Trekking Life

8-year-old painting prodigy is new art world star

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

by Jill Lawless

He's Britain's most talked-about young artist. His paintings fetch hefty sums and there's a long waiting list for his eagerly anticipated new works.

It has all happened so quickly -- he's still getting used to the spotlight -- and Kieron Williamson fidgets a little when he's asked to share his thoughts on art.

"Cows are the easiest thing to paint," said Kieron, who has just turned 8. "You don't have to worry about doing so much detail."

Horses, he says, are "a lot harder. You have to get their legs right, and you have to make their back legs much bigger than their front."

Paintbrush prodigy Kieron -- dubbed "mini Monet" by the British press -- is a global sensation. All 33 of the pastels, watercolors and oil paintings in his latest exhibition sold, within half an hour, for a total of 150,000 pounds ($235,000). Buyers from as far away as the United States lined up overnight outside the gallery, and there is a 3,000-strong waiting list for his impressionistic landscapes of boat-dotted estuaries, snowy fields and wide marshland skies.

He has a website and a business card. Strangers approach him at the gallery, asking him to sign postcards of his work. Journalists from around the world travel to his small home town in eastern England to interview him.

Kieron shrugs off the attention. "It feels normal to me," he says.

It definitely doesn't feel normal to his parents, Keith and Michelle Williamson. They are bemused, proud and a little anxious about their son's talent and its effects.

"It has been overwhelming," said Michelle Williamson, a 37-year-old nutritional therapist. She and her 44-year-old art dealer husband live in a small apartment with Kieron and his 6-year-old sister, Billie-Jo.

Kieron was a normal, energetic little boy, and his parents were surprised when he asked for pencils and paper during a holiday in Cornwall two years ago. They were astonished when the then-5-year-old produced an accomplished picture of boats in a harbor. He progressed rapidly to fully realized landscapes, many depicting the flat, open Norfolk countryside near their home.

"Keith and I don't paint, so we find it difficult to know what's going on inside his head," Michelle said.

"We don't understand it. We don't know where it comes from. But he's adamant it's what he wants to do. When your child has got such a gift and a talent, you have to support him."

That hasn't stopped the Williamsons worrying about whether they are doing the right thing in exposing him to so much attention. They showed Kieron's work to a local gallery, which has mounted two exhibitions and is helping them cope with the flood of global interest.

"It's not a natural thing to want to put your kid in the media spotlight," Michelle said.

"We've met so many sharks. All they see is the financial element. They don't see the emotional stuff. You can't separate the art from Kieron."

A self-possessed blond boy, dressed in a polo shirt, shorts and sneakers, Kieron doesn't seem like a hothouse prodigy.

He likes soccer -- he plays defense for a school team -- and messing around on the broad North Sea beaches near his home in Holt, a pretty Georgian town 125 miles (200 kilometers) northeast of London.

When he talks about his work, it's with a striking mix of the adult and the childlike. He can discuss his color choices and the interplay of light and dark, but also remembers more idiosyncratic details.

"This," he said, pointing at one landscape, "is when we came back from Holkham and we couldn't get fish and chips because there was a line going from the fish and chip shop to the car park."

When he starts to draw, with a confident, relaxed fluidity, all childishness disappears. Working from a photograph of a river at sunrise, Kieron swiftly sketches the horizon, the mounds of trees and the line of the river, then uses pastels to color the yellowy pink of the sky.

His parents are happy for people to watch him work -- it disproves any suspicions that the paintings are not his own.

They encountered that kind of skepticism at first, though Michelle Williamson says it has abated.

Critical opinion on Kieron's work is divided. One newspaper headline asked, "Is Kieron Britain's most exciting painter?" But others have wondered whether Kieron's paintings would be so well-regarded if he were an adult, and asked if his talent will endure.

The precedents are mixed. Pablo Picasso famously said that unlike in music, "there are no child prodigies in painting. What people regard as premature genius is the genius of childhood. It gradually disappears as they get older."

