Discovering a Missing Link: A Family Tie Reactivates a Long-Forgotten Research Finding

© Howard Gardner and Ellen Winner 2025

January 5, 2025: After much waiting and anticipating on the part of our family, the CBS Sunday news magazine finally appeared: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-brilliant-unique-world-of-child-prodigies

Suborno Bari on CBS Sunday Morning

We had the chance to view the segment that we had been long been waiting for—about those gifted children who merit the descriptor “prodigies.” The more familiar example on the segment is the math prodigy—in this case, a 12-year-old math genius who has already completed high school and has just become a freshman at New York University. From the start, he’s been amazingly precocious—solving algebraic puzzles when but four, giving public lectures in math a few years later. And now, rubbing elbows with far older teens who perhaps aspire to make money in the computer industry, he does not want to be known merely as a child prodigy—he hopes to “leave a mark” in the mathematical-computer world, broadly construed.

We’ll see. As the moderator points out, not all prodigies make major contributions as adults—and not all adult creators were once prodigies.

But we’ve not been waiting just to watch the first part of that segment. Rather we were waiting to see our then four-and-a-half-year-old grandson, August Pierre Gardner (his first two names are not a deliberate artistic allusion). August is featured as a child with a “rage to master” for drawing. Also featured were Ellen, an expert on gifted children, and Jen Drake—formerly Ellen’s student, and now a professor at Brooklyn College who studies artistic prodigies.

August Gardner on CBS Sunday Morning

Most children who have this “rage to master” in visual art create representational drawings from as early as two (a year ahead of schedule) and then progress rapidly to make increasingly realistic drawings—years ahead of their age-peers. Such children have been called “precocious realists” by Jen and Ellen.  Some images by precocious realists can be seen in this article.

August is a different kind of artist. His drawings and paintings are mostly non-representational. He seems fascinated with patterns. Of course, typical preschoolers also create non-representational configurations. But August at work does not look like a typical preschooler. He works carefully and slowly, with deliberation, often stepping back to look at what he has done so far. He also creates variations on a particular theme: numerous paintings in different colors featuring dripping lines; a series of paintings with just a few curving lines, each one different from the next; and patterns made by painting a form on the top half of a page, and then folding it over while still wet to create a mirror-image on the bottom half.  Sometimes, he counts the number of colors on his paint palette and then looks back at his painting in progress to count the number of colors he has used—to help himself decide where to dip his brush next. He has also been known to plan ahead—asking his parents to lay out his desired art materials the night before, then getting up early, creating what he had envisioned, and then waking his parents to show them his creation. 

An example of his deliberative process: Here is one of his completed paintings made at age 4-and-a-half.

The video clip below shows how he deliberates about where to put the yellow mark. Then, look at how carefully he finalizes that yellow mark.

And this clip shows his deliberateness in making the green mark, and also shows him counting the number of colors on his palette and on his painting.

The works of precocious realists stand out from the crowd. It is easy to see how unusual such children are by just looking at their drawings. But with children like August, it is not so much the end product but the process that is unusual. It is his planfulness, the intentional slow way he makes his marks, the way he steps back and looks, and the way he creates variations of patterns on a theme.

August can be very particular about his paintings. He did a series of paintings of rainbows and insisted that the colors always be arrayed in the particular order of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet. Once, he was at a fair and had his face painted with a rainbow, and he was upset that the colors were in the wrong order. This insistence on order of colors may sound a little obsessional. And in fact, gifted children often are somewhat obsessional in their focus. But there is nothing pathological about this kind of obsession. Rather, it is more of a reflection of a fierce drive and a fierce interest.

So: What is August painting? Patterns—that’s the word! And suddenly, an insight from a half century ago popped up for us.

In the middle 1970s, when intensively studying the cognitive development of a small group of very young children in the Boston area, Howard and his colleague Dennie Wolf made an intriguing discovery.  While children three or four were already exploring various kinds of symbol systems (drawing, number, singing, story-telling, dancing, symbolic gesture), our research team hit upon an important distinction. 

One group of young children we labelled dramatists. These children loved to create stories (often featuring imaginary characters), to animate puppets, to imitate other people, to relate their dreams and nightmares. Another group that we labelled patterners certainly had equivalent mastery of the principal symbol systems of their culture. But they were not on the lookout for stories, with their ebb and flow, climaxes and happy-or-sad endings. No, they were more interested in the configurations—typically abstract, non-representational, geometric—and the ways in which these could be shaped and reshaped visually (or perhaps tactilely).

What amazed Howard: To be sure, he certainly remembered this distinction—and indeed wrote about it in his 1980 book Artful Scribbles: The Significance of Children’s Drawings (1982). (But, until Howard watched the segment at the start of 2025, and listened to the testimony from Ellen, Jen, and the reporter, he had not made the connection. We could indeed talk about August as a child focused on abstract art—but, of course, that category did not even exist one hundred years ago (pre-Pablo Picasso, pre-Mark Rothko, pre-Jackson Pollock). Rather, August is a prototypical patterner.

An example of art by August Gardner

When we spoke to August’s parents about this characterization, they readily agreed—indeed, they pointed out two other domains in which he showed an interest in patterns. When just a toddler, he liked to approach the family piano and pick out musical patterns with two fingers. He never just banged randomly on the keys. And in the verbal domain, he has consistently enjoyed rhyming words—another kind of patterning.

“Castle and Sun,” Paul Klee (1928)

Back to our contrast between precocious realists and patterners. Are either of these early ways of drawing predictive of continuing on in the visual arts and even working in the visual arts as adults? We simply do not know. We do know about the childhood drawings of a few famous artists. Paul Klee’s five-year-old drawings were representational but not at all realistic. In contrast, the childhood drawings of John Everett Millais were strikingly realistic. It’s our guess that either of these early approaches to drawing might predict later artistry—because what is predictive is showing a rage to master in the visual art domain at a young age. This is something that cannot be taught, and seems to have a life of its own, surprising parents who watch in wonder at the focus their young children demonstrate—even if only in the domain of drawing.

One more issue. As grandparents of August, we cannot help wondering whence came his consistent—even at times compulsive—patterning. We know his parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins. We could certainly make the case that he has a genetic predilection for patterning—there are architects and artists in his family. But he also sees many examples of patterning in his home, at museums, and on broadcast and social media. Point for child-rearing and ambient culture.

And so, considering the perennial riddle of “nature vs. nurture,” we fall back on the answer that is so often correct on a multiple-choice test:

All of the above!

REFERENCES

Gardner, H. (1980). Artful scribbles: The significance of children’s drawings. Basic Books.

Winner, E. (1996). Gifted children: Myths and realities. Basic Books.