A kid of many colors

CORONA DEL MAR — Nine-year-old Ben Palitz lives in a world of color.

He’s a child of many interests, a Renaissance boy: He’s a skater and surfer, he plays piano, he throws a mean softball, and he paints.

That’s where the color comes in. Ben has painted vividly colored hamburgers and ice cream cones. In one portrait, an orange cat smiles next to a mauve dog. His favorite picture is a turkey with a rainbow of feathers.

His philosophy is simple: “If you don’t do a lot of colors, it makes it boring. We put lots of colors to make it pop.”

Although Ben is fairly new to the art world — he and his two sisters started taking lessons a year and a half ago — he’s the youngest member of a local painters’ association and he’s already had his work commissioned.

Bob Smith, a local real estate agent and neighbor of Ben’s family, bought a picture of a dog after seeing Ben’s work at a local art show. It looked so much like another neighborhood dog, Smith made its owners a gift of the painting and decided to order a portrait of Cruiser, his platinum golden retriever.

Ben worked from photos and created a rendering that Smith describes as “very colorful, somewhat abstract.”

“I think it’s excellent. It’s mounted in my kitchen,” Smith said. “Everyone who has seen it has been impressed.”

That wasn’t even Ben’s first sale. He sold a number of paintings at a July art show, which is a funny story within the family. When Ben tells it, the colors jump out — he remembers that he brought his paintings in a blue bag and set up his work on a green table. What he didn’t know at first was that the show was restricted to members of the group that was putting it on, the Southern California Plein Air Painters Assn. When he found out, he decided to join. He became the group’s youngest member, and he sold five paintings that day — more than anyone else in the show.

Ben’s first audience, of course, was his parents, who have their three children’s works prominently displayed in their Corona del Mar home.

“We love their art,” his mother, Laura Palitz, said. “Both my husband and I have always been fans of original art. We have all original paintings in our home that we’ve commissioned from artists.”

Ben said it takes him about two to three days to finish a painting. He often gets ideas from pictures his art teacher shows him, but he also likes to paint things like soccer balls and surfboards.

“I tried a yacht, but it didn’t turn out good,” Ben said. “The animals are hard, but they’re really fun because you get to use a lot of colors in them.”

He’s not sure he wants to try plein-air painting, which is done outdoors to capture the light and color of places because you can’t use as much color and everything has to be done just right, he said.

But the kind of work he does must come naturally to him, because when asked how he got into art in the first place, Ben’s answer is as simple as they come:

“We started painting, and I still do it.”