Konstanze, current photo and from early childhood. All Photos provided

KONSTANZE REINHARD
CHILD ARTIST

PAINTING

When I was two or three years old I started painting like crazy. I didn’t have to practice. I just picked up the brush and started doing it. I had no clue what I was painting. It totally flowed out of me. The paintings would just pop out of nowhere. I would also use other tools, the weirdest tools you could think of. I would use a spoon, my fingers, a toothpick. I thought I was making scribbles like every other kid does, but I guess I did something unique.

I would paint perfectly but when I made them I never saw anything in there. When I was about five or six, then I noticed that I made these really nice things. I have never put something in front of me and said, “Okay, I’m going to paint this.” That was impossible. That was not in my nature.

I think I was sent down here to do this. The colors were so interesting to me. They were so real. They were so flashy. The brushes and the colors were so neat and I would just start doing something and it turned out to be so nice. I would try to make a cloud and it would turn into the most fantastic sea lion. I do still have that feeling.

I remember once I was just having fun with the colors and my painting fell on the floor. I picked it up, and said, “Oh, I don’t want this!” My Mom said, “I’ll keep it. It’s a duck.” She would pick them all up and frame them. When I made something messy, later I began to see things in it. A couple of things that I thought were really bad when I was little, I sold prints of for $80. Now I notice that I made a painting with Jesus and a camel and then a swan. How could I think those were bad? When I was little, I thought they were just scribbles, but they were actually like masterpieces.

I did my art all by myself. I would lock myself in my room and not come out. I would sit on a little tiny stool at a table in a corner and would just work there and do all my little paintings. When someone would talk to me, I would not pay attention to them. I would not pay attention to anything—just focus on my little painting. My Mom would say, “Lunch is ready!” or she would say, “Go outside and play,” and I’d say “No!”

All my sweaters were stained completely from mixing paint. I would eat when I painted and I would get paint on my food. I would paint like a maniac. When I ran out of colors I would always want more. My Dad bought me many sets so I would never run out. He would buy seven at a time and only give me two. Then when I was finished with those, he would give me two more.

“Now I notice that I made a painting with Jesus and a camel and then a swan. How could I think those were bad?” Konstanze “She would just doodle and then all of a sudden something would appear. When she noticed a face or an identifiable creature, she would know exactly where to put the eyes. I found it really interesting that she was able to make out of those shapes something that resembled a visible animal for instance.” Reinhard

CLAY

Five or six years later I started to do clay work. The very first time I started doodling with clay was because I wanted to use it for glue. My Dad said that glue was too dangerous—that I would make a mess with it so I wasn’t even allowed to get close to it. Instead I would use clay to glue stuff together. It would never work, but I thought it was gooey and neat and I started making little stuff out of it. I would do very tedious things. I would make little tiny blobs of clay and make the most perfect little painted things. I still have a mouse that I made from clay. Never any lessons—all by myself.

HANDEDNESS

My mom told me that when I was three years old, I would do everything with my right hand. Then I started doing things with my left hand. Then I think in two more years, I could actually do everything with both hands. I could write with my right hand or with my left hand. Now, for three years I have been going things with my left hand, but I can still write my name really good with my right hand.

DANCE & SINGING

I’m very creative with my movements and my arms. When I was four years old I used to love to dance to Mozart. It would come out of nowhere. That felt great. I would put on the music and dance for hours and would make my parents sit on the couch and watch me. They would get so tired but I would make them stay there. I also used to make up words and songs to go with the dances.

One of my first words was “Adai.” It was my special little word. I would make up songs and the songs had these strange melodies from a different lifetime. I thought of them like from a different planet, from a different place. I never heard these kind of melodies here before and I thought, “Why don’t they have a melody like this. Why is it just my melody?” It was my secret little thing.

