The Prodigy's Cousin

by Joanne Ruthsatz

  Exposure to such environmental risk factors doesn’t always actually result in autism. What accounts for the variance in outcome? Some scientists have proposed that one factor is the individual’s genes; some people’s genes may leave them more susceptible than others to such environmental exposure. Their genes and the environment interact in a way that may result in autism—though the same would not necessarily be the case for others with the same environmental exposure and different genetic profiles.

  Perhaps, just as with autism, there are environmental “risk” factors for prodigy—events or exposures that increase the likelihood that a genetically predisposed child will demonstrate the unchecked drive, incredible memory, and heightened attention to detail that characterize prodigious behavior.

  It’s a possibility that the Tiessens, a Canadian family of four with first one and then two prodigious sons, have experienced firsthand.

  In 2012, The Huffington Post featured Josh Tiessen as one of “ten art prodigies you should know.” The accompanying video shows an interview with the artist, a soft-spoken seventeen-year-old with carefully styled, slightly spiked brown hair. He appears very thin, almost gangly, and he speaks with gentle reverence about celebrating God’s creations through his art.

  The video of that artwork reveals stunningly detailed pictures of animals and architecture: in Snow White, a portrait of a tiger Josh created at thirteen, he painted tiny, distinct hairs on the animal’s face and body; in Behold the Door, a zoomed-in view of a battered doorway Josh painted at fifteen, he carefully portrayed chipping paint, knots in the wood, and tiny nails.

  Joanne met Josh in the winter of 2013. Josh had graduated from high school but still lived with his parents in Ontario. Joanne drove through a snowstorm to the family’s charming Tudor-style home. When she arrived, Josh’s parents, Julie and Doug, provided a detailed family history. No one in Doug’s family was autistic. Julie was adopted; she had some information about her biological parents’ families, but there were also blank spots in the family tree. As far as Julie and Doug knew, though, they didn’t have any autistic relatives.

  Julie and Doug brought Joanne to Josh’s studio—a bright space at the back of the house with a slanted ceiling and shiny wood floors—and showed her some of Josh’s work. It was as extraordinary as it appeared online.

  Joanne knew that the Tiessens’ younger son, Zac, had a talent for music, but it wasn’t until Doug and Julie walked Joanne through his history that Joanne realized he, too, seemed prodigious. He had the same lightning-quick development of a skill that had served as Joanne’s hallmark for these distinctive children.

  But, unlike the other prodigies, Zac didn’t show any particular passion for music early on. As a child, he hated music class and refused to take up an instrument. It wasn’t until a thirteen-year-old Zac bashed his head against a church floor that he wanted anything—and then everything—to do with music. Up to that point, he was just the kid brother of a child prodigy.

  Josh Tiessen was born in Russia, where his parents were then serving as missionaries. It had been a harrowing pregnancy and birth that slung his parents through a labyrinth of Russian hospitals and medical procedures, but Josh emerged seemingly unscathed.

  Zac eased into the world in a Moscow hospital thirteen months later, the product of an uncomplicated pregnancy and birth.

  Josh learned to hold a crayon around the time Zac was born. He immediately wanted to draw, but he ignored the stacks of coloring books his grandparents mailed to Russia; he only wanted blank paper. His nanny, Lena Zhyk, fussed over Josh’s artwork. Look what he did today, she would say while holding up a sheet of paper. Julie and Doug rolled their eyes. It’s just scribbling, they thought to themselves. There’s no picture there.

  When Josh was around three, Lena taught him perspective. She held up stuffed animals for him to draw and talked to him about shading. Josh would sit at the small table in the playroom drawing for long periods of time, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he worked. Lena often corrected him; if Josh got the perspective wrong, she would rub out what he had done and draw or paint over it.

  Zac occasionally scribbled in the cast-off coloring books for a few minutes, but no project held him for long.

