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My corner

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday November 3, 2011

The new ballroom of the local wheel chair dancing group is on the second floor of a building without an elevator.
One would think that this will lead to a few problems…

Is this true?
No it isn’t.
But I do come across a lot of these kind of stupid situations where you would think that it’s obvious what is going wrong and that someone should fix it. But nobody ever does.
For instance 40% of the employees of sheltered workplace Promen have back problems.
So you would think that we get very little assignments that demand heavy lifting. But we have a lot of them.
Or you would think that if there’s a need for heavy lifting people would help each other. But they don’t.
They complain a lot about pain in there backs but they never seem to realize that they can change the situation.

For years I’ve been wondering why that is.
There seem to be several reasons.
For one thing people want to fit in. So instead of trying to change the circumstances, they try to change themselves to fit the circumstances.
But there are also a few other reasons.
Some people don’t recognize the problems as common problems, but feel that everybody should solve it for him self.
Some feel that since it is a common problem it isn’t their responsibility to solve it.
And some simply feel that isn’t possible to solve common problems; you can’t change the world.

In fact it is quite possible and fairly easy to solve common problems.
It is as easy to complain about common problems as it is to complain about personal problems.
The trick is to never lay blame and never expect anyone to be grateful for your efforts.
If you do that people really appreciate the fact that you are calling attentions to their problems.

The next step is to suggest ways to solve the problems. By changing the way they behave and the way they do their work people could make life much easier for them selves.
It take a few months but at some point someone will try it and find that it indeed makes his life easier.
And since it’s a common problem it also improves the lives of his colleagues. A little. But as the circumstances improve more people are willing to change their behavior. And little by little common problems get solved.

I’ve been doing this for the last 20 years with ever more success.
It won’t change the world, but it does change my corner of the world.

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The end of a path

by Henk ter Heide on Sunday January 3, 2010

It’s a good thing that keeping a new years resolution is a process and not an act. Otherwise I would have failed it already. Yesterday I did draw for more then an hour but I didn’t come around to writing this article
Ah well. Here it goes.

As my regular readers will have noticed, I haven’t done anything for some three months.
I had found that I couldn’t make the pictures I wanted with color pencil and had decided that I would start painting.
I had bought oil paints, an easel, a pallet and the lights I needed to photograph my paintings. I had even painted a few test panels.
And then everything halted.
It just stop.
I didn’t feel like painting any more.

I assumed that I would start painting again at some point. So I just waited.

The thing is that I have had this happening before. Often even.
I have had a lot of times that I am in the middle of some activity and for some reason just don’t feel like finishing it.
It used to annoy the hell out of my mother. She thought it meant that I was too lazy to finish my chores. (Although I never quite understood why she thought that joining a tennis club would be considered a chore.)

Over the years I learned that halting some activity for no apparent reason and then picking it up again a few weeks or months later, or figuring out what is wrong with it, is just part of being me.
So I waited.

The only thing that had me slightly worried was this blog.
This blog is linked to drawing and I felt that couldn’t keep all of you just hanging there. Not knowing what had happened.
I hate it when I’ve followed a blog for a few months or even years and it just stops. And I never find out what happened to the author.
Did he move on to other activities? Did he die?

A few weeks ago I started thinking that I should write some kind of brief explanation about why I wasn’t writing anymore. But a funny thing happened.
While I was thinking about how I should explain that this happens to me some times. That I didn’t know why I had stopped and didn’t know whether I would ever continue. I figured out why I had stopped.

Even better.
After I had realized why I had stopped, new ideas started flowing. And before I knew it I was drawing again.

I thought it would be best to first do a few drawing, to see if it would stick, and then tell you about my developments. But the drawing I’m doing right now is taking far too much time to do it that way. Although I drawn for more then an hour a day for the last week. I’m still only at about two thirds.

But still I feel curtain that this direction is so rewarding that I won’t stop after just a few drawings. I don’t feel that I have to test myself by finishing yet an other drawing before talking about it.

Why did I stop painting in September?
When I started thinking about it, it turned out to be fairly obvious.
I had lost my direction. I had lost my purpose.

When I started drawing early 2007 and started with this blog I had a very clear purpose.
I wasn’t trying to produce beautiful drawings. I was trying to find a way to express myself via drawings.

