‘Little Picasso’ Andres Valencia takes art world by storm

He’s 10 years old. Needs a step ladder to paint his larger works. Meet the pint-sized primary-school painting prodigy.

Andrews Valencia: the 'Little Picasso' taking the art world by storm. Picture: Supplied

When Andres Valencia starts to doodle in primary school, his friends gather round to watch.

They are not the only ones to have noticed his talent. The ten-year-old has the art world buzzing with excitement and will make his global auction debut this month.

The art prodigy, from San Diego in California, first picked up a paintbrush when he was five and sells his pieces for tens of thousands of dollars.

He uses a step ladder to create his larger works and his talent was spotted early by his parents, Guadalupe, a 50-year-old lawyer, and Elsa, a 47-year-old psychologist and jewellery designer.

They encourage his work, which is influenced by Picasso and cubism, but just want him to enjoy painting.

“To be quite honest, we try not to talk too much about it in front of him,” Guadalupe said. “We certainly don’t refer to him as a prodigy or anything like that. We just keep it simple with him. At home, he just does his art.

“So I don’t think that he knows the magnitude of what the art world and people think about it.”

Guadalupe said that he and Elsa had resisted calls to homeschool their son so that he can focus more on painting. “We want him to go to school like a normal kid. And because he’s ten, it’s not like a lot of artists, they go to work for six, eight, ten hours a day painting.

“So he paints after school and on the weekends, but he also plays with his friends.”

Andres earned global recognition at Miami Art Week in December. Jordan Belfort, the former trader whose life story was made into the Hollywood film The Wolf of Wall Street, bought one of his paintings, as did the actress Sofia Vergara.

Nick Korniloff, director of Art Miami, said that experts had been impressed before they knew his age.

“I’ve been doing this for 21 years,” Korniloff said. “And this was, without a doubt, the most incredible interaction I’ve had with an artist and experience with a collecting audience inside an art fair. We’ve had everybody attend our shows, all great celebrities and personalities. But this little ten-year-old boy brought down the house.”

Andres is not afraid of heavy subjects. Inspired by Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece Guernica, he created a painting depicting the horrors of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Korniloff was reluctant to predict what his work may be worth to future investors but is confident it will endure. “The work holds the wall just as good as anything else I’ve seen in a long career,” he said.

COMMENT: IT LACKS ONLY ONE THING: ORIGINALITY

“I blame Picasso. He doctored the dates on his early drawings and then claimed that, even as a child, he was a rival to the great Raphael.

Now every parent of precociously talented offspring seems inclined to believe that they have a Picasso in the making — perhaps rather too literally in the case of Andres Valencia, who has painted a Ukrainian update to the landmark Guernica.

It’s great that this ten-year-old seems so intelligently passionate. At his age I probably thought cubism was something to do with playroom building blocks. Valencia has studied some pretty testing painters, George Condo among them, and then offered his take on them. His canvases are bright, bold and confident. They pack quite a punch.

But the reason Picasso’s work was so powerful was that it was utterly fresh. He showed us a new way of looking. To imitate his style is to miss its point. However proficient a painted imitation, aesthetically speaking it leads nowhere much. “Every child is an artist,’‘ the great Spanish modernist said. “The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’‘ I hope that one day Andres will face this difficulty head on. But in the meantime he is selling out to our fickle contemporary markets. They are always ready to leap on the latest novelty but they then roll indifferently on. Many a crushed reputation lies abandoned in their wake.” — Rachel Campbell Johnston

The Times