Painter, illustrator, animator
Suite 3-115
RobertSoulless@yahoo.com
www.raoart.info
A 5'x8' acrylic painting illustrating an incident that occurred on the morning of January 9, 1893, the coldest winter on record, in the cellar of O'Briant's store, down in "Smokey Hollow" (the other-side-of-the-tracks before there were tracks).
A disreputable place, a "refuge for criminals and coloreds" according to the Durham Globe. A place where the homeless went to die. As did Hattie Scarlotte, 20 years old, about to give birth.
She had gone to a Durham magistrate three months before claiming that an Orange County State Representative named John Knowles was the father of her child and as she was destitute, requested that Knowles provide her with $40 for the child's welfare. "Squire" Gunter wrote to Knowles to appear before him but Knowles never replied.
So the young woman, alone and without hope, crawled into the cellar of O'Briant's store to have her baby. She and the newborn child, both dead, were found the next morning.
Three months later, in March, 1893, long after Hattie and her un-named baby were buried in a pauper's grave, John Knowles appeared before a Durham magistrate along with two close friends, substantial lawyers like himself, all of whom swore that it was not Knowles who soiled young Hattie Scarlotte but rather the Mayor of Hillsborough, who, a
friend testified, was personally seen lying with the woman "beneath the large oak."
The painting was completed and signed on January 9, 2010, the 117th anniversary of the birth of Hattie Scarlotte's child.
Some of Olason's style studies for "The Birth of Hattie Scarlotte's Child":
