Ghana Toddler Is World's Youngest Male Artist
Meet Ace-Liam Ankrah, a Ghana toddler who has set the record as the world's youngest male artist.
His mother, Chantelle Kukua Eghan, says it all started by accident when her son, who at the time was 6 months old, discovered her paints.
Eghan, an artist and founder of Arts and Cocktails Studio, a bar that offers painting lessons in Ghana's capital, Accra, said she was looking for a way to keep her boy busy while working on her own paintings.
"I spread out a canvas on the floor and added paint to it, and then in the process of crawling he ended up spreading all the colors on the canvas," she said.
And that's how his first painting, The Crawl, was born, Eghan, 25, told The Associated Press.
After that Ace-Liam kept on painting.
Eghan decided to apply for the record last year and was told that to break a previous record, her son needed to exhibit and sell paintings.
She arranged for Ace-Liam's first exhibition at the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra in January, where nine out of 10 of his pieces were sold.
On May 20 Guinness World Records declared that "at the age of 1 year 152 days, little Ace-Liam Nana Sam Ankrah from Ghana is the world's youngest male artist."
The overall record for the world's youngest artist is currently held by India's Arushi Bhatnagar. She had her first exhibition at the age of 11 months and sold her first painting for around $60 in 2003.
Ace-Liam, who will be 2 years old in July, still loves painting and has a corner in his mom's studio, just for him. He sometimes paints in five-minute sessions, returning to the same canvas over days or weeks.
"He is painting and growing and playing in the whole process," says Eghan.
