us that he knew artists didn’t always have much money,” my mother adds, “and in fact we had no health insurance when I wasn’t working.” It was another world, the one we entered in the 1960s.

Where are those paintings? I wondered if I should track down Dr. B’s family and try to find them. What did the painting exchanged for me look like? For T.? For M.? Why has this never come up before? I’m full of questions without answers, but I’m struck by the symbolism of this trade. It feels like the beginning of a fairytale:

Once there was an artist who created many wonderful paintings. One day he brought one special painting to the doctor’s office and swapped it for a newborn baby girl. He did this three times and ended up with three beloved daughters who were all destined, marked from birth, for Art.

It’s an asexual origin story that turns me into a child again, blind to my parents’ sexualities. It effaces my mother’s participation — as our childhood mythologies often did. Indeed, as cultures often do for women’s (literal) labor.

Most striking now, at the other end of this narrative, is the tight connection it reveals between art and family after all. When my father left the family in 1970 he said he wanted to rededicate himself to his art. But this new story makes clear that art and family were never on separate parallel tracks; they were always intertwined, where you least expected it. I asked my mother if my father had ever bartered his work on other occasions. She told me that their couples therapist also took paintings as payment. (I’m afraid to track those down: what emotional traces might still cling to them?)

Once, my mother also said, a couple had bought a painting directly from my father in the mid-1960s and then tried to exchange it. He refused, saying “this isn’t a department store.” But in a sense, that’s what he tried to do during the divorce: “I traded my art for my children and now I’d like my art back, please.” That symbolic exchange, which felt hurtful when I was growing up, now feels sort of … quaint, like a child’s overly literal interpretation of the world.

It took me six months to get up the nerve to find and call Dr. B’s family to inquire about those paintings. I practiced in my head.

“Hi, is this Dr. B? My name is Victoria Olsen. You delivered me!…. Really! Do you remember my father from over fifty years ago? Uh, he was an artist. You took a painting as payment for my birth…. That was so nice of you. Thanks!!…. But, um, do you still have it? Huh. What about the two for my sisters…?”

When I finally found the family and called I was too late to talk to Dr. B; he had passed away the year before. But I spoke to one of his daughters, another grieving daughter like me. She still had two of the paintings and sent me photos. She loved them. “Your father was a really wonderful artist,” she told me. “I look at a lot of abstract art. It’s not always pleasing; it needs energy and emotion. It’s not always comforting. Your father’s paintings aren’t simply comforting.” She invited me to visit them, but we haven’t yet pulled that off.

Earle Olsen, untitled (1960s). Private collection. Photo by its owner. Which birth did this painting pay for?

I tried to cross-reference these images against reproductions of my father’s work in order to identify them. (My father never tracked his own work so I started an inventory after his death.) The long rectangle above could be a painting from the 1950s he called “Panorama.” In the 1950s his abstractions were still linked to landscape. The other one looks later to me: closer to the abstract expressionist work he made in the early 1960s. I thought of how gratified my father would have been, to know that his work was still on display, and admired. It’s a cliché to reduce the impact of art to a personal connection, but in my own evaluation of my father’s work this feels significant. The decades those paintings spent on the wall of another family’s home is a measure of one kind of success: my father’s work mattered to a few people, so it mattered.

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In publishing this excerpt here, I revised it a bit¹. I decided to lean into the fairytale idea and add some more invention, like the imagined phone call. I tried to show that my father and I were both child-like, envisioning his art as literally creative, as if his paintings brought us into being. Suddenly I remembered that striking illustration I grew up with from D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths: Athena bursting fully formed from her father’s head. (There’s another foundational—and asexual—origin story for you.)

Still, something about this family story is hard for me to untangle. On the one hand, I’m glad I learned about this exchange (belatedly) and found some of the work. That feels almost miraculous. On the other hand, I’m uneasy about this swapping of art and children, though creative production and reproduction are often placed side by side (more usually for women artists). Why am I not just thrilled that someone valued my father’s art so highly, that art-loving doctors like Dr. B existed? And yet, I have a vague sense that my father got away with something— again. (He was always getting away with something.)

Here’s the moral of this tale: Even though Dr. B’s family valued their paintings, it wasn’t a fair exchange. I’m left with the disturbing question: did my father overvalue his work or did he undervalue his children?

Please share or like or leave a comment below…. I am curious how this story reads to others.

1. Credit and thanks to my Cape Cod writers group for the helpful feedback!