Picasso himself was a child prodigy, however, who went on to revolutionize art. The 19th-century English artist John Everett Millais was made a member of the Royal Academy at 11.

But for every Millais -- or Mozart -- there are many prodigies whose gifts do not survive puberty.

"Most brilliant 8-year-old pianists or footballers don't maintain it into adulthood," said Jack Boyle, a Glasgow-based child psychologist.

He advises the Williamsons not to worry too much. Kieron's talent is unlikely to do him any harm

"Children like being successful and they like being the best," Boyle said. "My advice? Take the money and run. Milk it for every penny, but don't harm the child in the process.

"Develop his other interests -- and sell as many of the paintings as you can."

At the moment, Michelle Williamson is looking forward to the start of the school year in September, when exhibitions and interviews will be replaced by homework and normal childhood routines.

The gallery is offering two new landscapes -- Kieron's last work as a 7-year-old and his first as an 8-year-old -- by an online auction that closes Aug. 20. A new exhibition is planned for next summer.

Michelle Williamson says she and her husband won't be disappointed if Kieron one day stops painting, as long as he is happy.

"We fully expect Kieron to change his mind," she said. "But we know that whatever he ends up doing, Kieron is going to give it 200 percent."

Kieron says he knows what he wants to be when he grows up -- "painter and footballer."

And he is willing to offer advice for other aspiring artists.

"Never give up. Try and keep your buildings straight. And don't do a plain blue sky."

Online:

Kieron's Website: http://www.kieronwilliamson.com

Picturecraft Gallery: http://www.picturecraftgallery.com

Will Wikileaks help end the Afghan war? No

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

by Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn: The sad truth is that wars are not often ended by press disclosures of their horrors and futility

The brave hope of the soldier who sent 92,000 secret documents to Wikileaks was that the disclosure of willful, casual slaughter of civilians by coalition personnel (with ensuing cover-ups), the utter failure of 'nation-building', the venality and corruption of the coalition's Afghan allies, and the complicity of Pakistan's intelligence services with the Taliban, would cause a wave of revulsion in the United States.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (above) skillfully arranged simultaneous publication of the secret material in the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. The story broke on the eve of a war funding vote in the US Congress.

But on Tuesday evening, the US House of Representatives said Aye to a bill already passed by the Senate that funds a $33 billion, 30,000-troop escalation in Afghanistan. The vote was 308 to 114.

To be sure, more congressmen voted against escalation than a year ago when the Noes totted up to only 35. That's a crumb of comfort, but the cruel truth is that within 24 hours the White House and the Pentagon, with the help of influential papers like the Washington Post, had successfully finessed the salvoes from Wikileaks.

'Wikileaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war' was the Post's Tuesday morning headline. Beneath this headline the news story said the leaks had been discussed for only 90 seconds at a meeting of senior commanders in the Pentagon. "Senior officials" in the White House even brazenly claimed that that it was precisely his reading of these same raw intelligence reports a year ago that prompted President Obama "to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration".

There's some truth in the claim that, long before Wikileaks, the overall rottenness and futility of the Afghan war had been graphically reported in the press. Earlier this year, for example, reporting by Jerome Starkey of the London Times blew open the US military's cover-up after special forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February 2010 raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed.

It's oversell to describe the Wikileaks package as a latter-day Pentagon Papers. But it's undersell to dismiss the revelations as "old stories" as detractors have been doing. The Wikileaks file is a damning series of snapshots of a disastrous enterprise.

The sad truth is that wars are not often ended by disclosures of their horrors and futility in the press, with consequent public uproar. After Ron Ridenhour and then Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre in 1968 - when more than 500 men, women and babies were methodically, beaten, sexually abused, tortured and then murdered by American Gis in Vietnam - there was public revulsion, then an escalation in slaughter. The war ran for another seven years.