  Increasingly impressive artwork began emerging from the playroom, but Julie was convinced Lena still had a hand in its creation. By the time Josh was five, Lena swore she was no longer touching his projects. Julie and Doug were skeptical that they had a great artist on their hands, but they encouraged Josh to sign his pictures and jokingly referred to them as “Joshy originals.” Colleagues who visited the Tiessen home never believed the pictures were truly Josh’s work: the art was far too advanced for five-year-old hands.

  When Josh was six, the Tiessens moved back to Canada. For several years, Josh’s interest in art fizzled, at least as far as Julie and Doug could tell. School occupied much of his day. Sometimes, though, when Julie thought Josh was playing, she would find him up in his room drawing sports logos or sneakers at his desk; when he was watching TV, he would whip out paper and begin sketching. But the long afternoons he had spent on art as a toddler seemed to have been left behind in Russia.

  After Josh finished third grade and Zac second, Julie began homeschooling the boys. Josh took to it immediately. He loved the quiet atmosphere and the wide-open afternoons no longer stuffed full of classes and activities.

  Zac was a dervish of a student. “We had lots of blood, sweat, and tears that first year trying to get Zac to concentrate,” Julie recalled. “I cried a lot of days.”

  One day, frustrated with the boys, Julie gave Josh and Zac paper and pencils and told them to go outside and draw. Zac spent fifteen or twenty minutes sketching something that vaguely resembled a fountain and then abandoned the project. He spent the rest of the afternoon underfoot in the house.

  Josh perched himself on the family’s lawn and set about drawing the long, rambling home they lived in at the time. He zeroed in on every brick, every roof shingle, the design on the doors. When he ran out of space, he came back into the house for more paper, eventually taping several pieces together. Julie and Doug had to coax him in for dinner.

  When Julie found a book on perspective at a library shared by a group of homeschooling parents, Josh read it, studied it, and incorporated what he learned into his drawings. Zac quickly got bored with the project and moved on, creating havoc in the home classroom.

  Julie enrolled both boys in a church arts club to complement her homeschooling lessons. One of the club advisers, Valerie Jones, a British expat in her mid-sixties who crafted animal portraits as a serious hobby, noticed Josh immediately. She watched as the nine-year-old used clean strokes and hard lines to embed his name within a red-and-blue geometric design on a name tag; he was completely engrossed in his work.

  Over the next few weeks, she kept an eye on Josh as the group worked on shading and perspective. The other children all produced what Valerie thought of as “kids’ art,” but not Josh. His drawings had incredible precision.

  His approach to the projects was different, too. Other kids grew distracted; they couldn’t focus on any one task for too long. The room, filled with ten or so kids, was busy; it sometimes got loud. But Josh shut everything else out. He focused intently on executing his drawings.

  Valerie was convinced that this was a talent that needed to be nurtured. She sought out Josh’s parents and raved about their son’s abilities. She later invited Josh and Zac to her studio for lessons, and the boys began spending Wednesday afternoons in Val’s basement studio, working at a table adjacent to her laundry room. Zac continued for six months or so before giving it up. Josh kept at it. He was quiet, respectful, and surprisingly mature—almost like a miniature adult. He soaked in Val’s instructions; he was never distracted.

  Soon, Val was ushering Julie down to the laundry room to see Josh’s latest projects. Julie was shocked at what she s
aw, particularly when Val showed her Josh’s chalk pastel depiction of a lion inspired by Aslan, a Christlike figure from the Narnia series. The lion’s green eyes appear liquid, his mane wild; he possesses a stirring dignity. In a moment reminiscent of Josh’s toddler days with Lena, Val insisted that Josh had done it entirely on his own.

  After a few months, Val called Julie to ask if she could arrange an art exhibition for Josh. Julie laughed. Josh was only ten! But Val insisted that the world needed to see his work. Julie relented, and Josh had his first exhibition at eleven and his first sale to a stranger: a nurse purchased one of his photographs, a shot of a child taken during a mission trip to Honduras.