Being autistic and having a visual thinking process I find that I have to work very hard at expressing myself.
Before I can tell anybody anything about the people I meet and the places I go. I have to translate from the pictures and movies in my mind to words I can speak.
Although I’ve become quite good at it over the years, it’s still a lot of work.
Which means that I can write an article like this one, which is perfectly understandable.

But sitting on a stool in a bar I can either relax or talk with people. And since I go there to relax I never talk very much.
Lately a few of the costumers of my favorite bar have figured out that I’m quite knowledgeable on some subjects and they question me about them. And when they do, I answer them.
But it always feels like an interview. Never like a conversation.
To me conversation are just to much like work.

Three years ago I thought that since I have this visual thinking process and a photographic memory, it should be very easy to find a way to draw those people and places that I wanted to show the world.

But it wasn’t.
Using color pencil I quickly found that the pictures I drew never looked like the pictures in my mind.
For two reasons.
One of which turned out to be very obvious, when I finally thought about it. The pictures in my mind are of a photographic quality. Pictures I draw never are. Which, I suppose, is the charm of drawings. But it wasn’t what I had in mind.
The other problem is that I have a field of vision of 180 degrees. Just by the size of the paper that I’m using, a drawing is only about 30 degrees. Which is probably why a guy like Stephen Wiltshire draws such detail on such big canvases. It’s the only way to get the world in your drawing.

When I moved to painting I just assumed that I would solve both problems.
Bigger canvas would mean drawing a bigger part of the world. And since you can layer with oil paint you can indeed get more photo realistic pictures.

The one thing I hadn’t counted on was drying time.
With oil paint you can layer different colors on top of each other. But after each layer you have to wait until it’s dry. Otherwise the different layers will mix and everything will turn a foul color of brown.
Drying time can be as much as two or three days.

So imagine what that means.
No doubt you have seen those beautiful portrait paintings where the artist has put a little dot of white paint in the pupil of the each eye to suggest life.
Those two tiny dots of white paint take three days to paint.
That is a few seconds for every dot. And then three days of drying time before varnish can be applied.
(And after that the painting has to dry out for several months before it can be used.)

There is no way that I can work that way.
Most painters work either from postcards or from sketches they have made.
I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to draw/paint the pictures and movies in my mind.
I started out with the pictures because it seemed easier to learn. But to really show the world what I’m all about I have to draw/paint the movies.
But of course they change over time.
There is no way for me to keep an image in my mind for the several months it would take to finish the painting.

The first painting I wanted to do was a simple one of an apple tree in bloom in an English landscape.
I’ve been wanting to do a picture like that for as long as I’ve been drawing. I could never find a way to do it with color pencils.
But even such a simple idea keeps changing:
Will I put the tree in the foreground or the background. On a hill? Against a blue sky or a stone wall?

And that are only the questions I ask myself.
The color arrangement also changes. But that isn’t something I consciously think about. It’s just the way the world around me changes.
When the sun shines the pictures in my mind have all kinds of bright colors. When it’s an dreary day the pictures in my mind change to low hanging fog. And then at night I “see” a lot of greys and blues.

There is no way I can show my world using paint.
But even if there was. It’s far the much work. I was looking for an easier way to show my world then by translating the pictures in my mind.
This is far to difficult.

So without realizing what was wrong, I had reached the end of this path.

This is turning into a very long article.
Tomorrow I will tell you about this new direction I have found

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EyeSee and thinking about my process

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday June 2, 2009

A few days ago I wrote that I had to get some things out of my system before I could really concentrate on drawing. I even started with an article about unemployment.
But now I’m feeling that isn’t it. Maybe it’s just that I don’t yet really know how my process works.

This morning I realized what the problem was with the drawing I was planning. It was not, as I was thinking, that the different parts of the drawing could present problems. It was the drawing it self.
I had printed a photo of some beautiful actress with blond hair that I was planning to copy.
The problem is that I don’t copy.

It’s like I’m making a kind of choice. Only it isn’t a choice.
The choice would be that I rather make a bad original drawing then a good copy. But that is not it.
It’s more like I can’t force myself to copy anything.
It doesn’t matter what good reasons there might be for making a copy (getting practice, feeling safe). I just can’t do it.

Maybe I should just accept that while I’m switching to this, relatively, new interest I’ll draw when I have something to draw. The rest of the time I will fill with thinking about it and searching for beautiful art to fill my web pages.

