All the time we are talking, Kieron Williamson is busy sketching on the pad in front of him with quick, fluid movements of his pencil. He is copying from a book of pen and ink illustrations by Edward Seago, the twentieth-century British artist, before he adds touches of his own to the sketches.
Kieron is clearly caught up in what he is doing, his blonde head a study in concentration as he kneels in the front room of his family home. But he’s not so distracted that he doesn’t sometimes look me in the eye and put me right. ‘You’ve added a bit more detail here,’ I say, as he is reproducing Seago’s sketch of an old man in an overcoat. ‘Seago’s’, I explain, ‘is lighter.’ ‘Not lighter,’ Kieron corrects me. ‘You call it looser. Loose and tight. They’re the words.’ Seven-year-olds don’t often give adults lessons in the terminology of fine art.
Kieron actually can and does, and has been hailed as a ‘mini-Monet’, on account of his neo-impressionist style, or the next Picasso. Recently, buyers from as far afield as South Africa and America queued up outside his modest local art gallery – some of them camping out all night — to snap up 33 paintings in just 27 minutes, leaving Kieron ?150,000 better off. How did it feel? ‘Very nice,’ he replies politely. ‘Did you talk to any of the buyers?’ ‘Yes, they kept asking me what else I do.’ And what did you tell them? ‘That I go to school, that I play football for my school and that I am the best defender in the team .’
His exhibition, the second to sell out so quickly — has brought him a lot of attention. Several American TV networks have filmed him in the family flat already and today a camera crew is squeezed into the front room with me, Kieron’s mum, Michelle, his younger sister, Billie-Jo and two sleeping cats
“These are ones I did last night when I was watching the television with Billie-Jo,” he says, handing me a sketchbook. It falls open on a vibrant fairground scene. Kieron finds the page in the Seago book that inspired him. There is the same carousel, but he has added figures, buildings and trees in his drawing in the sketchbook.
As accomplished as Kieron’s paintings are, part of their appeal is undoubtedly the story of precocious talent that goes with them. If he’s doing similar work when he’s 28, it may prompt a different reaction.
But Kieron is having none of it. He looks up sharply from his sketching. “If I want to paint,” he says, “I’ll paint.”