25

Cosmos, Galaxies, and Dinosaurs

WORDS ABBY KRONPHOTOGRAPHS ALEXANDRENA PARKER

Aelita Andre, the Six-Year-Old Australian Painting Prodigy, Captivates New York City

O ne morning, six years ago, the then-three-month old Aelita Andre sat wailing in her stroller within the Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. Agi-

tated looks emanated from all corners of the room, chastising the parents as if to say, this is no place for a child. In an attempt to soothe his disquieted daughter, Michael Andre lifted Aelita from her stroller until she was eye level with the paintings. Within just a few seconds, the crying ceased as Aelita fixed her gaze on the artwork in front of her. “She probably was telling us, by yelling, ‘Pick me up, I want to see, too!’ ” Nikka, Aelita’s mother, recalled. “She doesn’t want to sit in the stroller and observe our feet; she wishes to see artworks, too.” Michael and Nikka sought to ignite a sense of creativ-ity and wonder in their daughter from a young age. Now, at just six-years-old, Aelita is the “youngest professional painter in the world” and still somewhat of an anomaly in a typically exclusive industry. Her work as an artist has already earned her three solo exhibitions at Agora Gallery, one of New York City’s leading contemporary fine art galleries, as well as numerous other galler-ies across the globe. Coveted by abstract art collectors, a few of Aelita’s paintings sell for upwards of $20,000, though most cost between $6,000 and $18,000. Raised in Melbourne, Australia by parents who are visual artists, Aelita has always been witness to the creative process be-hind making art. As soon as she could crawl across the sprawling canvases her father painted on, Aelita began experimenting with different materials and color combinations. Aelita completed some of her earli-est works just after turning one, but accord-ing to the artist, she “first started painting inside mummy’s tummy.” Gesturing to-wards a piece she completed more recently, Aelita indicates that she had painted similar works while in the womb. “I had my whole painting area in mummy’s tummy. And I also made magic in mummy’s tummy.” Although she was not yet able to speak fluently, Aelita’s parents insist that she communicated through her paintings. “She was making conversation happen through the colors,” Nikka said. “Painting for her is like, for us, talking and listening. For Aelita, it is how she expresses herself.” Sometimes Aelita treats painting as a sort of perfor-mance art—singing and dancing around her canvases—as a way to further exude her emotions. “I feel like a magical space uni-corn when I paint,” said Aelita enthusiastically. “I am very in-spired about my artwork.” Just after her first birthday, Aelita already had the consis-tent ability to stay focused on one painting for almost 40 minutes at a time. Her parents liken Aelita’s process to a meditative prac-tice, noting her extreme thoughtfulness and patience in creating her pieces. According to Nikka, “After Aelita finishes painting, she sits, puts her hands together, and thinks. And she will sit

there like that for a few minutes.” When Aelita was about two-years-old, Nikka said she actively began to notice there was something special about her daughter’s work, particularly her use of color, understanding of composition, and attention span. “We thought, it’s probably because we love our baby that we think it’s so incredible how she uses color and composition,” Nikka admitted. “We thought maybe we were reading too much into what Aelita was produc-ing, but I thought, I have to show somebody professional to see what people will say to me.” Nikka showed the paintings to a curator at the Bruns-wick Street Gallery, who agreed to feature the paintings in a group exhibition before ever learning Aelita’s age. Though he was surprised to discover that a 22-month-old artist created the paintings, he was still willing to showcase Aelita’s work. “I think an artwork speaks for itself; who created it is irrelevant,” said Nikka, who intentionally withheld Aelita’s age from the curator. “Whether it appeals to you or does not appeal to you, art should be totally democratic—at least for the creator.”Since this initial show, Aelita’s paintings have attracted an inter-national following with exhibitions held in several cities including Melbourne, Hong Kong, Tuscany, London, and New York, with selected works chosen for private collections housed in Tokyo, Moscow, Vienna, Rome, and more. New York holds a special place in Aelita’s heart after she first traveled to the city for her solo exhibition, “The Prodigy

of Color,” which ran in June 2011 at Agora Gallery. With two follow up shows, “Cos-mos” and “Secret Universe,” it seems the city’s art scene has also embraced the young artist’s work. “Aelita approaches painting with a stealth-like determination of a more mature