Anyway. About todays drawing.
I bought Jack Hamm’s book about drawing land and seascapes and found that it’s almost the opposite of his book on portrait and figure drawing.
Where the book on portraits starts with almost no theory and a lot of pictures of body parts to copy. The book on landscapes starts with 20 pages of theory on composition.
And what a theory. I’ve been drawing and reading about drawing and painting on and off for the last 30 years. But Hamm teaches me more about composition in the first 8 pages then I had learned up till now.

Since business is slow at my job at the moment I took the book to work and forgot to take it back home for the Whit weekend. So Saturday when I had a little time I couldn’t read the book but I could think about what I have read.

The theory is that you should not put your subject in the middle of your frame. Well you could if you wanted to. But you’d get an interesting picture if you don’t.

At first I started thinking about holiday snapshots.
Let’s say you want to photograph a family of five in front of a large old oak.
The most obvious choice would be to line the family up with the oak behind the person in the middle. And shoot them head to toe with the tree trunk showing above the head of the person in the middle.

But you’d get a much more interesting picture if you have the tree behind the second person in the line.
Shoot the people head to middle with a little more then a quarter of the frame showing either the sky or low hanging branches.

Or so it is written on page 5 of the book. Page 6 and 7 talks about catching the eye of the audience in a circler motion by putting interesting feature of the drawing on specific lines.

This drawing is an attempt at that.

EyeSee

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Finding suitable work

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday September 17, 2008

Working hard for a year to find out why I want to keep what I already have.

A year ago I started a program at BAVO-RNO to find work that was suitable for me considering the fact that I’m autistic.
In the first part of the program I research my own qualities and those of other people. Although I don’t remember the exact list of qualities I found, it was interesting to think about them.
Being autistic I tend to focus on the individual parts of behavior of people without realizing that there is a deeper meaning, a system to there behavior.
For instance tomorrow I’m having a meeting with one of my manager about a, for me rather costly mistake, he made at the end of last year. I always knew that I couldn’t trust him. But I never realized that there is a kind of motivation to his behavior: He is lazy and willing to do anything to prevent people from finding out that he is lazy.
Now I recognize that I can deal with him accordingly.

It was when we started with the second half of the program that I felt that I was loosing speed and in the end coming to a complete stand still.
In the second half of the program we started thinking about what kind of jobs I would like and what kind that would suite me.
The problem there was that I had put down the condition that it should be a job at which I could start without getting an additional education. I was 46 at the time. Which is rather old for somebody who has experience in the field but hasn’t worked the field for the last decade. But starting from scratch in a completely new field of interest with a completely new education would mean that I would be 50 before I could get a job. Which would be completely impossible.

But my existing skill set is somewhat limited.
I’ve work in IT for a few years but that was more then 10 years ago. I haven’t kept up. Which means that my knowledge base for a fast moving field as the IT is gone. No change that I would ever get a job there.
I also have a different skill set. After leaving the IT I was fortunate enough get the first year of a study called “inrichtings werk”. As far as I know this type of education never existed outside of the Netherlands so I’m not quite sure how to translate it.
It was a study where you were taught to teach people how to change there behavior. The study was meant for people who would work with people that didn’t feel that there were responsible for there own life and there own problems. Meanly people with (mental) handicaps.

For some one who, like me, didn’t know that he was autistic it meant learning about behavior, social skills, acting and a whole lot of other skills you need to survive in a modern day society. But I also learned how to influence people and how to change their behavior. I’m actually quite good at it (if I may say so myself ).

But as far as finding a job this is also a skill that’s not very useful. Influenced by emancipation movement of the sixties and seventies the way social workers dealt with the disabled changed. People became responsible for there own actions. Which meant that social workers became advisers and sounding board for their clients. Listening to them and asking them questions. Which is a completely different skill set. One for which I don’t qualify.

The third option was to try to find some kind of unskilled labor.
Although I did think about it for a while it soon became clear that there is no way that I can do unskilled labor outside of the sheltered workplace.
When people do unskilled labor employers invest hardly anything in them. Which means it’s very easy to dismiss them. But even if they aren’t dismissed workers can very easily be moved from one department to an other.
I have experienced both in the 8 months I worked outside of the sheltered workplace and both were to chaotic for me. In both cases I experienced a lot of panic attacks.

So early August I concluded that there is only one workplace left for me and that is to do unskilled labor at the sheltered workplace.
If that sounds boring that is because the work we do is very boring.

