I began this blog in January, 2013 with a mission to reveal my experience as the younger brother of a severely handicapped individual. Mike is autistic, very low functioning and has never spoken. I began photographing Mike on his 40th birthday in 1989. Today’s post is the first in a recapitulation of those photographs. I […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: The final portrait in the trilogy of my older brother is a rendering of his most notable features from the last time I saw him in his geriatric group home. Mike is autistic, severely low functioning and has never spoken. I have felt every emotion possible in my years trying to interact […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: My readings about portraiture led me to an interesting experiment yesterday whereby I combined my features with my older brother Mike’s. This was a bit scary for several reasons: 1) Mike is autistic; 2) he is low functioning 3) he has never spoken; 4) I have never been able to communicate with him; […]
I really enjoy the art of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Both artists taught at the famous Bauhaus and both have written about their philosophies. There is a compilation of Klee’s Bauhaus lectures and essays about art in two notebooks (The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature); Kandinsky also wrote down his ideas about […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I am still working with the icons I developed for my brother Mike and me. Mike is my older autistic brother, for those of you reading my blog for the first time. Mike is very low functioning and nonverbal. One of the themes I have used in previous watercolors is a triangle […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Yesterday’s mask was a little ambiguous to my eyes. I wanted to create a face that was an amalgam of my brother Mike and me. Mike, my brother, is autistic, very low functioning and has never spoken. That mask didn’t quite fuse my features with my brother’s. I met with more success today. I see […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: My pen point did a bit of walking* for this experiment. Unlike yesterday’s doodle, my peripatetic pen created a completely closed form today. I did lift the pen tip from the paper a couple of times to draw a couple of circular forms. I don’t remember the thought process that led me to do this, but I […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I sidetracked myself from reading Kandinsky. I am a slow but thorough reader and Kandinsky requires slow going. I was itching to actually paint something, so I revisited my effort to depict reading of a contact sheet. After attaching watercolor paper to my drawing board, I drew a 6×6 grid of rectangles […]
Today’s experiment: I worked with ink today. I am pursuing the same theme I began a few days ago: the portrayal of the past in visual terms. Although relativistic physics tells us that time and space are intimately connected (i.e., spacetime), it is impossible to capture the flow of time on a canvas without the […]
What do I want to express? I have been exploring the idea of portraying the concept of time visually. This came from my project of digitizing 25 years of my 35mm film archive, particularly the hundreds of rolls of film from my Brother Michael project. Mike is my older brother who is autistic, low functioning […]
