Portrait of the artist as a boy

THE ARTIST Kieron Williamson is standing in a busy gallery, explaining Ducks Crossing, a beautiful oil painting in his latest exhibition.

‘‘These beech trees go an absolutely gorgeous orangey yellow in the autumn,’’ he says of the landscape scene of Norfolk, east England, where he lives.

Kieron is a week away from his 12th birthday. He’s a perfectly ordinary boy – he loves being outdoors, playing football and riding his bike fast – and yet his talent for painting has made his family’s life rather extraordinary.

The boy the British tabloids call Mini Monet has just sold out his latest exhibition of 40 paintings, raising more than £400,000 (NZ$786,000), and he is already a millionaire.

A mailing list of 10,000 people crave a Williamson and buyers from New Zealand, Indonesia and Germany have visited his exhibition.

‘‘You’re a genius!’’ exclaims one visitor to the Picturecraft Galley in the small town of Holt, Norfolk, where Kieron holds all his exhibitions. Kieron’s extremely polite manner suggests he has heard it all before.

In 2011, proceeds from his paintings had enabled him to buy his family a house in a village on the Norfolk Broads, the watery landscape he loves best.

Kieron talks incredibly fluently and modestly about his art. But he’s still a boy, too, with a big plaster on his elbow from where he skidded over on his bike on their gravel drive.

The pastels he once drew have been supplanted by mature, moody oils of figures in the landscape.

He paints mostly scenes from rural Norfolk and Cornwall, in southwest England, where Kieron first asked to draw, out of the blue, aged 5, on a family holiday.

He often rushes outside to watch a sunset in his pyjamas or begs his parents, Keith and Michelle, to take him to streams, churches or simple field edges he has spotted from the car.

‘‘Not many people stop to smell the roses, but Kieron does, definitely, as well as everything else,’’ says Michelle.

Shortly before he finished primary school, his parents decided to educate him at home.

Teaching a prodigy could be intimidating but Michelle and Keith don’t seem burdened by the need to provide Kieron with inspirational experiences.

‘‘Kieron is good at asking for [those experiences] and we meet his needs and follow his lead,’’ says Michelle.

She is the director of Kieron’s company, set up in 2010, helped by a specialist children’s solicitor and accountant who ensure that his fortune is held in trust for when he comes of age.

Michelle and Keith are excited about the future, even allowing for moody teenage years. Teenagers, like artists, are expected to be temperamental, but Keith thinks Kieron is unlikely to be archetypally moody.

‘‘He’s such a calm person’’ says Keith. ‘‘The only time you see any aggression in him is when he’s playing football. Then he’s like a different person.’’