But when I started thinking about working for the sheltered workplace for the rest of my working life I realized that I do have a skill that has a value within the sheltered workplace. I’m schooled in teaching people who feel left behind and not responsible for there own life and ~~handicap~~ disability how to live and work with their ~~handicap~~ disability.
We have a lot of those kinds of people within the sheltered workplace.
This may not be a skill that is recognized by the sheltered workplace and at the moment there is no job in it. But that only means that I will have to ~~sculpt~~ carve my own niche out.

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Growing

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday July 9, 2008

Pen and ink drawings by Pete Bromage and paintings by Nathaniel Fowles and Jon Conkey.

Drawings by Pete Bromage
Drawings of steam locomotives. Drawings of people at work. Drawings of people working the land. Landscapes and old churches. With the quality of these drawing I would have though that Pete Bromage would have his own website to sell his work.
But apparently he hasn’t.

The roundhouse by Pete Bromage

Nathaniel Fowles’ paintings
From his profile: “When I was eleven or so, I decided that I wanted to be an artist (it seemed like a good idea at the time).”
Going by the not very large set of paintings I’m assuming that Nathaniel Fowles never fulfilled his ambition. Still he paints quite nice pictures of a city that needs no introduction.
According to his profile his paintings depict fragments of stories. Which might explain why I felt that the paintings where trying to tell me something.

Themeworks
To grow people need challenges. Jon Conkey challenged himself to paint 365 oil painting in one year to practice his oil paintings skills. Themeworks is the result of that challenge.
The website consists of 332 little paintings of mostly landscapes. A few people and buildings but mostly lovely landscapes.
Although he has finished this project and moved on this site is still well worth a visit.

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Getting those juices flowing again

by Henk ter Heide on Sunday January 20, 2008

Finding a way out of the “annoyance” trap.

What do you get when you put 2.000 people with disabilities in a room?
A lot of complaints about all the problems they have.

Last week one of my colleagues got a new job. After having a secondment at some company they gave her a contract.
You would think that every body would be very happy for her but they weren’t.

Friday at noon I stepped into the minivan that would take me home and the first thing the driver told me was how angry he was because Gerry didn’t say good-bye. He thought that would be a normal thing to do. When you find a new job, you say good-bye to the driver of the minivan who has taken you to your work for the last few months.
I disagreed. Telling the driver not to pick me up because I found a new job wouldn’t be on top of my to do list. I would trust Promen to pass that information on to their drivers.
Talking about it I found that the driver did know that it was the responsibility of his manager to give him that kind of information but it was much easier to blame Gerry.
My problem was that he kept nagging about it for the thirty minutes I sat in his car.

I would love to tell you that this anecdote is about something that hardly ever happens. But sadly it isn’t.
Working at a sheltered workplace means having to listen to this kind of stories all day long.
Even worse. Working at a sheltered workplace means telling this kind of stories to every body who wants to hear them. (And to every body who doesn’t want to hear them ).

It’s kind of a trap.
When you start working at the sheltered workplace you have a lot of problems.
You have tried working in a regular job and failed. You have tried again and again and failed. At some point the government steps in and you are send to a sheltered workplace.
You tell yourself that you wasn’t send to a sheltered workplace because you did something wrong. You tried your best but it just didn’t work out. You are not to blame.
And of course you are not the only one who feels that he is not to blame. Every one of my 2.000 colleagues feels that he is not to blame. That something happened to them that was out of their control.

Now you might think that a sheltered workplace is managed by people who are specially trained to work with people with disabilities. People who know how they should teach people how they should do their work and how they should work in a healthy manner with respect for their own body.
But you would be sadly mistaken.
With the president of the company as notable exception the management consists of people who also are disabled. Who where send to the sheltered workplace because they couldn’t hold their own at a regular job. People who feel they did nothing wrong and that nothing is their responsibility.

When I started working at the sheltered workplace in 2000 I found myself in the worst organized company conceivable. Managers never left there office and “the people” where left to fend for them selfs. “The people” where at full strain and exhausted and everybody was complaining about their problems.
Within a few weeks I found myself joining the armies of complainers and I’m still complaining.

