As I sat with my 7-year-old son for more than an hour in front of an abstract painting, I saw what appeared to be black paint thrown onto a white canvas.

My son loves abstract paintings. He was explaining to me how much I was missing by just looking at the paint color. I hadn’t seen the energy flowing through the painting. I didn’t see the chaos or the frustration that my son instantly saw, and the artist later confirmed was there.

He saw beyond and could detect and understand the artist’s behavior.

This wasn’t my son’s first foray into abstract paintings. In first grade, he spent more than three months re-creating an alphabet letter into a collage of patchwork patterns and colors at his school. (See if you can guess the alphabet letter; the answer will be given at the end of this article.)

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