painter coupled with innocence. [With her, there’s the] abandon-ment of preconceived notions that often dictate outcome, and yet the outcome is always perfect,” said Angela Di Bello, Gallery Director at Agora. “I think New York is very important because it has em-braced modern art from the beginning,” Nikka said. “But for Aelita, she fell in love with New York. She absolutely adores Central Park.” Not surprisingly, Aelita’s interests are hardly those one might expect of a six-year-old. She has watched countless doc-umentaries on cosmology, astronomy, and paleontology, and counts David Attenborough and Carl Sagan among her heroes. Currently being homeschooled, Aelita remarked, “They are the best teachers in the world.” Her deep fascination with these sci-ences is reflected in the nature of her paintings, which depict narratives relating to cosmos, galaxies, and dinosaurs. Aelita usually explains the narrative behind her paintings as she is creating them. In the case of her 2012 work Paleontolo-gists Footprint Dinosaurs Nesting Grounds, which she primed with a coat of paint partially applied by her feet, Aelita insists she was a

“I feel like a magical space unicorn when

I paint.”

27

paleontologist leaving her footprint on the canvas. Aelita’s inter-esting use of tools and found objects adds a surrealist element to the otherwise abstract expressionist style of her work. Small details and indiscriminate marks can easily be overlooked, but often they play an important role in the story Aelita is trying to convey. “She explains as she paints, ‘they are not just spheres, but they are force fields hiding herbivores from carnivores,’” said Nikka of Aelita’s process. “When she’s painting, she’ll point, ‘the mother lays her eggs here.’” In her free time, Aelita practices ballet and gymnastics and is learning how to play the piano and violin. A great pen-chant for attention and enthusiasm for communicating with peo-ple have instilled in Aelita a love of performance. “She really loves being on stage dancing and singing,” Nikka explained. “At one point, we went to a concert and I had to really keep her from running on the stage. She probably would have if I hadn’t kept her really hard, because she really was trying to run on stage and perform.” Despite her remarkable success and sophisticated inter-ests, her parents insist, “she is just a normal kid.” “I love swimming, running, and playing,” Aelita said. “And I love playing with my beautiful pets,” she added, referenc-ing her guinea pigs. While she has experienced considerable success in her young career, skeptics question whether Aelita truly deserves her place in the art world, believing her work to be either a derivative of, or influenced by her parents. “Aelita is certainly capable of putting a picture together (although it has been alleged that her parents have an oversize hand, quite literally perhaps, in creating these works, and presumably also in naming them)...Whatever

their aesthetic charm, her canvases are hardly novel from a formal vantage, nor do they provide added meaning below the surface,” wrote Noah Horowitz, director of the VIP Art Fair, in a 2011 ar-ticle for the New York Times. Others—who have compared Aelita to the likes of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollack—claim there is an uplifting innocence and honesty about her paintings that is not often found in adult works. Part of what makes Aelita’s work original is her lack of formal training. Because she has not been educated in the tradi-tional principles and theories of art, Aelita is utterly innocent in her practice. The colors and found objects she chooses to use on her canvases are organic, influenced only by her imagination and fascinations. “I choose colors because of their beauty,” Aelita said. “The rainbow galaxies in space inspire me to paint—even the spiral galaxies [because] of their color and abstraction. The first time I saw a star, I wanted to paint because I learned that stars are beautiful...and planets and galaxies.” Nikka embraces this organic, self-influenced progres-sion of Aelita’s. “My biggest fear is that someone will interfere and teach my child the conventional way to paint,” she confided. “This is a very wrong approach, because I think she needs to express herself.” Aelita’s artwork is reflective of her fearless spirit, self-belief, and energy—childlike qualities many abandon in adult-hood. While it was Aelita’s initial curiosity in her father’s materi-als that got her started in painting, it is certainly her liveliness and persistence in the practice of art that are promising of a long-term passion—a life of multi-colored footprints on canvas, waves of glitter and broken dinosaur eggshells, and the quiet, patient narrative of what’s going on in her mind as she circles her canvas again, and again, and again.

STRING CITY ISLAND PRINCESS