FIGURE SKATING

I’ve been wanting to be a figure skater ever since I was four years old and saw Oksana on video. There are so many things I could be, but I just wanted to be that. When I was four years old I was too little and I didn’t keep it in my mind that much. But when I saw the movie again when I was six, that is when I started inventing stuff. Well, I was so excited. I started getting flattened cardboard boxes and sliding around the floor pretending to skate.
My grandmother was a really good figure skater too. I’m doing my stuff now. I got a little suit and everything. I force myself to practice my skating because I know if I want to be good, I’ve got to practice like crazy. I imagine everybody clapping and I’m doing my little skating stuff. It’s like the art.

HEALING

Also, I can heal people with my hands. My mom taught me how to take the bad energy out of your body when you are feeling down or when you hurt yourself. You just put your hand over it and you have to really concentrate on taking all the pain out. I fix my dad’s headaches like that.

WRITING

I have written lots of books. When I was four years old I wrote a really good book on rabbits. Rabbits used to be my favorite animal. I would write backwards and not know when to put a period, but I would write pretty well. I had no clue how to spell. I just wrote how the words sounded. I’m still extremely bad at spelling. I’m two years behind. I’m a pretty good poet because my dad was a poet and I’ve got that creativity.

LOSING THINGS

I still have my little doll that my grandma made when I was born and I have lots of puppets. My Mom tries to stash them away and keep them because I am not the most responsible person. I lose stuff like you wouldn’t believe. I can lose something so big like my bed sheet. I can lose it completely. So my mom always likes to keep my books because she loves them.

BEST FRIEND

I’ve had a best friend since I was three years old. Her name is Yanna Sorell. She is six months younger, but we have always been buddies. We are still together in everything and always will be extremely connected. We laugh at the dumbest things that no person would laugh at. We just fall down and start laughing like maniacs. You try and do that with somebody else and they go, “So, what’s your point?”

Yanna is a straight “A” student. I’m not close. We would dig in the recycling trashcans when I was seven or eight or ten years old. We got out a big wire thing for chickens and we pretended it was our little house. I remember one time we said we have to write this down. This is a great memory. We got this chicken thing and we tied it to the back of our bikes and we were trying to get it home. We have been on adventures our whole life.

All paintings shown in this article were created when Konstanze was between ages two and three and a half.

CLUBS AND SPYING

Yanna and me are so creative. We tried to make our own band once and we made up songs and wrote them down and then would say, “Some day we are going to be famous.” That was when I was nine years old. We made inventions and had clubs in the closet and would keep notebooks everywhere. We were spies. We would really spy on people—I mean seriously. I was doing it because I wanted to be like Harriet in the movie, “Harriet the Spy?” Harriet wanted to be a writer. I didn’t want to be a writer. I just wanted to spy. I wanted to have this adventure of being sneaky.

When I would spy, I got so close to people. I did the most amazing things you can imagine. Well, Ok! I’m not supposed to tell anybody, but I would go to people’s houses and steal their roses and look in the window. A lady would be making tea and I would scribble everything I saw in my notebook. I would take the little tea thing out and I would read the label and write down what it said, “tea bag from . . . ,” or I would write, “The lady has a wart on her nose. She is wearing a white tee-shirt, and black pants.” That sort of stuff. I still have all of that writing. My handwriting is so bad and I spelled everything terribly, just the way it sounded. When I wrote in my diary I used so many exclamation marks. I used them so much I would write half a page and then do the other half with exclamation marks.

I did this because I am a very adventurous, sneaky person. Well, I’m sneaky in a good way. You know about the Harry Porter books? I’m totally the number one fan. I love it, because it has adventure and it is sneaky. It’s everything I ever imagined.

“When she was two, we got her a watercolor set and some paper and in the next two years, she made about 400 paintings—mostly finger paintings. She used a brush and her fingers and did them very quickly.” Reinhard

CREATIVITY

I know this. There are two parts of your brain. One part of the brain is like, you know, math and spelling and being a straight “A” student. The other part is total creativity, adventure and all that kind of stuff. See I can think of stuff to say very fast, and I think I use that part of my brain, the creativity part, so much that I’m not a very good student in school. The thing is that people who are straight “A” students, usually are not extremely interesting. That’s all I have to say. To become more creative, I would say, don’t focus on stuff. Become sneaky. I would sort of say, “Talk a lot when your not supposed to.” No I’m just kidding.