It is true, as Noam Chomsky pointed out to me, when I asked him for positive examples, that popular protest in the wake of press disclosures "impelled Congress to call off the direct US role in the grotesque bombing of rural Cambodia. Similarly in the late 70s, under popular pressure Congress barred Carter, later Reagan, from direct participation in virtual genocide in the Guatemalan highlands." Even though New York Times editors edited out the word "indiscriminate" from Thomas Friedman's news report of Israel's bombing of Beirut in 1982, his and other dispatches from Lebanon prompted President Reagan to order Israeli prime minister Begin to stop, and he did.

But as Chomsky concluded in his note to me, "I think one will find very few such examples, and almost none in the case of really major war crimes".

What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the US war in Afghanistan, none of these conditions has yet been met.

The US began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniev Brzezinksi started financing the mullahs and warlords in the largest and most expensive operation in the CIA's history until that time.

Here we are, more than three decades later, half buried under a pile of horrifying reports about a destroyed land of desolate savagery, and what did one hear on many news commentaries earlier this week? Indignant bleats, often from liberals, about Wikileaks' "irresponsibility" in releasing the documents. Shoot the messenger!

Vietnam MIAs: ghosts return to haunt McCain

Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

by Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn: The ‘war hero’ senator buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam

The ghosts that haunt Senator John McCain are about 600 in number and right now they are mustering for a final onslaught. McCain, one of America's foremost Republicans and President Barack Obama's opponent in 2008, is currently locked in a desperate bid for political survival in his home state of Arizona.

After 20 years of immunity from challenge from his fellow Republicans, he's now involved in a close primary battle with J.D. Hayworth, a former congressman turned radio broadcaster who sports the Tea Party label. Hayworth says McCain is a fake Republican, soft on issues like immigration. The polls have been tightening, and if McCain got bludgeoned by some new disclosure, it could finish him off.

That very disclosure is now likely to burst over the head of McCain, the former Navy pilot who was held in a North Vietnamese prison for five years, and returned to the US as a war hero.

His nemesis is Sydney Schanberg, a former New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting from Cambodia that formed the basis for the Oscar-winning movie, The Killing Fields.

In recent years Schanberg has worked relentlessly on one of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War, one that still causes hundreds of American families enduring pain. Did the US government abandon American POWs in Vietnam?

By 1990 there were so many stories, sightings, intelligence reports, of American POWs left behind in Vietnam after the war was over, that pressure from Vietnam vets and the families of the MIAs ('missing in action') prompted the formation of a special committee of the US Senate to investigate. The chairman was John Kerry, a Navy man who had served in Vietnam. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member.

Down the years Schanberg has pieced together the evidence, much of it covered up by the Senate committee. In 1993, an American historian unearthed in Soviet archives the record of a briefing of a Vietnamese general to the

Soviet politbureau. The briefing took place in 1973, right before the final peace agreement between the US and Hanoi.

What the Vietnamese general told the Russians was that his government was intent on getting war reparations, $3.25 billion in reconstruction money, pledged by the US in peace negotiations headed on the US side by Henry Kissinger. The general told the Russians that Hanoi would hold back a large number of POWs until the money arrived.

But Nixon and Kissinger had attached to the deal a codicil to the effect that the US Congress would have to approve the reparations – which the two knew was an impossibility in the political atmosphere of the time. Thus they effectively sealed the POWs’ fate. Hanoi released 591 immediately, but held back around 600.

All of this was suppressed by the Kerry-McCain committee, with the complicity of the US press, enamoured of both McCain and Kerry. McCain was particularly vicious in mocking what he and his press allies suggested were the fantasies of MIA families and Vietnam vets.

Schanberg writes now that, "In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community.

"The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men - those who had not died from illness or hard labour or torture - were eventually executed."

In the presidential campaign of 2008, as I reported for The First Post at the time, McCain faced accusations that in fact, as a POW, he had broken and cooperated with his North Vietnamese captors, who regarded McCain as a valuable prize because his father was a prominent US admiral, at the time commander of all US forces in the Pacific.

McCain Jr, so his accusers said, disclosed vital information, and made broadcasts denouncing the US, which were then used by the Vietnamese to break other POWs.

The issue never became a big one in 2008 - but now it's coming back with a vengeance.