  Other exhibitions—and sales—trickled in. Josh displayed his work with other artists at a local business, a church, and a gallery. At fourteen, he had his first solo gallery exhibition when his work was featured on the Community Wall at the Art Gallery of Burlington.

  Zac attended every event. He was always a spectator, never a participant. He helped carry canvases and, in exchange for a small commission, sold artist note cards. He never showed anything of his own.

  Josh got his big break when he grabbed the attention of Robert Bateman, a prominent Canadian painter. He was Josh’s professional idol—a man who, much like Josh, specialized in detailed, realistic portrayals of nature and animals. Josh had written to him a few months before his Burlington exhibition, attaching images of his paintings. Just a day after Josh took down the last of the works he had hung at the Burlington gallery, he got a response. Robert praised Josh’s work and invited him to a Master Artist Seminar.

  The seminar was on Cortes Island, off the coast of British Columbia, more than twenty-five hundred miles from the Tiessens’ home. Money was scarce. Doug had been diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease two years before, a condition his doctors believed he had contracted in Russia, and his health was failing. Julie’s health was declining as well; she would be diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease the following year. Long-term disability payments were the family’s only source of income.

  Josh’s aunt and uncle volunteered their frequent-flier miles. Josh and his parents scrambled to find money to pay for the rest of the trip. Through a scholarship from the center hosting the seminar, an unexpected contribution from a family friend, and money donated by the Kiwanis Club in exchange for a painting, the Tiessens pieced together the funds to send Josh and Julie to British Columbia, and Josh attended the seminar.

  Infused with the golden endorsement of Robert Bateman, Josh’s career took off, and the media attention increased. His price tags shot up, too. Bateman advised Josh that work of his caliber could sell for much more than he was charging, so the fifteen-year-old upped the asking prices for his originals into the thousands.

  Zac had constant exposure to the Josh Tiessen art frenzy, and, as Julie puts it, for years his “nose was kind of out of joint” about the whole thing.

  Josh began pouring more and more time into his art. For him, that time was bliss. He prayed before he began and played music or listened to lectures on faith and art while he painted. Everything else was a distraction.

  The common ground between Josh and Zac eroded: Josh frequently opted out of their hour-long daily allotment of TV; he lost interest in gaming. The brothers had previously played basketball together, but after they enrolled in a Catholic high school, neither boy made the school team.

  At fifteen, Josh set up the Josh Tiessen Studio Gallery in the sunroom. It was a massive upgrade in work conditions. Josh had previously done a stint in the garage. As winter approached, he had moved a series of heaters out to his studio, but none beat back the frigid air. His next move had been to the basement laundry room. It was warmer, but paint splattered the Tiessens’ washer and dryer. As collectors began visiting, Josh felt awkward bringing them down to his makeshift work space.

  Just as Josh was turning sixteen, he graduated from high school. Over the next few years, the achievements rolled in. Josh pocketed a series of honors at local art festivals and competitions for teens. He nabbed the second most votes in So You Want to Be an Artist, a national Canadian contest for teens, for his close-up depiction of an intricate doorknob on a weathered door; the painting was then displayed at the National Gallery of Canada in a monthlong exhibition. The famed Canadian conductor Boris Brott invited Josh to create a piece to accompany one of his symphonies, an honor Josh performed twice. He was invited to join Artists for Conservation and the International Guild of Realism. He was one of sixty thousand Canadians to receive a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, an award given to individuals with notable achievements or contributions to their communities.

  That contribution included not just his art but also a striking benevolent streak that Josh shared with the other prodigies. He gave a portion of his earnings to charity, frequently donated artwork for fund-raisers, and initiated an annual artists’ event with a charitable purpose. He launched his own foundation, Arts for a Change, to coordinate his philanthropic work.

  When others inquired about the source of Josh’s talent, the source of his passion, Julie and Doug, two missionaries who had never considered themselves particularly artistic, always gave the same answer.

