Below is the fifteenth group of watercolors that I painted for earlier posts in this blog. The paintings below are about gesture and hands, particularly as regards my low functioning, autistic and nonverbal brother, Mike. Please see the original posts for the back story and inspiration of each painting. Originally posted on February 23, 2014 (Tactile Communication). Mike often […]
Right now, I am probably on the red-eye to the east coast. Mom is going to be ninety years old in a couple of days and I am going there to celebrate it with her and family. The only problem is, Joy won’t be able to go with me. She came down with the flu […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Process: Yesterday I was thinking about making the hands I paint more abstract. I started today with two Payne gray brushstrokes. The first one (on the left) was spot on. It had just the contour I wanted. The second one was a bit off, but not terribly. As with yesterday’s study, I incorporated […]
Yesterday I noted that many of my early pictures of my brother Michael happened to feature images of hands as visual elements. Mike is nonverbal, autistic and profoundly retarded. He does not speak, nor does he use gestures to communicate. Mike’s hands are visual elements because of the delicate awkwardness with which he holds them. […]
I’ve taken many photographs of my older brother who is autistic, profoundly retarded and has never spoken. Many of my earlier photographs of him seem to capture hands. Sometimes the hand belongs to him, sometimes my hand is in the picture. Conventional wisdom is that a portrait photograph is about the subject and the photographer. However, […]
My brother Michael is autistic, low functioning and has never spoken. From the late 1980s through the 1990s, my project was to use photography to help me discover who my brother was and how I could relate to him. I wrote the following in the early 1990s about my recollections of Michael from childhood. Sometimes […]
