I love writing my blog. I look forward to learning something new every day to write about or, if not new, a continuation of what I began the day before, or returning to a line of thought from some months back. Now and then it is worthwhile recapping the arc of the blog so that I regain direction and don’t fizzle out like some of those fireworks that don’t quite make a starburst.

This might be one of those times.

Blog origins

I started my blog to record and consolidate my thoughts, feelings and experience as a sibling of a severely disabled older brother. Mike is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. I am younger than Mike and spent a lot of time as a child trying to figure him out. My parents explained that he didn’t understand things and over the course of my life (I am past middle age at this point) I never have really given up wondering about him. He has never given me cause to think that he knows that I am his brother or anything different than a stranger.

Not to long ago, after an absence of several years, since I moved to the west coast, I visited him with my mother and younger brother. As always, I was expecting something, some kind of recognition and was more distraught than usual when he did not respond to me or my mother or my younger brother.

Using visual expression

That visit was a turning point for me and also for my blog. I turned my energies to trying to express myself visually. Those of you who have low-functioning, autistic siblings, or are parents of autistic children, know how utterly frustrating it can be at times. There has to be some kind of outlet. For me, drawing and painting was more than an outlet. It was a path to some kind of understanding – a way to think, just as some people use writing to think things through. Since I concluded that it was impossible to understand Mike, I thought, perhaps I have a better chance of understanding myself.

Progression

My last visit to Michael in November 2013 was a point of identity shift – a term I wasn’t aware of at the time, but came to know it through The Identity Shift Project (@TISProj) of Jessica Safran, fellow NYU Alum. I started looking for a new metaphor, reading works by existentialist philosophers, looking for definitions of autism in different contexts (see Autism and the Stranger). My visual experiments started with attempts to boil down visual concepts to icons, as Joan Miró seemed to do with his painting. From there I rediscovered the art of Paul Klee and Hans Hofmann, and their teachings. Although each has a different style and slightly different goals, they both state how an artists imbue their work with their own “inner life”, a component of which is empathy – according to Hofmann.

Today

This is where I am today, attempting to turn my insides out. It’s not that easy, so I’ve been distracting myself with readings in neuroscience (Oliver Sack’s Hallucinations and Migraine) and just started the book Plato on the Googleplex about the relevance of philosophy today. It seems I must buckle down and get back to the task of everting myself.

Comment about yesterday:

First a note about yesterday’s attempt to portray emotions. I think I cheated a bit. I mean, a bloody eye? How can that not evoke emotion? There are certain symbols an artist can use, without much thought that evoke plenty of emotion. I will say that I hadn’t planned on using the eye in yesterday’s sketch, until the form I created suggested it.

Today’s experiment:

No thought in today’s watercolor sketch. I started with a purple blob that looked like a comma, and tried to darken the rounded edges… Actually, a blow-by-blow description of the process isn’t necessary. It’s just a doodle.

Thoughtless Doodle 6-4-14
4″x6″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block