world

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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I’m finally getting some ideas about the difference in thinking processes between autistics and non-autistics.

Some 20 years ago I read somewhere that people who are autistic can’t think in symbols. I didn’t know that I was autistic myself and I didn’t understand what they meant. Don’t autistics understand symbols like the dollar ($) sign and the Euro (€) sign?
When I found out that I’m autistic, last year, I understood even less.

The book about drawing with the right side of your brain was very surprising for me.
I hadn’t expected that there would be such a big difference in the experiences I had and the experiences that were described in the book. I didn’t quite get why the faces/vases drawing would be so hard for non-autistics. But what really surprised me was how hard it apparently is to draw portraits.
I just draw what I see. I might get lost in the details. Maybe I don’t think it’s a very good portrait because the details don’t match, but I don’t make the stupid mistakes most people apparently make.

Last week my employer wanted so speak to my councelor to learn something about autism.
We met in a cramp office with an cheap, old, dented and cracked table which we filled with the arms and hands of four people, 4 plastic coffee cups each with one plastic spoon, one dairy, two notepads and a few odds and ends.
My councelor told my manager and a manager from human resources a little about autism. Hopefully they learned something from it. One of the things my councelor described is how autistics see a lot more detail. He started out by saying “we see a table with a few sheets of paper” and continued with a description of what I saw.
“A table with a few sheets of paper”?????
Is that all that you see?????

Thursday my department at work had to wait a while to get the next order. The supply room kept telling us that we would get the order in a few minutes. So we waited and waited. In the end it took a few hours.
While we waited one of our interns drew a little. This guy is 16 or 17 years old and mentally disabled but he draws very good.
He started out with a cartoon styled St. Sebastian using very strong bold lines.
Then he tried to draw a portrait of me. Before he even started, he told me that he couldn’t draw very well and proceeded with waverly lines to draw something that didn’t even look like a face (or at least in my eyes). But he thought it was quite good.
Then I left to do something else. When I return an hour later he had filled a few sheets of paper with strong confident drawings.

I finally got it.

I think I misunderstood what was meant by symbols. Not only the signs that people use to point out the road to the city or the way to the toilet but the whole condensing of ideas people use to make it easier to observe and think about the world.
I don’t see the condensed world. I see every little detail.
I’m at odds whether condensing the world is an advantage or a disadvantage. But it doesn’t really matter since you can’t choose your thinking process.

The interesting thing is that the same happens when non-autistics look at a drawing. They don’t see all the detail I see. They just see a symbol.
If it has a trunk, branches and roughly the right colors it must be a tree. The shape doesn’t matter that much.

I think that this was what had me frightened.
There is no way I can draw all the detail I see. Not only because I don’t have the skills but, more importantly, I don’t have the patience. But if most people can’t see the details I don’t have to draw them.

Symbol puppets

This may seem like a children’s drawing but for me it’s something I’ve never done. I’ve never realized that you can just take a few circles to symbolize eyes and mouth.

Symbol trees

These trees represent something I’ve been trying ever since I started with drawing.
On route to my work I come passed a lot of trees like these two. Especially now in fall a lot of leafs has fallen off. So on the one hand you see very nice green, yellow and orange colored leafs and on the other you look right through the tree and see a blue and yellow sky in the background.

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world

The end of a path

Shortcuts: Thinking and drawing in shorthand (Drawing: Symbol drawings)