Art and Autism

I was asked about some of the paintings on my website and Autism.

I explained the process.

I made a big mess on the canvas, then turned it around to each side and squinted till the subject seemed somewhere hinting in there.

Then I sketched it out so it stood out from the chaos, then I brought it right out.

So, many of my artworks come straight from my own subconscious. I just see movement in the mess, then sketch it into form. I never plan my paintings. They pretty much just evolve as they come out.

Many people with Asperger's think in pictures. I don't think this is so for those people with autism who had severe visual perceptual fragmentation or difficulty getting interpretive meaning from what they see (I now can see things as a whole but often make the visual meaning a few seconds after the seeing so if something is in an unusual place or takes some unexpected form, I often can't recognise what it is).

Many folks with autism will tap, smell, mouth or move static objects to evoke the awareness of their 'category' or use- I call this meaning blindness (I write about it in Autism; An Inside Out Approach).

Remember 'autism' covers many different challenges in information processing and very different emotional realities. Some people with autism are very active and extremely emotional. Others are not. Many folks with Asperger's rely more on conscious thought and their logical mind. Many folks with autism rely a lot on sensing pattern, theme and feel and struggle to rely on conscious thought, instead relying on the triggering of preconscious thought or the language of behaviour or the pure emotional state. Basically, we are all different.

There is another site called Autism Arts which has a wide range of art by people on the spectrum. There is a wonderful savant artist featured there who uses amazing movement in his paintings, almost pure movement with form as virtually secondary.

Here's the link: www.autismarts.com/photo_album7.0.html

I think in movement- I know what things are by how they move/are used, not easily by just the static image. I know people from 'the music of their beingness'- how they lift a glass, cross a room, sit in their body... like an animal does.

I often use gestural signing to make sense of incoming words better and also to keep track of the meaning of my own as I'm speaking them (had it been modelled a lot as a kid as though this was something normal others used for themselves it would have helped me get meaning from language much earlier and not be 'meaning deaf' to them and myself as much as I was) and I 'see' form kind of through my hands, so I sculpt by feel rather than vision, my hands tell me when it's right, with art, it is the movement that either sits right or jolts me, the form is less relevant. This is partly from spending 30 years with fragmented vision (seeing the part and losing the whole) so my art is much more about movement but there is a lot of symmetry too.

(I wrote a book which covers some of this: Autism And Sensing; The Unlost Instinct).

Most of my life I couldn't 'dare' art or sculpture though I had an incredible connection with color, pattern and rhythm and desperately wanted to. I couldn't 'dare' it because I found it too exposing. I had a terror of seeing what could come out of me and especially that others might notice or say something. I didn't want to be too 'moved' because I felt too emotionally overstimulated already and I wasn't ready to handle the 'invasion' of others noticing (I'm pretty cool about that now). I began really expressing myself through art and sculpture once I'd addressed the involuntary self protection responses of Exposure Anxiety (which I call the Invisible Cage) through diet and later through adding a small amount of medication, I have since become more consistently prolific. Some people with Asperger's Exposure Anxiety too. Many folks with autism have this very badly, occasionally so badly they can't even initiate using the toilet, or asking for help, let alone daring something so potentially moving and expressive as art or music. Others find they can dare through music and art but not in a directly interpersonal way with people. I've written about this in Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage.