Bold slashes of red mingle with swirls of turquoise, interspersed with vivid purple, all on a slate-grey backdrop – a veritable rainbow of colours. The maturity of the work indicates decades of painting by a mature hand. The artist Advait Kolarkar is four years old.
Advait was only a year old when he started painting with his fingers, recalls his mother. "He would sit with his sister and paint. He painted on paper, the floor, the walls with his fingers," recalls his mother, Shruti Kolarkar, a commercial artist. Soon he moved on to paint brushes, and now has branched out to using rollers and other complex tools. "He just uses whatever is handy," says Kolarkar.
The preschooler, who hails from Pune and is now based in New Brunswick, Canada, got international acclaim when he became the youngest artist in the world in the last four decades to showcase his works at the Artexpo New York, early this May. Even before this, he already had two exhibitions in Saint John and several in Pune.
"We always felt that Advait was special. But we wanted to be sure that it was not just a parent's pride. So we asked Subhash Pawar, a professor of the Kala Mahavidyalaya in Pune to come and see him paint and judge his work when Advait was two," recalls Kolarkar. Pawar was so impressed with the work of the toddler artist that he not only suggested art teachers for him, but also proceeded to recommend his artwork to Pune galleries.
When they moved to Saint John in Canada, it was the city's cultural affairs officer Bernard Cormier who took a shine to the young painter and decided to facilitate more exhibitions for him. In early 2018, his work was displayed at an exhibition at the Saint John Arts Centre with the pieces going upto $2,000.
At the Artexpo in New York, which was a sell-out, Advait's paintings sold at thousands of dollars.
For skeptics, who may doubt that such reformed artwork can come from one so young, the Kolarkars went through a complex jury process to check the veracity of Advait's talent. They have compiled several videos of the entire process – a child playing with colours, making a mess of his clothes and hands and creating masterpieces.
Perhaps, just as fascinating as the incredible talent that the young painter holds, is the sensibility to art that he has developed at an extraordinarily young age. Though he started painting before he could walk and talk, Advait has now started assigning themes to each of his paintings – drawing inspiration from his four-year-old world of dinosaurs, space stories, watching the sun on the sea, imagining the underwater life and such.
Advait spends hours everyday sitting in the room that his parents have converted into an artist's studio, not getting off the ground till his piece is done. Ask him about what inspires him to keep going, and he cuts to the heart of the matter as children are often wont to do. "I paint beautiful paintings," he says. "I feel amazing when I paint. That's why I love it."
