Sensual eating How should I put this? Mike was always a sensual eater. Why use utensils when you can feel the texture in your hands? I suppose it adds to the complete culinary experience… assuming you have someone to clean up after you. Brief recap For those of you reading my blog for the first […]
Parties I used to go to some of the parties that Mike’s group home would arrange (see Halloween Party, Christmas Party). Mike is my older brother, who is autistic, very low functioning and nonverbal. They were experiences that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I had more than a few surprises at these events. For instance, I saw […]
Mike’s toy Mike’s favorite toy was a slinky. I took a photograph of him playing with it on one of my first visits to his Day Program. Mike is my older brother. He is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. After living in a large institution for a good portion of his life, Mike was placed […]
Group home The gesture for today’s study also comes from a visit to Mike’s group home. For those of you just joining me, my older brother is autistic, very low functioning and nonverbal. Although he was home for the first 10 years of my life, that was decades ago, and yet having him as a […]
Contact It is a real thrill to make contact. We visited our grandchildren in October of last year. William turned 7 months old while we were there. He was quite different than when we first saw him, after he was born. Then, all he did was sleep. As I understand things, infants can’t see that […]
One of the photos of my brother captured him trying to get me to do something for him. He took my arm as if it was my handle, like some kind of teapot. I wrote a post about this occasion a back in September (2013). Mike is autistic, very low functioning and nonverbal. Since Mike doesn’t […]
Reexamining old photos I’ve been looking through my old photos with the idea of finding expressive and meaningful hand gestures. The photo below is a frame from one of the home movies that my father must have taken. We were on vacation in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I’m pretty sure of the date […]
Holding hands is one way of showing intimacy… assuming the hands belong to different people. Holding one’s own hand can have other meanings; I don’t think that intimacy is one of them, however. That could be a good blog post, but not what I had in mind for today. My older brother Mike is autistic, […]
Today was a day for doctor visits. In keeping with my interest in gestures I took my camera along with the idea of capturing images of hands at work. In addition to routine blood tests, for which my poor wife had to endure three punctures, she had another procedure which involved three additional punctures before […]
Thoughts about abstraction Yesterday I painted a study of hands that were doing a specific job: taking a fish and preparing it to be eaten. I’ve been thinking of how I would go about abstracting the image of these working hands. Working from my image, I could try to convey some of the following ideas: preparing […]
