Alejandro Goldzycher: Argentina.

Alejandro began drawing when he was one. When he was five his parents took him to see "Le Moulin de la Gallette"--it is the only painting by the famous Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh at the Argentinean capital's Fine Arts Museum. The little boy was deeply impressed and couldn't stop going to the museum. His parents recognized his talent and asked an art teacher to give him private lessons. Alejandro was a superb student at school as well and when he got bored he would draw caricatures of teachers. They usually liked it a lot and had a good laugh and so did his friends.

Alejandro Goldzycher lives with his parents, his younger brother, and his little sister in a one-hundred-year old French-style house in the busy and noisy Congreso district of Buenos Aires next to the National Congress building. One day his mother read about the Arts Olympiad and ICAF in the Buenos Aires Herald.

Alejandro made a painting that depicted his vision of the future: "an ideal world, full of peace and happiness, where hatred and discrimination did not exist." It was selected as the national finalist. Alejandro had less than two weeks to get his passport and board an airplane to Washington, DC to attend ICAF's international festival in June 1999. His mother came along and so did his art teacher, Silvia Virginia Roca. The festival and his visit to Washington transformed the then nine-year-old artist. He took pleasure in meeting children from countries that were very different from Argentina. Alejandro could feel his mind opening up and his perspectives changing.

He made the most of his stay by visiting the National Gallery of Art everyday. His mother still remembers how he stared at some of the works with his eyes wide open--full of amazement and enthusiasm.

Alejandro admires many painters--Da Vinci, Holbein, Van Dyck, Dali, Van Gogh, of course, and the Argentine humorist and painter Eduardo Ferro--but his true inspiration flows from the books he reads. Stories by Edgar Allen Poe and J.R. Tolkien trigger his imagination. "All my works are the product of my own imagination," he asserts.

He enjoys experimenting with different techniques like oil, gouache, and color pencils and different media. Alejandro has created more than one hundred 8 centimetre-tall paper puppets of famous characters in world history. His series includes queens, kings, saints, warriors, and his grandmother. But that's not all. Alejandro loves creating art with his computer and still draws witty caricatures. With his sharp eye for detail and people's characteristics Alejandro's caricatures stand out.

Since he became an Arts Olympiad Finalist, his friends keep asking him to draw caricatures for them. The demand for his art is growing. His eye for details will help Alejandro find out how he can best benefit the world with his talent.