Over the last few weeks something has changed. Instead of getting annoyed about all the problems I see at my work I find that I’m ever more getting annoyed with myself.
I used to have a very nice life filled with all kind of mysteries. Even though there are a lot of emotions I can’t recognize there are a few I do recognize and I used to have them.
But nowadays the only emotion I have is annoyance. The mysteries are gone and all I do is getting annoyed with people and circumstances.

Last Wednesday I thought that there should be some way to stop annoying. Maybe I could ask my counselor if he knew of a way.
I didn’t.
When I started thinking about ways to stop annoying the answer was obvious.

Up until I started working at Promen I used to research subjects I didn’t understand.
Usually I chose very strange subjects to research. e.g. Why people consider suicide. Did king Richard III of England really have his nephews killed. And several other strange subjects.
Some subject would fascinate me for some months or years and I would read a lot about it and think a lot about it, reach some sort of conclusion and forget all about it.
I never quite understood why I did it, but now I have kind of a theory.
Gifted people often have strange interests. I’m not gifted but on the edge of being gifted. If my IQ had been a few points higher I would have been.
People with autism are supposed to collect things but as far as I knew I never did. To me a collection is just something that takes a lot of room and you have to dust it. It never made much sense to me.
But now I’m realizing that I did collect. Not things you can put in your bookcase but information.

The only thing is that I never did anything with my information. I read about something. Thought about it. At some point I would reach the end of my interest. And there it would end.
Not any more.
Now I have this blog.
Instead of only reading about a subject I now can go a step further and write about it. So I will be starting a new category. Projects.

I’m not completely sure how I will go about it.
Maybe I’ll first read a lot about some subject and then write something about it. Or maybe I will write about a project while I’m still researching.
Which ever way I chose it should help me get my juices flowing and my mind off of the annoying circumstances at my work.

I’m thinking that my first project will be about suicide. I’ve read so much about that subject over the years that I would be nice to write about for a change.
My second project will probably be about the economic situation in the Philippines. A subject about which I know nothing what so ever. Probably I’ll also do a project about the movie Zeitgeist.

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Solving my travel phobia

by Henk ter Heide on Saturday December 1, 2007

My problems with toilet habits turned out to be a lot bigger then I thought.

Ever since I started this blog at the beginning of this year I’ve been surprised by the amount of knowledge you need if you want to write an article about something you don’t know and how much you must understand if you want to write an article about something you don’t understand. This means that I not only have to solve problems but I also have to figure out what the problem was so I can write about it.
That seems like a lot of extra work but actually it’s a good thing.
I’ve been taught to try to find the easiest solution for problems and go for it. I’m not sure whether that is one of those things you learn by accident or that it actually does work for people who aren’t autistic.
Although this doesn’t work for me I tend to forget. I work very hard at solving a problem the hard way and then at some point I realize what caused the problem and within 30 seconds it’s gone.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the problems I have had all through my life with toilet habits. I told that it had come to a crisis and that I had to take some sick leave. But I had gotten a handle on things and was planning to go back to work in a few days.
Sadly I didn’t. I couldn’t.
A few minutes before I should have been picked up by the mini van to be brought to the shop in Capelle I felt some bowel movements. Not knowing what these feelings meant I called in sick again. Which turned out to be a good decision. If I had gone I would have had an other crisis.
After that I stayed at home for a few weeks. Thinking I should first learn to distinguish between the different feelings I have in my bowels.

Two weeks ago my counselor came by again.
We talk al lot about the toilet problems I had been having and he pointed me to something that I hadn’t noticed for some reason.
I was getting afraid to leave my house.
To go down town I have to cycle down a 2 kilometer long narrow road with water on both sides. When going down town I was getting afraid that I might accidentally drive into the water. Strangely enough on the way back I didn’t have this fear although I cycle down the same road.

Thinking about it some more I realized that I never had a problem with toilet habits. It always was more of a phobia and although it has something to do with toilet habits it’s more of a fear of travel. Since fear cause diarrhoea it’s an easy mistake.
The best way to deal with fobia is to face them right on. The more you think about your fear the bigger it gets. If you just deal with it usually it passes.

I went back to work last Tuesday and had two anxience days in which a took I lot of anti diarrhoea medicine and had four very frightening travel experiences.
On Thursday some one asked me what exactly scared me. Not something I wanted to talk about because I thought that my fear would increase if I thought to much.
But the opposite happened. I realized that I wasn’t afraid that I would soil myself. I was afraid of the feeling it self.
The moment I realized that the fear was gone.

