Is Your Child Messing With Paints? Encourage Him…

His name is Kieron Williamson and he is a child art prodigy. If you haven’t heard of him yet, be assured that you will – and often. He is already being hailed as a Mini- Monet. He held an exhibition in England this week to showcase his work and left the exhibition with more than £100,000 (about $160,000) in his pocket after all his paintings were snatched up by eager buyers. No different to any other child his age, the boy wonder still wears his school uniform while playing with friends after school in the lane outside his house or zooming around on inline skates.

 

Some parents who have their eyes on a secure old age for themselves via a child who will be earning huge amounts of money in years to come, will opt for football, tennis or car racing as a means to a secure old age. A career in art is something else entirely.

 

Kieron lives in the English countryside. Many would say that it is not exactly the place where you would find a child prodigy who later that evening would be on his way to his first art exhibition to fill his pockets with huge amount of money. But the real question is, where do you expect to find these talented children? What sets them apart from the rest? The reality is despite his talent he is just like any other kid and you would expect to find him amused in activities that others his age partake in.

 

It was only two years ago when the seven-year-old made a ripple from his skills with pastels and acrylics depicting the countryside near his home in Norfolk. How work attracted the praise of many and soon had a waiting list of 680 buyers. During that time the interest in the young British artist has grown fast, with a waiting list of nearly 6,000 people including Americans, Chinese and Germans who are all keen to get their hands on a Kieron original.

 

Some of Kieron’s paintings which he sold for £2,000 have gone on to sell for £10,000. At his fifth exhibition, so far his greatest success, he sold one painting for £15,595.

 

The boy’s talents seem miraculous; his father is an electrician and his mother a nutritionist and both are completely non-artistic. The first sign of his talent came when he and his parents were in Cornwall on their first family holiday. While the family admired the bay, the then very young Kieron created a striking drawing with pencils.

 

Kieron started his painting career on the kitchen table, but times have changed and he now has his own studio, which is cluttered with easels, paints, palettes and other painting paraphernalia. He has books full of pencil sketches, but he paints in oils, pastels and watercolors. He is skilled in many mediums. Talking about his paintings, Kieron said: “I like painting stormy skies and I’ve painted lots of marshes, and I like painting windmills.”