  He just came this way.

  Zac’s childhood looked a bit different.

  He was active from birth. The nurses at the hospital nicknamed him Houdini for his ability to escape from even their tightest swaddles. While a toddler-age Josh pored over art projects, Zac exasperated Lena by skipping from toy to toy, pushing around cars and trucks. He experimented with Lego bricks while his older brother mastered drawing with perspective. No toy was safe in his hands; playthings that had survived multiple other children broke within weeks.

  He was always in motion, always on the verge of catastrophe. He loved to climb, and Lena was constantly rushing to pull him off things—ladders, chairs, tables—trying to grab him before he toppled. At a friend’s apartment, Julie once found Zac perched on the ledge of an open ninth-floor window. Another time, he got his head stuck between the metal bars of a porch railing in Russia and screamed for twenty minutes before Lena, Julie, and Doug wriggled him out. When Julie and the boys joined some of their Russian friends for a picnic near the Black Sea, Zac kept trying to run off a cliff. Julie joked that if she could just keep Zac alive until he turned five, he would be fine.

  He was a social creature and craved the company of other children in a way that was foreign to his older brother. Julie ran a one-room schoolhouse for her boys and a couple of other families during their last year in Russia. It was a torment to Josh, who had nightmares about other children destroying his toys, but Zac exalted in the mayhem.

  Zac’s parents always suspected he had a talent for music. He hummed when he was playing, eating, and falling asleep; he hummed in the car and in the bathroom. When Julie or Doug asked about the tune, Zac would cite the background music he had heard earlier in a restaurant or store or on a commercial—music Julie and Doug hadn’t even noticed. He had an excellent sense of pitch and a good singing voice. Lena and Josh warbled their way through the Russian songs Lena taught the boys; Zac was the only one to hit the notes. Julie often wrangled Zac into sitting next to Josh and singing into his ears to help him stay on key.

  Despite his seemingly natural gift, Julie and Doug could never pin Zac down long enough for him to develop it. Music classes at school repulsed him. As he would later recall, nothing sounded right. The other kids’ singing was erratic; the piano was out of tune. When Julie began homeschooling the boys, she tried to integrate music into the curriculum, but Zac hated it. He fidgeted when sight-reading music or singing from hymnals. He couldn’t be bothered to learn about the history of music or classical composers.

  Zac’s lack of interest frustrated Julie and Doug. Music, they felt, was a place Zac could excel—a route for him to develop a talent of his own. Julie and Doug took Zac to a music store before Christmas and tried to entice
him into asking for an instrument. No dice. Someone gave him a toy piano, and his parents bought him a toy electric guitar. Neither took.

  Zac flitted from activity to activity. If any project or pursuit lasted long, he lost interest. One year, Josh and Zac set out to build a large fort in a ravine, but Zac abandoned the project. Doug occasionally built model cars with Zac, who would help out at first but then leave Doug to finish the models alone. Zac and Josh joined a Bible quiz group, and Josh diligently memorized verses while Zac struggled to put in five to ten minutes a day. When Josh began devoting hundreds of hours to more complex pieces of art as a teenager, Zac watched TV and played video games. His parents suspected he had at least a borderline case of ADHD.

  If there was fun to be had, though, Zac was in the thick of it. He was at the heart of every group; he emerged from every activity with a new best friend. He passed long afternoons gaming or playing Ping-Pong with friends, and he issued a constant stream of invitations to the Tiessen home, always looking for someone to hang out with.

  Until the day Zac slammed his head against a church floor. After that, he was different.

  It happened when Zac was thirteen.

  Zac’s church youth group meeting ended, and most of the kids headed out to the foyer to wait for their rides. Zac and some of the others tracked down a few empty appliance boxes they had used as part of a game during the meeting. He and his buddies flattened one out. They took turns lifting it and jumping over it, raising the makeshift hurdle a bit higher each time.