Four-year-old N.B. art sensation racking up sales of his abstracts

Four-year-old Advait Kolarkar loves dinosaurs, playing Angry Birds and has trouble sitting still while his mom does a TV interview. But he’s already an art prodigy, with three exhibitions of his abstract paintings to his credit.

Virtually all of the 66 paintings he’s created have sold, earning him $23,000.

Not bad for a kid who hasn’t even started kindergarten.

“He used to spend hours with his sister painting with watercolours. But it was when he was one year old when he started creating amazing abstract compositions on the floor, which grabbed our attention,” said his mother, Shruti Kolarkar. Advait, who was dressed in a suit and frequently flashed an impish grin, sat beside his mother as she spoke with CTV’s Your Morning by video Monday from the family’s home in Saint John, N.B.

When they discovered his talent, Advait’s parents gave him a canvas and acrylic paints and let him go.

“Even when he started talking, he majorly talked about the forms in the painting and that made us think that he may have something special. He was expressing his feelings and his thoughts through colours and he was putting his imagination on the canvas.”

In his online bio, his parents say Advait can explain the nuances of colour and sees dragons, galaxies, birds, flowers, sea creatures, dinosaurs in his work, which feature names like The Alligator King, Pirate Ship, and Prehistoric Octopus. He will work for hours on a canvas until he is happy. Advait uses his hands, brushes, rollers and other tools in his compositions, along with squeezing and splattering paint out of bottles to create his explosions of colour.

His work was displayed at a prestigious exhibition in New York City at the end of April.

“Initially, we could not believe that he was selected as Artexpo New York is a huge global platform for fine art,” said his mother. “We didn’t know what was going to happen and we were a bit nervous about it. But when the show started, the response was spectacular.”

It was the boy’s third exhibit, after his work attracted the attention of a gallery curator in his hometown of Pune, India. The family migrated to New Brunswick in 2016, and in January, Advait became the youngest artist in the history of the Saint John Arts Centre to have a solo exhibit. The child picked the name, “Colour Blizzard,” himself.

Though some have expressed skepticism, Kolarkar, who is also a painter and a commercial artist, says no one interferes with or helps Advait as he creates.

“He is free to do whatever comes to his mind. So nobody at home is allowed to instruct him. It is just 100 per cent him creating those works,” she said.

As to whether Advait will continue with his art, only time will tell, says his mom.

“Advait loves what he’s doing and we wish it may continue and we want him to enjoy the art throughout his life like the way he’s doing now, with a lot of freedom. If he wants to take it forward as a career that would be wonderful.”

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