"Prodigies have an intense drive to draw. They want to draw the minute they get up and the minute they get home from school."

"Said [Dr. Jennifer E. Drake, an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.] 'They don’t care about showing their art.' One seven-year-old drew 'complicated transformers' in a highly realistic manner on a white board, and then simply erased it and started all over again, propelled by some internal drive. Drake’s recent research also found that the ability to draw hyper-realistically— created by children she calls precocious realists—is neither a function of IQ, age, gender, or training. As she describes it, precocious realists have the ability to immediately zone in on the details, as opposed to first sketching in the overall shapes. Drake sees a clear division between someone who is gifted and someone who is a prodigy. It turns out, unlike math, music, and chess prodigies, child art prodigies are the hardest to find, according to Dr. Joanne Ruthsatz, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and author of the forthcoming book, 'The Prodigy’s Cousin: One Psychologist’s Amazing Story of the Link Between Autism and Genius.' She tracks more than 30 prodigies, but has only five art prodigies in her group. While she can’t disclose who’s in the cohort, she can say Aelita is not—although she’s highly interested in meeting her."

From "What Makes a Child an Art Prodigy?/The paintings of seven-year-old Aelita Andre have sold for tens of thousands of dollars, raising the question of what separates true, precocious genius from mere youthful creativity with hype."