It’s not yet two years old (it happens on July 22, 2024) but Ace-Liam Ankrah has already exhibited his works and sold eleven of them to date. Born in Ghana, the little boy was designated by the Guinness World Records as “the youngest male artist in the world” thanks to “abstract works” which he creates on canvas “using your hands and your body”. “Ace-Liam expresses himself through vibrant, emotion-filled brushstrokes, embracing the freedom of abstract expressionism”we can read on his site, where his paintings are on sale between 1,330 and 7,317 dollars.
The child began painting at the age of six months thanks to his mother, Chantelle Kuukua, herself an artist. She confides that she discovered her son’s talent by chance, when she had “spread a piece of canvas with a little paint on the ground to hold [son fils] busy” while she herself was working on a painting: “He […] ended up spreading the paint all over the canvas and in doing so he created his first masterpiece, titled The Crawl.“
Since he could speak, the child has asked to paint, relates his mother, who reserved a space for him in which to paint and in which he alone chooses the format of his canvases and the colors he will use: “He calls me so that I open the bottles of paint for him then he begins to apply the paint on the canvas as carefully only spontaneously”, she explained to Guinness Book. She adds that a work can be finished “in a few minutes or half an hour”sometimes over several days: “It happens that he leaves a painting and then comes back to it after two days to finish it. When he finished, he said: ‘Mom, finished’.“
The lovely story questions the eternal question of innate and acquired: is the child endowed with a gift or does he have the chance to grow up in an environment conducive to artistic creation, where canvases and tubes of paint are available, where playing with paint on the floor is not considered stupidity but a liberating self-expression? Would Ace-Liam Ankrah be a gifted pianist if his mother was a concert pianist? A punching maestro if his father was a professional boxer? A lover of numbers if she were a math teacher? We’ll never know and that’s a good thing, since her mother emphasizes that the important thing is to support the interests of her little ones: “Every child is unique and nurturing their passions can lead to incredible discoveries and accomplishments.” We may not leave a kitchen knife in their hands at 8 months, but we can tell them that anything is possible.
