Aidan Seed, 32, painter. Aidan is a precocious talent. Artist in residence at London’s National Portrait Gallery, before that he spent two years enjoying the enviable title of Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. Aidan tells me this post was open to writers, artists and composers, so it wasn’t only other painters he had to beat off in order to get it. He laughs. ‘There was no beating involved. I doubt I was the most talented artist who applied that year—I got lucky, that’s all. Someone liked my stuff.’ Self-deprecation aside, the art world is buzzing with hype about Aidan’s immense talent. Next February he has his first one-man show at London’s prestigious TiqTaq Gallery. Owner and art dealer Jan Garner describes him as ‘astonishingly gifted’. I ask him what being a Fellow Commoner involved. Aidan tells me, ‘Trinity’s got its strongest reputation as a sciences college, and the post I held is its way of supporting the arts. Literally, being a patron of the arts in the old-fashioned sense. They didn’t expect me to do anything apart from paint, and they paid me a salary. It was a dream job.’ So why ‘Commoner’? ‘It means I’m not a scholar,’ says Aidan. ‘They didn’t give me the post because of any academic achievements.’ He smiles. ‘It doesn’t mean they thought I was common, though I am.’

Aidan is proud of his working-class background. His mother, Pauline, who died when he was twelve, was a cleaner, and he grew up on a council estate in the Culver Valley. ‘I didn’t have a toothbrush until I was eleven,’ he tells me. ‘As soon as I had one, I used it to mix paint.’ Pauline, a single parent, was too poor to buy him paints or canvas; he was forced to steal what materials he could from school. ‘I knew stealing was wrong, but painting was a compulsion for me—I had to do it, no matter what.’ His family would have discouraged any artistic interests, so Aidan stashed all his early work at his friend Jim’s house. ‘Jim’s parents were from a different world to mine,’ Aidan tells me. ‘They always encouraged me to paint.’ As a child and young adult, Aidan painted on any surface he could find: cardboard boxes, cigarette packets. When he left school at sixteen, he got a job in a meat-packing factory where he worked for long enough to save the money he needed to fund his art degree. ‘The years at the factory were hard,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad I did it. I had a brilliant art teacher at college who said to me, “Aidan, if you want to be a painter, you have to have a life.” I think that’s really true.’