There is a four-year-old girl in upstate New York who has painted and sold two dozen paintings and, from these sales, earned about $40,000. She’s had a gallery show in her hometown of Binghamton, and The New York Times reports that she has her critics and admirers. Putting the question of her popularity aside, consider for a moment that she even has critics and admirers. She is, after all, four years old.

Painting is one of those fields in which you imagine there are countless numbers of people toiling away while never really finding any recognition or satisfaction even. (Admittedly, that is a somewhat dour perspective.) So to see a four-year-old, a child who is in preschool, already considered a success sort of makes you either want to pull out your hair maybe, if you’re the self-pitying, aspiring-artist type, or makes you want to smile — at the oddity of a four-year-old who can make paintings that people find emotionally moving.

This young artist, Marla Olmstead, who did I mention is four, has a waiting list for her paintings, for which the going rate is now about $6,000. My favorite part of this story is when her mother talks about the money and Marla’s inability to understand what it means to have $40,000. Her mother said in the Times, “She has no concept of money. She was really into lip gloss, so I told her it was enough money to buy a whole room of lip gloss.”

You do understand she’s four years old, right?

Vinnee Tong