EXCLUSIVE: Art prodigy, nine-year-old Aelita Andre sat down for an interview with news.com.au to talk about her art, fame and the future.

AELITA Andre has done things many of us can only dream of, all before the tender age of 10.

She has showcased her work in sold-out galleries in New York, London, Italy and Hong Kong, painted live in front of more than 20,000 people, has been featured in Forbes magazine and interviewed by Good Morning America, CBS, NBC, BBC and TheWashington Post.

She was compared to Jackson Pollock by The New York Times, labelled “the Mozart of the visual arts” by a professor at the St Petersburg Fine Art Academy and has even written a book.

The Melbourne-born daughter of Australian Michael Andre and Russian Nikka Kalashnikova is most comfortable with buckets of paint and a canvas. But the pint-sized painting prodigy opened up to news.com.au this week about life in the spotlight, where she gets her inspiration and what she sees in the splashes of colour that have afforded her a life of travel and fame and been an outlet for her freedom of expression.

And before you ask: she’s a normal, happy young girl who wouldn’t have it any other way.

“The fact that I grew up with so much attention and famousness is like, I feel really happy that,” she said.

“I’m famous for my amazing art and so happy to be known around the world and when I go into shops and things and they say, ‘Oh, I remember you, you’re that famous artist Aelita’ I feel so happy in that moment and I’m really glad about that. I feel special.”

She is special. Born in 2007, Aelita was the youngest person ever to have their own accomplishments listed on Wikipedia.

Her parents say she began to paint “professionally” aged nine months. Her first works, acrylic on canvas, were exhibited when she was 22 months old, at Melbourne’s Brunswick Street gallery, and seven of her 15 works — priced between $300 and $3000 according to The Guardian — sold before the show even started.

By age four, a single piece of her work had fetched $24,000.

From there it’s been exhibition after exhibition.

On her website, Aelita is described as the embodiment of “the rich, expressive, artistic impulses that the fathers of modern art such as Kandinsky and Klee drew upon”.

Her mother Nikka says she is “not concerned with representation or figuration” and “is far too broad and free-spirited to confine herself”.

Eye-rolls are not uncommon when the young artist’s works are mentioned. The ABC once asked if she was a “toddler Picasso or a kid waving a paintbrush”.

So what does she see when she paints? Plenty, she told news.com.au.

“I interpret my style of painting as a magic, abstract universe and it’s not normal, it’s not usual,” she said.

“It doesn’t sit in one tiny sphere in all realism, it goes out and it explores the world.

“When I do my artworks, I don’t have any plan. The moment before I put a drop on the canvas I just say I’m going to make a beautiful abstract work of the universe today.

“When I do my paintings, I just feel free. I don’t feel locked up in a tiny world.”

In her paintings she sees flying dinosaurs, guinea pigs, rabbits — all the things an eight-year-old should see when she paints. But Aelita says she also sees “the cosmos”.

She is inspired by “animals, documentaries, the amazing things I see in nature” and she has no plans to put the smock away any time soon.

“When I grow up, I want to stay as a painter for ever and ever and ever for a trillion billion years, and no matter what, I want to stay as a painter, every single day, every single night, always I will stay a painter and I will paint in the same style.”

And if it makes her happy and people enjoy it, this author can’t see much to be critical about.