Today’s watercolor experiment: I began today’s study simply: I applied several yellowish pigments to a completely wet watercolor paper. In Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he equates forms with colors. Yellow, to use today’s example, is one of the ‘keen’ colors that is consonant with a sharp, or triangular shape. I wanted to see what would happen […]
My wife, Joy and I just started watching Mad Men. Frankly I was a little bit leery about rehashing the 1950s and its prevailing attitudes. Drinking, smoking, antisemitism, treating women badly was the norm back then. The protagonist, Don Draper, is a mysterious, emotionally empty Madison Avenue ad agency creative director. Little by little we […]
Dad died 7 years ago yesterday (November 30 by the lunar calendar). Thoughts of him have been in the back of my mind all month. Although I wasn’t conscious of it, this may have prompted me to read A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H Hardy, a book that had been sitting on my shelf for quite […]
Emotional reception There are many works of art that evoke emotion in me. Oddly enough for me as a visual artist, the medium that tugs at my emotions the most is music. Of the factors responsible for this, the strongest seems to be memory. I cannot discount associations from my childhood, which was filled with music; the […]
Dad played the violin. Mom played the piano. They played duets before they had children. In my childhood memories, I only remember them playing together a couple of times. Music was a big part of my family life, growing up. Opera on Saturdays, my father reading along in the libretto sometimes; Mozart, Beethoven, Bach… you […]
I wanted to write about vocalizations since these are the only sounds that my older brother has ever made. Mike has never spoken. He used to hum, but doesn’t do that too much any more, at least when I’m present. He sometimes sniffs rhythmically, and grunts. Who knows his motivations for doing this, if any? […]
I’ve always tried to be a doer. This might have resulted from my attempts to help my mother with my nonverbal older brother, diagnosed with autism and profound retardation, I don’t know. Since the focus of my blog is to address my problems and attitudes from the perspective of a sibling of an autistic brother, […]
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 […]
My parents and I returned to my brother Mike‘s group home many times after that first visit. On one notable occasion, I brought my violin. I thought that perhaps if he heard the same sounds that he used to hear at home, maybe something would click. I didn’t think that he would wake up and […]
Like all of you, I am terribly upset by the Boston Marathon bombing. My heart really isn’t in blogging, and I was wracking my brain to think of what to write that would be consistent with my blog’s mission. I had planned to talk about the role music played in my family. Given the healing […]
