ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — Meet Ace Liam Ankrah, the Ghanaian kid who holds the record as the world’s youngest male artist.
His mother, Chantelle Cocoa-Egan, says it all started by chance when her son, who was 6 months old at the time, discovered her acrylic paints.
Egan, an artist and founder of Arts and Cocktails Studio, a bar that offers painting classes in Ghana’s capital, Accra, said she was looking for a way to keep her son busy while working on her own paintings.
Ace Liam Nana Sam Ankrah, who turns 2 years old in July, paints amid his artwork at his mother’s art gallery in Accra, Ghana, Monday, May 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
“I spread out a canvas on the floor and added paint to it, and in the process of crawling he ended up spreading all the colors onto the canvas,” she said.
That’s how his first artwork, “Crawling,” was born, the 25-year-old Egan told the Associated Press.
After that, with his mother’s encouragement, Ace Liam continued to paint.
Egan decided to apply for the record last June. In November, Guinness World Records told her that in order to break the previous record, her son needed to display and sell the paintings.
She arranged Ace Liam’s first exhibition at the Science and Technology Museum in Accra in January, where nine out of 10 of his listed works were sold. She declined to specify the size of the paintings sold.
They were on their way.
then, Guinness World Records confirmed the record In a statement announced last week, “At the age of one year and 152 days, Ace Liam Nana Sam Ankrah from Ghana has become the youngest male artist in the world.”
Guinness World Records did not immediately respond to an Associated Press inquiry about the previous youngest male artist to hold the record.
AP reporter Ed Donahue reports on a very young artist.
The overall record for the youngest artist in the world is currently held by Indian Arushi Bhatnagar. She had her first exhibition when she was 11 months old, and sold her first painting for 5,000 rupees ($60) in 2003.
These days, Ace Liam, who will be two years old in July, still loves to draw and eagerly accompanies his mother to her studio, where a corner has been reserved just for him. Egan says he sometimes paints in just five-minute sessions, then returns to the same canvas over days and weeks.
One day, he ran excitedly around the studio, with the usual bursts of energy for boys his age. But he was also very focused for about an hour while he painted—selecting greens, yellows, and blues for his latest work-in-progress and rubbing paint colors onto the canvas with his little fingers.
Egan says getting the world record didn’t change his life. She won’t sell “The Crawl” but plans to keep it in the family.
She added that she hopes the media attention around her son will encourage and inspire other parents to discover and nurture their children’s talents.
“He draws, grows, and plays with the whole process,” she says.
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