Yesterday, the American Conservative, a monthly, released a special issue, 'The Men our Media Forgot'. The US media, pressured in any number

of ways by successive US governments to ridicule and suppress enquiries into the missing POWs, are the prime target, but McCain also bulks large in the American Conservative's sights, since his present political crisis forms an excellent peg for Schanberg's story. The calculation is evidently that this could be a huge boost to Hayworth.

In an article for the American Conservative, titled 'McCain and the POW Cover-Up', Schanberg insinuates, without saying so directly, that the Pentagon blackmailed McCain to squelch the MIA hearings: "It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behaviour in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo - to try to break down other prisoners - and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio.

"Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain."

Is McCain haunted by these memories?

A substantial part of Schanberg and the American Conservative's indictment is that there has been plenty of compelling evidence that POWs were abandoned, but the established US press ignored it. Can this nation's major newspapers and television networks sedulously refuse to discuss assertions that US servicemen were abandoned by their government?

The answer is yes. An example: On October 22, 2003 the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, resulting in the deaths of 34 US crew members and the wounding of 173, issued its report on Capitol Hill.

Among its findings: "There is compelling evidence that Israel's attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew; evidence of such intent is supported by statements from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Undersecretary of State George Ball, former CIA director Richard Helms, former NSA directors Lieutenant General William Odom, USA (Ret), Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, USN (Ret)."

The crew, the report said, were "abandoned by their own government... fearing conflict with Israel, the White House deliberately prevented the US Navy from coming to the defence of USS Liberty... due to the influence of Israel's powerful supporters in the United States, the White House deliberately covered up the facts of this attack from the American people... there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history."

Signing these emphatic conclusions were some of America’s best known military men: Adm Thomas H. Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen Raymond G. Davis, former assistant commandant of the Marine Corps; Rear Adm Merlin Staring, former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, and Ambassador James Akins (Ret), former United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

And how were these categorical conclusions dealt with in the press? Reviewing the record four years later, Alison Weir, executive director of If Americans Knew, reported on the CounterPunch website that a review of the hundreds of newspapers indexed by Lexis-Nexis "does not turn up a single US newspaper that mentioned this commission, a single US television station, a single US radio station, a single US magazine.

"While it was mentioned in an Associated Press report focusing on one of the commission's most dramatic revelations, Lexis reveals only a sprinkling of news media printed information from this AP report, and those few that did failed to mention this commission itself, its extremely star-studded composition, and the entirety of its findings."

And who, in the case of the Liberty, conducted the initial, cursory Navy Court of Inquiry in the immediate aftermath of the attack? None other than Admiral John S. McCain, father of Arizona's senior US senator, under the supervision of Johnson's White House

"Boy Wonder" - Gajan

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

by Richard Dwight

Creating quite a sensation the other day at the golf course of the Royal Colombo Golf Club and Waters Edge, was Gajan Sivabalasingham, the 15-year-old prodigious golfer from Markham, Ontario.

Endowed with a tallish lanky physique, with boyish sparkling eyes that revealed a zest, zeal and enthusiasm for a sport that he has come to love. He did belie his tender years to display rare maturity that was most impressive, which found the caddies following, increasing in numbers, simply to take in the brilliance of this young lad as he kept playing.

This being his first visit to Sri Lanka, Gajan though not familiar with the golf courses here and, accustomed to the facilities prevailing in Canada and the States - Nevertheless did extremely well at a round of golf at the RCGC, where he notched 3 birdies and an eagle, and then at the Waters Edge he registered 6 birdies, that evoked the comment from the caddies, that Gajan as a Junior, had bettered the previous day’s score of a national golf champion.

Exceptional as it is, it surely does speak much for his potential as a golfer in the years that lie ahead. Evidence of this could be gathered from that which follows in this brief narrative of Gajan.

Gajan who hails from, Towncentre Montessori private school, Markham was born in Canada. The only son amongst 3 elder sisters to Mr. and Mrs. M. Sivabalasingham, who emigrated in 1990 to make Canada their home.

