Friday, October 10, 2014

Autistic 5-year old Creates Art, Sells Prints to Finance Therapy

I hate kids.
From Art Market Monitor:
Iris Halmshaw is a British girl who is autistic. She’s also an accomplished painter who is funding her therapy through her parents sales of her artwork:
“From the first painting, she filled the paper with color and it wasn’t random — it was considered and thought out,” says her mother, Arabella Carter-Johnson. “She was so excited and happy I knew that we had found a key into her world and a way of interacting with her.”

Fast forward two years, and Iris’ paintings are in high demand, and are starting to be worth a lot of money.

[…] Due to the high level of demand for Iris’ art, her mother has set up a website to sell both originals and prints. It was a runaway success, quickly attracting over a million pageviews from more than 200 countries. “All profits from the originals go into Iris’s savings account,” says Carter-Johnson. “We also sell cards and prints, and the profits from those go towards her speech therapy, occupational therapy, music and yoga.”...MORE
Iris Halmshaw

Some people are seeing a Monet-at-Giverny-type series emerging but not me, nope.

Her paintings are now in exceptionally high demand, and are changing hands for thousands of dollars.