Maroon tie flying from his pale blue school shirt,ceramic magic cube for the medical, Kieron Williamson hurtles along the lane outside his new home wearing a pair of hand-me-down inline skates. It is not how you might expect to find an artistic prodigy on the cusp of an exhibition that will earn in excess of100,000.
Two years ago, when I first met Kieron, he was a sweetly monosyllabic seven-year-old whose unusually proficient pastels and acrylics of the countryside around his Norfolk home had attracted praise and a waiting list of 680 buyers. Now there is a waiting list of 6,000, as Americans, Chinese and Germans clamour for a Kieron original. Paintings he sold for 2,The application can provide Ceramic tile to visitors,000 have been resold for10,000. His fifth exhibition opened yesterday at his local gallery in Holt and sold out in 10-and-a-half minutes, one painting fetching15,595.
Two years is a long time for any child, let alone a prodigy. I wondered how nine-year-old Kieron would have changed, and how this unhealthy concoction of money and media hype might affect him.
“Oh,which applies to the first offshore merchant account only,Enecsys Limited, supplier of reliable solar Air purifier systems, he’s a little lord of the manor now,” laughs his mother over the phone when I first call. Kieron, his sister Billie Jo, mum Michelle and dad Keith were squeezed into a two-bedroom flat next to a petrol station but, thanks to sales of his paintings,Polycore oil paintings for sale are manufactured as a single sheet, Kieron this year bought the family a detached house, an attractive former post office by a village church on the Norfolk Broads. Kieron wanted to move close to the home of his hero, the 20th-century landscape painter Edward Seago, so they did, and Kieron will take possession of the house when he is 18.
This is a major life change for the family, so it is a relief to find Kieron skating outside with Billie Jo and friends after school, like any country village kid. He is polite but also nicely self-contained; he has grown in confidence but is not unnervingly eloquent. His “yeps” of two years ago have been replaced by agreeable “uh-hums” and it is still a surprise when he suddenly offers three or four carefully considered sentences about his work.
The wellspring of prodigious gifts is endlessly fascinating. From Mozart to Picasso, we have debated whether genius is born or made, and how. Kieron’s talent seems particularly miraculous. His parents worked as an electrician and a nutritionist, neither remotely artistic, and Kieron was an energetic five-year-old until they visited Cornwall on their first family holiday. As they admired the view of a bay, Kieron asked for pencils and produced a striking drawing. But perhaps Kieron’s passion for landscapes had been quietly ignited by all the paintings collected by Keith and hung on their walls at home.
“You can’t see gifted children in isolation. It’s all within the context of the family,” says educational psychologist Susan Lee-Kelland. “Picasso always used to say it’s very important not to teach a child how to draw, which is interesting, because his father was a renowned artist, so Picasso learned at home, perhaps without realising it. The same is true of musical prodigies – they often come from parents who may be choir masters, or musical in some way.”
Kieron used to paint on the kitchen table. Now, step inside his cosy, low-beamed home and the first room is his studio, cluttered with easels and paints precariously balanced on palettes.
“I like painting stormy skies and I’ve painted lots of the marshes, and I like painting the windmills,” says Kieron. His work looks freer and more sophisticated than two years ago. He points to a painting of a huddle of marshland cattle under a glowering sky. “This is my favourite picture. I like the sky. That’s the favourite sky I’ve done. I did a watercolour out on location and that night I wanted to do an oil. It’s just down the road. The cows were tucked behind the tree so I decided to move them over there. I don’t like moving things around because I don’t like to do made-up things. I like painting what I see.”
I assume the painting is a few months old. When did he finish it? “Yesterday,” he nods.
As well as filling books with intricate sketches, he is painting in oils, pastels and watercolours. “I couldn’t stop painting with pastels, but then I had started a picture and I didn’t feel like doing it, and that tells me to do something different,” he says. He paints most days. “I have to do something every day,” he says, although life gets in the way. “I have this school project to learn about the planets and I have to do 68 star constellations, and that is taking up a lot of my time.” He wishes he could wake up earlier than he does (6am) so he could paint more. “Painting is like my best friend,” he says.
