Arkin Rai, a seven-year-old child living in Singapore, draws dinosaurs with exquisite realism. At age three his dinosaurs were simple and schematic. A year and some months later, however, he created a complex drawing in which dinosaurs were layered one on top of the other, an image that bears an uncanny resemblance to a drawing of horses and a bull by the adult Pablo Picasso.

In Arkin's fanciful scene, the long, graceful neck of an Apatosaurus-like beast obscures the view of other dinosaurs. One of them is a Tyrannosaurus rex, drawn in profile with one leg mostly hidden behind another—an effect called occlusion, which most children discover at age eight or nine. In the ensuing months his drawings became shockingly realistic. He started using fluid contour lines to give figures shape. At age six he was depicting dinosaurs fighting and running, using various advanced methods to convey the distance between objects.

This article was originally published with the title Predicting Artistic Brilliance.

1 Comments

1. 1. Ruth Rosin 11:32 PM 11/15/12

   "Precocious child-artists" obviously see the world differently than other children their age. But any attempt to understand how this could have happened requires knowing minute details about their life-experience, including what works of art they viewed, what they were told about that, what toys they played with, what, if anything, they were taught abot drawing, as well as whether, and how they might have been advertently, or inadvertently, coached by adults!
   
   I find nothing about all this utterly essential information in your report. And most such information may even be lost, without the possibility of retrieval, by the time a child produces an artistically impressive drawing.

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