READING PEOPLE

I can read people’s minds. Well I can’t read their minds, but when someone hates me, I can tell right away and when somebody really likes me, I can tell. I can see people when they are across the room, and I know exactly when they are looking at me, or when they are looking at what I am doing. I get a very strong sense. When people are curious or scared or anything, I can sense it.

SCHOOL

I love school and I work really hard to get good grades. Most of my life, I got B-, never an A+. About school and teachers, I’ll be very honest. I always think of stuff fast to say, so when I’m in trouble I can really get easily out of it. Most kids can’t. I always know how to be extremely friendly. I never want to be mean, you know.

When something is hard, I get very frustrated. But mostly when we are doing anything that has to do with an adventure, like blowing up something, something like science or say when we have to color something if its drawings, that is really inspiring to me. And cutting out something, that stuff I just love. Field trips, I love. When it’s something uninteresting, I hate it. I love art and stuff like that.

Well, what would I do if I was the teacher? Well, I would make learning more like a game. This is what teachers mostly do, and I hate it. They write a question up on the board. They show you exactly how to do it and the kids figure it out. It takes them about five minutes to figure it out. Then she says, “Ok, does everybody know how it goes?” Everybody nods their heads, and then she gives us this huge sheet that has all these problems on it, and we have to do it in five minutes. And she says. “Now Ok, everybody do it!” We say, “Wait a minute, it took us five minutes just to do one question. How can we do all this in such a short time?” So I would give children much more time. I love it when we are doing something creative like working in groups—something like that.

SOCIAL LIFE

People usually just say I’m a normal kid, I’m very not a normal person. I’m not allowed to go to any dances. My parents hate pop music and I love pop music. I’ve never been to a dance—to the school dances. Everybody dances with the guys at school, and we just have fun, all of us. We all go have ice cream, and I can’t have ice cream. I’m allergic to it.

I have these little rules with God. I say, “Ok, I promise never ever to eat another chocolate chip again,” and then I do it again. “Ok please, just one more. Please. I promise I won’t do anything else.” And I keep making these promises to God because I love him but I break them all the time and feel kind of guilty.

I can do this thing that nobody can do I think. Well, like I can be crying and so miserable and then when somebody walks in, I can be the most cheerful person in the world. I’m a very good actress. I can act perfectly. That goes along with my sneakiness. I can change in a split second. Then I usually go back to my misery, or if I’m really happy and I’m supposed to be mad, I share it with my friend Yanna. She is the person that I tell everything to.

I usually like everybody, even the people who have been really bad, because I’m thinking everybody is equal. It’s not their fault that they turned out this way. I think their parents taught them the wrong way, not the right way and I should be nice to them. I’m nice to everybody because of that.

People can say anything. I don’t care. They can say I have a big nose. I never take anything as an offense. I am who I am. I guess my parents encouraged me to be who I am. I’m extremely open. I say I love you to my parents all the time. Most children don’t.

“I think I was sent down here to do this. The colors were so interesting to me. They were so real. They were so flashy. The brushes and the colors were so neat and I would just start doing something and it turned out to be so nice. I would try to make a cloud and it would turn into the most fantastic sea lion. I do still have that feeling.” Konstanze

BILINGUAL

My Dad is German. My mother is from Colombia. She speaks Colombian-Spanish and is a Spanish teacher. I’m bilingual. You know that, don’t you?

Konstanze lives with her parents
Reinhard and Irma in Ojai, California.

