When told the word “precocious,” people often associate the word with the great artists from years past and present time—including masters such as Leonardo Da Vinci and John Williams—or with those famous for holding great wisdom. Great wisdom is not always a byproduct of great age, however, for some of the youngest people today hold the greatest innate talent. They are not just the artists of tomorrow, but the best of the youngest artists today. Alma Deutscher and Advait Kolarkar are currently two of the most accomplished child prodigies, and in Walpole, Emily Dorigo and Zeeva Feinstein hold immense talent in the arts while only in elementary school.
A ten-year-old may appreciate reading a Dr. Seuss poem, but Emily Dorigo takes it a step further. The poem that she read alongside high school students in the annual fall Poetry Reading in November, “The Rose Fell,” does not only have a rhyme scheme, but it can be read as a much deeper metaphor for love. Only a fourth grade student at Elm Street School, Dorigo has already shown the world her immense talent in both writing and art. She brilliantly combines her two subsets of the arts into one sensation; she drew a picture of her hand writing the poem with a rose pen. Dorigo started drawing when she was two years old, and her current favorite piece that she created is a painting of the night sky with stars. Dorigo explores versatility in her artwork, for she created a mellow night painting but also developed whimsical characters including pink and purple hues with little animals. She has also explored portraits and abstract art. At the pace she is at now, Dorigo may even surpass Dr. Seuss in her coming years in Walpole.
It is safe to assume that many nine-years-olds do not know the term prosopopoeia (writing in the perspective of an inanimate object) nor could name the parts of a digestive system, but Zeeva Feinstein does, for she has a quest for learning and expressing her creativity. Her imaginative and endearing story “The Germ Invasion,” which has been published in author Peter H. Reynolds’ “HUTCH Magazine,” features the perspective of germs on their way down a boy’s digestive tract. As a third grade Elm Street School student, Feinstein impresses the world with her talent for writing—she read the same story for an open microphone night at Barnes and Noble in early 2018—as well as art. One of Feinstein’s paintings is inspired by her favorite artist, Jackson Pollock, as it is an abstract piece with a whirl of green, red and blue. Feinstein does not just participate in the arts for her own satisfaction, but she wants to give back to the community, hoping to be a writer or a teacher someday so she can help others like her grow in their talents—and to learn terms like prosopopoeia.
To most four-year-olds, a sandbox can be an enjoyable way to play, but for Advait Kolarkar, the blank canvas is his playground. While children get their hands dirty with sand, he gets paint all over his hands, spreading the colors around to not make a simple sandcastle but an artistic masterpiece. At first look, Kolarkar’s paintings seem like products of an older, well-established artist. Just a four-year-old boy in India, Kolarkar first learned to paint with food coloring, and he expressed his vivid imagination on canvas with an explosion of colors in a form of abstract art. His love for dinosaurs and outer space are channeled into his art as part of the creative process. His paintings have swirls and splatters almost like a galaxy that Kolarkar dreams of discovering as an astronaut some day. They are splashes of colors, looking like fantasy worlds come alive. Galleries and the press have recognized him as the world’s youngest artist, and people have been buying his collections of artwork. Many anxiously wonder what new inner universes of imagination will explode onto canvas in the coming years.
Hailing from England, pianist, violinist and composer Alma Deutscher is known as a little Mozart, according to widespread press reviews, her appearance on CBS 60 Minutes and an hour-long BBC Documentary. Yet, she wants to be remembered not as a little Mozart but as a little Alma. At just six years old, she wrote her first piano sonata, and in between then and now, she has written piano and violin concertos among many other works, leading up to a full-length opera that is her interpretation of “Cinderella:” instead of looking for a glass slipper, the prince searches through song for the lady with a beautiful voice. She gets her inspiration from waving a skipping rope in her garden and hears wonderful melodies in her mind, and she believes that writing melodies from her heart is more meaningful than dissonance and using new technologies to create contemporary music. Deutscher is musically mature, yet she utilizes her youthful energies and genuine joy to produce music that has and always will make people smile.