Incidentally, Siva in his own right was a fine sportsman, having excelled in cricket at the highest level for the Tamil union and Saracens Sports club, before leaving for Canada.

The parents are accountants by profession. Perhaps it was the hitting around of a set of plastic golf balls, given to him by his immediate elder sister at the age of 4 - that led Gajan to take a liking to play golf.

Fondness for golf

This fondness for golf that began to take hold of him, runs parallel to his studies in school, where at the age of 15, he is in grade 10, with grades 11 and 12 to follow and, then onto the university.

The sport of golf has so possessed him at this early age, to the extent that he spends as much as 2 1/2 to 3 hours a day, every day practising golf in the summer, and does the same 2 hours a day, three days a week in the winter, with homework (studies) taking 2 1/2 hours a day, of his time. His inspiration comes from the world renowned golfer Tiger Woods and from his family, to whom he is deeply attached.

Since playing his first round of golf at the age of 4 in 1997 - there is undoubtedly something special about this lad’s golf at the Junior level. For the reason that having made a fine impression at local competitions, the Canadian nation paper ‘Toronto Star’ spoke of him as ‘little Tiger’, and did hit the front pages of all the national dailies, which went down well with the community at large.

A swinging sensation he was when at the age of 6 in 1999, he represented Canada for the US kids world championships, to be the youngest to represent Canada in any sport.

This did find the agent of Tiger Woods convey the maestro’s good wishes, which thrilled Gajan no end. Ever since then he has been a part of the team Canada under 19. As an active participant of golf tournaments conducted by the Golf Association of Ontario and the Canadian Junior Golf Association - Gajan from the age of 6 upto the present age of 15, has done exceptionally well to win around 60 domestic as well as international junior tournaments.

Satisfaction

By far the most rewarding satisfaction he prides over, are the victories he experienced in the ‘Future tournament, ‘Mississippi World championship,’ USA in 2004, in the Canadian National optimist championship in the years 2005 and 2006 and, of course his winning the prestigious Ontario Bantam Boys’ championship at the age of 13 in 2007 - where he came from behind to shoot a 66 to walk away with the hefty ‘Eagle Trophy.’

This feat of his and the fact that he finished the year (2007) in the top three in eight tournaments, did earn for him a feature article in the ‘Desi Life’ magazine in its October/November 2007 issue, with his photograph on the front cover captioned ‘Boy Wonder.’

There’s much that is interesting in that article concerning his golf. Where Gajan says it’s all about deep breaths.

For when he is feeling the pressure out on the green, he takes a few deep breaths and tries to visualise his next shot - and right before he is about to hit, he strives to really clear himself of everything and just think about hitting the shot. All this may have helped him to win his first international tournament, when he was 10.

Twice a week

There exists a happy relationship between father and son (Siva and Gajan) which has bonded them together, to more importantly be great friends. Siva speaks thus of his son, whom he cherishes most “whether he wins a tournament or loses a tournament, he looks the same to me, Gajan should enjoy the wins and also accept defeat, then take it to the next level, every day is a learning experience,” Siva concluded by saying that “all parents have expectations and he’s a very gifted golfer, but if I push him too much, I might lose him.”

Currently at the age of 15, Gajan is working twice a week under Dave Woods, the former Canadian professional Golf association teacher of the year. He is experiencing a gestation period of lull, where he plays with much older boys, whose ages range from 16, 17 and 18. Being the youngster he is, Gajan is familiar with golfers like Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, B. J. Singh, Michael Campbell, Nick Price, Steven Ames, Ben Crenshaw, Tom Watson and ladies No. 1 player Annika Sorensten.

There is yet another side to this teenager’s life, in that he is cultivating a concern for those in need of help. This is reflected through his charity foundation, where by his ‘Gajan Golf Classic’ he raises funds for the Sick Kids Hospital.

Gajan’s dream is to be a professional golfer, it’s alright having dreams, but he will do well to ensure that he does not make dreams his master - but rather transform them into reality.