BTW I read that some autistics are afraid of public toilets.
Although I never feared them I do have a problem with a lot of public toilets.
There are two types of toilets. In homes you usually find the type with a plateau on which the stool comes to rest before you flush it down.
In public places you tend to find the type with a watery hole in which the stool disappears.
I’ve always had the problem that I couldn’t feel my stool coming. I still have the problem that I can’t feel how big the stool is.
To know if the rest of my day will be “save” I have to look down. It’s quite scary when that isn’t possible.

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Being autistic or having autism

by Henk ter Heide on Saturday October 27, 2007

Thinking about the relation between autism and identity.

The last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between having autism and being autistic.
When I first started writing about autism I talked about having autism primarily because there are more searches for the keyword “autism” then for the keyword “autistic” and I wanted my writings to be found. Even so I had to correct myself several times. I’m prone to using the word autistic.
In the mean time I also read about autism. At first I read about the symptoms of autism and those article were written by experts in the field who always talked about having autism.
The last few months I try to read article that are written by people that have experience with autism themselves. That turns out to be much harder for the simple fact that there don’t seem to be many people with autism who blog about autism.
But the few I’ve found are adamant in their opinion that it should be “having autism” and not “being autistic”.

They seem to hold the same opinion I come across at the sheltered workplace were I work. “I’m not a wheelchair but I sit in a wheelchair.” Or a more clear cut explanation: Not being able to walk or to see or to lift heavy objects is only one of my qualities. It’s not my foremost quality.

But I still haven the feeling that it should be “I am autistic” and not “I have autism”.

So I’ve been thinking about the difference by comparing it to being gay.
I’ve defined myself as being gay, although it is indeed only one of my qualities, ever since I was 18 yr old.
I discovered that I liked men when I was sixteen. For two years I thought about what that meant for my life and what kind of problems I would have to face and by the time I was 18 I came out of the closet. I have had my fair share of problems but I must say that hardly any of them had anything to do with being gay.

But there is more.
I’ve met several thousand gay people over the years and in general they had a good life and were happy with the choices they had made.
I’ve also met some 50 to 60 men who like men and without exception they have a lot of problems. Not only with their sexuality but with all parts of their lifes.
They don’t like the job they have. They don’t like their girlfriends/wifes. They don’t like sneaking around (although they only think about it but never actually do). And most of all they are always afraid that they will be found out and loose every thing they have. (Although I would think they hardly have anything that is worth anything.)

Reading about the problems that people who have autism describe I’m reminded of a lot of the problems that are common with men who like men.
Fears of the consequence of being different. Fears of being bullied. Fears of not fitting in. Stories about painful remarks people have made.
What I miss are stories about solutions. Thinking about the sort of problems you’re likely to face and how you will deal with them. Instead of being blindsided the moment it happens.

So what’s the difference?
Well the difference between having autism and being autistic is something I’m still thinking about. But the difference between being gay and liking men is something I’ve solved years ago.

Sexual preference is hereditary. It’s something that just happens to you. You don’t control it. It’s something that makes you different from other people and they will react.
Identity is a choice you make. Usually it entails thinking a lot about your main characteristics. It means that you’ll have to think about what you want from life and what you want to change. You’ll have to think about what you could change and how to do that. You’ll also have to think about the characteristics you can’t change and how to deal with those. You’ll have to think about the kind of problems you’ll have to face and how to deal with them.

It’s a lot of work to think about identity but at some point you’ll be finished. You will have a blue print with a describtion of the way you want to live your life. Although this blue print won’t prevent you from having problems it will make it a lot easier to deal with those problems.

Twenty five years ago I had dozens of strategies about how I could deal with the kind of problems a gay man could face. I’ve forgotten most of them because I never came across any of those problems.
I’m not sure why that is. Maybe I was to pessimistic about what could go wrong. Or maybe I was able to recognize problems and avoid them. Or maybe I displayed so much selfconfidence that people left me alone.

This time I think it’s probably better to just define an identity for myself to steer my choices. I don’t think it’s a good idea to spend to much energy in thinking out strategies for situations that might never happen.

I define my identity as autistic gay artist who will get back at his ideal weight of 65 kg at some future point.

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Lose structure (drawing: Who’s afraid of yellow, red (and blue))

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday July 5, 2007

Fearing colors

Who is afraid of yellow red and blue (picture) is a famous painting by Barnett Newman I never quit understood. How could anybody be afraid of colors?

