I hardly know where to begin in expressing myself without words. Below is one of my sketches in which I attempted to portray my older brother’s environment, as I saw it. He is autistic, profoundly retarded and has never spoken.

I am moving away from intellectualizing about autism, probing my memory and records as to whether communication between my brother and me happened or not and performing postmortems on my relationship with him, as I have done in many previous posts.

Visual expression

I have a good visual sense and would like to be able to express my feelings about him by creating an image with my hands. My photography worked to a point, but I found that it is not always reliable. Besides, he is no longer accessible to me to photograph, so I choose watercolors. I have practiced watercolor painting on my own for a few years, but would like to have them reflect my state of mind.

Here is my first attempt at self expression of feeling with a watercolor. I used my sketch as background and tried to overlay appropriate colors.

I really did not know what I wanted as a result. Perhaps I wanted some drippy overlays, veils of colors. I confess I did not know what I was doing.

A change for me

Usually, my approach would be: 1) learn all about what colors mean what to whom; 2) learn all there is to know about my particular colors and how they mix together; 3) practice wet on wet techniques and wet on dry techniques; 4) look at other artists’ work.

That’s right, I would have had the perfect procrastination program all set out before me. I still feel like I should do some reading.

Do not know

I am not sure if I like my painting. It says something to me, but to articulate it would be stepping away from the feelings. I would like to continue in this vein for a while, so I hope you all will be patient.

I welcome any constructive feedback that any of you are willing to share with me. Thank you everyone.