Two years ago, when I first met Kieron, he was a sweetly monosyllabic seven-year-old whose unusually proficient pastels and acrylics of the countryside around his Norfolk home had attracted praise and a waiting list of 680 buyers. Now there is a waiting list of 6,000, as Americans, Chinese and Germans clamour for a Kieron original. Paintings he sold for 2,The application can provide Ceramic tile to visitors,000 have been resold for10,000. His fifth exhibition opened yesterday at his local gallery in Holt and sold out in 10-and-a-half minutes, one painting fetching15,595.
Two years is a long time for any child, let alone a prodigy. I wondered how nine-year-old Kieron would have changed, and how this unhealthy concoction of money and media hype might affect him.
“Oh,which applies to the first offshore merchant account only,Enecsys Limited, supplier of reliable solar Air purifier systems, he’s a little lord of the manor now,” laughs his mother over the phone when I first call. Kieron, his sister Billie Jo, mum Michelle and dad Keith were squeezed into a two-bedroom flat next to a petrol station but, thanks to sales of his paintings,Polycore oil paintings for sale are manufactured as a single sheet, Kieron this year bought the family a detached house, an attractive former post office by a village church on the Norfolk Broads. Kieron wanted to move close to the home of his hero, the 20th-century landscape painter Edward Seago, so they did, and Kieron will take possession of the house when he is 18.
This is a major life change for the family, so it is a relief to find Kieron skating outside with Billie Jo and friends after school, like any country village kid. He is polite but also nicely self-contained; he has grown in confidence but is not unnervingly eloquent. His “yeps” of two years ago have been replaced by agreeable “uh-hums” and it is still a surprise when he suddenly offers three or four carefully considered sentences about his work.
The wellspring of prodigious gifts is endlessly fascinating. From Mozart to Picasso, we have debated whether genius is born or made, and how. Kieron’s talent seems particularly miraculous. His parents worked as an electrician and a nutritionist, neither remotely artistic, and Kieron was an energetic five-year-old until they visited Cornwall on their first family holiday. As they admired the view of a bay, Kieron asked for pencils and produced a striking drawing. But perhaps Kieron’s passion for landscapes had been quietly ignited by all the paintings collected by Keith and hung on their walls at home.
“You can’t see gifted children in isolation. It’s all within the context of the family,” says educational psychologist Susan Lee-Kelland. “Picasso always used to say it’s very important not to teach a child how to draw, which is interesting, because his father was a renowned artist, so Picasso learned at home, perhaps without realising it. The same is true of musical prodigies – they often come from parents who may be choir masters, or musical in some way.”
Kieron used to paint on the kitchen table. Now, step inside his cosy, low-beamed home and the first room is his studio, cluttered with easels and paints precariously balanced on palettes.
“I like painting stormy skies and I’ve painted lots of the marshes, and I like painting the windmills,” says Kieron. His work looks freer and more sophisticated than two years ago. He points to a painting of a huddle of marshland cattle under a glowering sky. “This is my favourite picture. I like the sky. That’s the favourite sky I’ve done. I did a watercolour out on location and that night I wanted to do an oil. It’s just down the road. The cows were tucked behind the tree so I decided to move them over there. I don’t like moving things around because I don’t like to do made-up things. I like painting what I see.”
I assume the painting is a few months old. When did he finish it? “Yesterday,” he nods.
As well as filling books with intricate sketches, he is painting in oils, pastels and watercolours. “I couldn’t stop painting with pastels, but then I had started a picture and I didn’t feel like doing it, and that tells me to do something different,” he says. He paints most days. “I have to do something every day,” he says, although life gets in the way. “I have this school project to learn about the planets and I have to do 68 star constellations, and that is taking up a lot of my time.” He wishes he could wake up earlier than he does (6am) so he could paint more. “Painting is like my best friend,” he says.
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