After drawing Tentacles I wanted to draw some more pictures were I could play with colors. A drawing of a fire seemed the logical next step.

But instead of starting with a drawing I started pacing my room. For some reason I couldn’t sit down and make this drawing.

Had this been a few months ago I’d probably would have stopped drawing all together. I would have concluded that some unknown force didn’t want me to draw. So why try.
But in the last few months I’ve learned that people with autism have feelings to. They just have great difficulty in recognizing them. I tend to have very strong physical reactions to feelings but it can take a few hours to a week before I recognize the feeling.

So instead of stopping all together I decided that there probably was something very frightening about this picture, that I couldn’t draw it. But it should be possible to draw something that resembled a fire but wouldn’t be frightening to me.
I started out with this sketch:

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 1st sketch

This picture looks nothing like a fire it just uses the colors.
But after drawing this much I found that it still was to frightening. So thinking that my fear might be caused by the colors I tried this drawing:

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 2th sketch

But again it got very frightening and I tried something else:

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 3th sketch

Here I’m almost drawing plants. What wasn’t what I had in mind.

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 5th sketch

With the 4th and 5th sketch I tried to get away from the plant shapes and back to the yellow and orange colors but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with this drawing and why it coursed such violent emotions in me.
After using a whole day to draw five sketches I went to sleep.

Problems at work

The next day my employer, the sheltered workplace Promen (Dutch), tried to blindside me to force me to accept a move to one of their least structured departments.
For some reason I can’t phantom Promen seems to think that doing stupid mind numbing work makes a department structured when in actual fact it’s the manager that structures a department.
“Structured” means either that it’s very easy to predict how a day will run or that you have a great deal of control over the way your day plays out.
The problems with this manager is that he has a low self esteem which results in his ongoing attempts to prove who’s boss. He also has much trouble admitting mistakes.
I’ve known him to order people to preform tasks they weren’t qualified to do and then getting angry when they protested. (“WHEN I TELL YOU TO DO SOMETHING I EXPECT YOU TO DO IT!!!!”). I get very strong, unrecognized, feelings when I’m placed in that kind of a situation.
I’ve also known him to punish people for doing what he told them to do instead of what he meant.
If this wasn’t enough he also has a great mistrust of people. In his mind there’re always out to fool him. Once I witnessed how he refused a mentally impaired colleague sick leave stating that since he didn’t experience monthly pains she couldn’t either.
There’s no way I’m ever going to work at his department.
Luckily I recognized in time what was going on and I could get some help, but still I was very frightened for several days and couldn’t work on this drawing.

Where is the structure

About a week after I started I felt that I should give this drawing another try.
Almost at ones I realized that it wasn’t the colors that frightened me. It was the fact that I wanted to make a drawing that wouldn’t have any structure what so ever. Just putting some yellow and orange colors on the paper and see where it leads.
After I realized that it still took me several hours to finish this drawing.
I do like the result.

Who’s afraid of yellow, red (and blue)

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Link

I still don’t know why Barnett Newman was afraid of yellow, red and blue. If you want to know more about this abstract painter this Wikipadia article is a nice place to start. I couldn’t find a site where you can see his work but by using this Google page you’ll find pictures of a lot of his paintings.

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“Drawing” the sport (drawing: Star field 2th sketch)

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday June 20, 2007

I’ve read somewhere that if you would see a tennis player in the buff you would see that the muscles in his right shoulder are much better developed then the muscles in his left shoulder (assuming he’s right handed). I don’t know about tennis player but it might be true for people who draw.

As I predicted a while back I’m getting better in the technique of blending colors and it’s taking less time but it’s still a lot of work.

Star field 2th sketch

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After doing one of these drawing my shoulder is hurting a little. Half way through the second I had to go and do something else because my whole arm hurt.

Mm. After doing the drawing I find it isn’t quit what I had in mind. Maybe I’ll try something new in a while as part of something else. A star field on it self is a lot of work with a boring result.

BTW if you try to color a large surface, like I do in this drawing, you’ll often find that some pencil strokes are much darker then others. To prevent this you should turn the pencil around it’s axel while you’re drawing. That’ll give you more control on the thickness of the line. Then again maybe you want a very light color in that case you should make your strokes longer. Strokes of fifteen to twenty centimeter work nicely.

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