KONSTANZE'S PARENTS COMMENT

IRMA, KONSTANZE'S MOTHER

My English is not very good. When Konstanze was quite young I noticed that she started to play with crayons and to make nice lines on the paper, and then put color on top. I said, “Well this is interesting!” I didn’t see any babies doing that. I didn’t expect too much at the time. Then when she was two and a half, she would really start to make things on the paper with her fingers. I thought, “Is this really nice art or what?” I called my husband and I asked him, “What is this?” He said, “This is the real art.” So I said, “Don’t let her ruin the whole thing that she is doing.” When she finished one painting, sometimes she wanted to put more color on top, or just erase the whole thing, so I took many of them away from her just to keep them.

The first one that she made, it fell on floor by accident. It was kind of a mess, and then I picked it up and noticed it was a little duckling. I said to her, “This is beautiful Konstanze, it is a little duckling.” And she says, “Oh really, mommy?”

Most of her art, she did with her fingers. Then she started to use brushes, spoons, q-tips and cotton. She used so many things. One time I saw her working with a toothpick. She was very reclusive, always by herself. She didn’t want anyone to look at what she was doing. It is so funny because she used to say, “I’m very busy now, so please don’t call me now.”

My husband had a lot of paper for his art. When we looked at her art, we knew it was real art, so he started to cut some really nice pieces of paper for her. We got her an ordinary watercolor set from the store.

I talked to her in Spanish since she was a baby and sang little songs to her. I didn’t know any songs in English, so I sang in Spanish. She picked up the languages really fast. When she was nine months old, we went to South America. I remember that she picked up some words in Spanish and then three months later I went back and she spoke Spanish very beautiful.

Konstanze is very affectionate. She tells me she loves me a lot. That is very beautiful. She loves to kiss and hug. I think this is because she has Latin blood and is very close to the family. She is a very sweet girl.

REINHARD, KONSTANZE'S FATHER

Konstanze is twelve years old. When she was two, we got her a watercolor set and some paper and in the next two years, she made about 400 paintings—mostly finger paintings. She used a brush and her fingers and did them very quickly. The thing that I really found so remarkable was that she knew when a painting was finished. Most painters find it hard to know when to quit—to know when the painting is done. She was just cranking these things out so beautifully and would say, “I’m finished now.” She would never go back.

Her paintings were not representational. They were intuitive—no plan, no model, no photograph to go from. They didn’t have anything to do with a conscious picture in her mind. She would just doodle and then all of a sudden something would appear. When she noticed a face or an identifiable creature, she would know exactly where to put the eyes. I found it really interesting that she was able to make out of those shapes something that resembled a visible animal for instance.

She did one after another painting with her little watercolors. When one set of paints was gone, she would get another one and keep going. She would sit for two or three hours at a stretch without getting tired. I built her a little desk—just her size—so she would be comfortable doing her little paintings. I still have that desk.

Konstanze is multi-faceted. She is a wonderful entertainer. She has a natural gift to be very articulate and a natural ability in all forms of artistic expression. She is very sensitive to sounds and color. She is very particular about what she wears. She knows right away what is good and not good for her and usually picks out something that is absolutely perfect. So there is this natural built in ability for discerning.

I am an artist and I make a living doing that, so maybe there is some genetic link. It’s very possible. Konstanze is very intuitive with just about with everything. She refuses to take any art training. I tell her, “You should practice drawing from a model or from a photograph or an object,” That way she would understand shapes and how everything goes together in relationship to other dimensions and shapes. She doesn’t want to hear about that.

Now Konstanze wants to be a figure skater. She only has been taking lessons since November of last year. They are group lessons but all the instructors are encouraging her to take privates if possible, because she has such a natural ability. We go three times a week.

When she was seven or eight, her friend Yanna (who she has known ever since she was four) gave her a tape of Oksana Baiul’s life (1994 Olympic Gold Medal for figure skating.) Konstanze was mesmerized by this tape. I had to make her a copy and play it for her all the time. The first time she ever saw it she said, “I want to be a figure skater, no matter what. I don’t care what it takes, I’m going to be a figure skater.” That movie really triggered something in her. She is really serious.