ARTism

 Unusual Artistic Talent in Autism I have been fascinated by artistic talent among people with autism for many years. A small subset of individuals on the autism spectrum display unusual gifts in the visual arts, especially drawing and painting. You will find a gallery of works by Stephen Wiltshire, Jessy Park, Ping Lian Yeak, Laura McNellis and Jonathan Lerman by clicking on the link below. Autism art tends broadly to be of two types: (1) highly representative and often geometric, sometimes to an amazing degree; and (2) primitive folk art with broad brush strokes often use of bold primary colors. In both cases the artwork is displayed in an organized fashion over the page or canvas, unlike artistic efforts of children and amateur artists. The color palette often resembles that which a trained artist might use, but artists with autism often have little formal training. You will find many more examples of such art in "ARTism:A book of autism art" edited by Karen Simmons of Autism Today, which features art work of 36 artists with ASDs. It would not be unusual to find a few people in nearly any population who display interest in and talent for the visual arts. However, people on the autism spectrum generally have limited interest in esthetics and often have significant limitations in language and social understanding. It is possible artists with autism create art entirely for themselves and not as a means of sharing their conception of the world around them with others. As a child, Laura McNellis, now a 52 year old woman with autism who lives in Morgantown, NC, produced numerous tempera still life paintings each evening. When each was finished, while the paint was still wet, she folded it in half, and then half again and stuffed the still wet artwork in a dresser drawer. She never showed her paintings to anyone until later life after her talent had been “discovered.” In her 2005 book, “Neuropsychology of Art: Neurological, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Perspectives” (Psychology Press) Dahlia Zaidel attempts to make sense of the cognitive neuroscience basis of this unusual talent. People with autism tend to focus on small parts of a larger visual image, and are preoccupied with creating order in what must often seem to them to be a chaotic world. Works like those of Jessy Park, which are highly geometric and detailed are good examples of this strength and interest. Another approach to finding order is to categorize things that belong together and paint them as a group, as did Laura McNellis. She painted a series of works consisting of her mother’s dressing table, with hair brush, hand mirror, lipstick and so on lying before a vertical mirror. In one painting, Laura paintd a screw driver along with the grooming implements. I asked her sister if she understood why Laura had added the screwdriver and she said that she had seen her mother screwing a screw into a loose hinge and must have concluded that it was another of the things her mother used, so it belonged with the face makeup and lipstick and other personal tools. The young artist, Jonathon Lermen doesn’t fit into either category. He does remarkable charcoal portraits of people’s faces, somewhat reminiscent of Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon. He is the only artist with autism that I’m aware of who does facial portraits. There is speculation that his interest in drawing faces started with his grandfather’s death. The neurobiological reason behind artistic talent in autism remains elusive. Utta Frith, a UK psychologist proposed a “weak central coherence” hypothesis of autis, noting that people with ASD preferentially use a detail-focused processing style over a more global, integrative processing style that predominates as a person ages. Individuals with ASDs are are able to globally process stimuli as seen in selective attention tasks where participants are explicitly told to pay attention to global information. While there may be validity to the tendency to focus on details in producing art, that doesn’t explain the extraordinary fascination many artists with autism have with the visual arts. So the jury is out on why and how this unusual ability manifests itself. In the mean time we have the good fortune to enjoy remarkable works of art.