NEUBEUERN: Three-year-old Laurent Schwarz may still be wearing nappies but his paintings have earned him social media fame and the nickname of Germany’s “mini-Picasso”.

In a studio his parents have set up at their home in the Bavarian town of Neubeuern, the toddler has been busy creating splashy artworks, often several times bigger than he is. When he is not playing with his dinosaur toys, he likes to liberally apply acrylic paint to canvas with brushes, rollers or just his fingers to create riotously abstract pieces.

His parents said his works have attracted the eye of art lovers and galleries and fetched high prices. They insisted it was Laurent’s artistic passion that has fuelled the art world hype, media interest and his very early brush with fame.

His 33-year-old mother Lisa Schwarz said that the family discovered Laurent’s love for painting on a family holiday last year, at a hotel which had a studio. “When we got home, Laurent just wanted to paint — paint, paint, paint, the whole time,” she said.

She and her husband Philipp bought him some canvases, brushes and paint, and it was not long before family and friends were clamouring to see the prodigy’s work.

They set up an Instagram account to share images of his work more easily and said they were soon bowled over by the response. “Within four weeks we had got 10,000 followers,” said Lisa, with enquiries from galleries following soon after, and interest from newspapers in Germany and abroad which quickly dubbed him the “mini-Picasso”.

Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2024