Exiting Nirvana Read online

  PART THREE

  Painting

  Jessy Park: Merrill Lynch & Godiva at the World Financial Center, 1999.

  CHAPTER 8 “The sky is purple-black”

  Jessy’s in her room, the door shut. I knock of course — the proper behavioral lesson — but it’s years since we heard the angry “Go away!” of her adolescence. Today, though, there’s a pause before the “Come in.” I know why; she’s doing “secrets,” and she’s putting them away. Though the tubes of acrylics are in place, her table is empty of its usual work-in-progress. It’s three weeks before Christmas — or Valentine’s Day, or Easter — and Jessy is painting her little cards. Each family member will get one; so will former Jessy-helpers; so will the “housemates” who live with her when we are away.

  It’s a happy task. The holiday itself is happy to think about, and her chosen subject matter makes it happier still. Twenty years of little cards adorn our kitchen, the multicolored record of Jessy’s “enthusiasms,” her obsessions, unalloyed by the lurking anxieties that lie in ambush for them in real life.

  Each 3-by-5 card is a miniature painting. There are double-yolked eggs. There’s a whole series of astrothings — solar eclipses, lunar eclipses, the planets in full array. There’s Venus rising, so bright that it casts a shadow. There’s a horizon with a green flash. There are five bees, safely dead. A monarch butterfly is so exquisitely detailed it seems real. A tomato hornworm recalls Jessy’s first pun, and her happy laugh when the hornworm blew its horn.

  Time passes; enthusiasms “wear away” and new ones succeed them. No more astrothings, but houses, all sorts of houses. That was the period — it lasted more than a year — when Jessy, her voice tense with pleasure, would tell you, “I’m interested in real estate!” And she was, but not the way other people are interested in real estate; the economics of it meant nothing to her. Rather, her interest was in classification for its own sake. The phrase “starter house” made her shiver with delight. She would go on and on about “luxury homes,” “million-dollar homes,” though that was a category, not a price, determined not by grandeur of grounds or architecture, but (of course) the number of bedrooms, baths, and half-baths. And now, banks…

  But other cards are less autistic, more sociable, as Jessy learns to look for subjects that are appropriate to their recipients. There are cat portraits for her cat-loving sister. Her Scottish brother-inlaw, born in Glasgow on St. Patrick’s Day, gets a four-leaf clover for his birthday, for Christmas (my suggestion) the Glasgow city seal. The real estate enthusiasm itself grew out of actual conversations with her friend Anna about the purchase of a starter house. Like her books, her little cards show a progression, unsteady but real, toward engagement with the ordinary world.

  . . .

  What’s art is a matter of definition. “Those are the cookie art,” Jessy said of her SING-SANG-SUNG collage. She never applied that term to her books. The Book About the Shadow, about the troubling Light, were in another category, one she could recognize though she couldn’t name it. They were functional records; that was why, I think, she seldom bothered with color, why she took no trouble with her drawing, except when an obsessive anxiety called forth the eerie realism of the science building or the shadow cast by an enormous 78. Color was for beauty, I think, though Jessy wouldn’t have said that either. So she cut out school menus and painted them and pasted them up in pastel strips; she made collages with multicolored silly business and crumpled tissue paper and her own name in string. The books were important, but I don’t think the farthest-out critic would call them art, still less apply the term to the illustrations for the journals she’s kept intermittently since the books were abandoned. As drawings, there is nothing remarkable about them except that they were the drawings of an autistic child and are now the drawings of an autistic adult. Jessy was four when she drew her first crude representation of a human being. She was nine when the comic books began. And since that time her representations of human figures have not changed at all.

  Shadows cast by the number 78, and by the stick figure of Jessy herself.

  It is remarkable when an adolescent, still more an adult, still more an adult who has been taught to draw, draws like a child. Paul Klee did not, for all his attraction to children’s art; more precisely, he could not. Nothing is more difficult than to draw like a child unless you are one. I would say impossible, except that Jessy does it. I watch her as for the ten-thousandth time she makes a circle for the head, an oval for the unclothed body, single short strokes for each arm and leg. Only the hair differentiates individuals; hers is straight, mine curls, boys and men have none. The whole figure is done in less time than she’d take to write it. In fact she is writing it. It’s clear what these are: not drawings but ideograms, conventional, rapid, unvarying. They have nothing in common with her renditions of buildings or her portraits.

  Those portraits are surprisingly skillful, considering that there are so few of them — no more than can be counted on the fingers of one hand. She made them in 1973. Ask her today if she’d draw a person and she’ll say no: “too hard.” But then it was different. The portraits were set assignments. Anna and Diana were teaching her to draw.

  The twins met Jessy in art class. As she entered high school, art (like gourmet cooking and, later, business math) was something she could take with normal children. It didn’t take long for the teachers to discover that this bizarre youngster who screamed at the bells and scratched in the wrong places and could hardly talk could do any assignment given the normal teenagers. She could do a still life with a flag and a bottle, she could render the same subject cubistically…if she understood that that was what she was supposed to do. So it was that Anna and Diana entered her life. Fascinated by the paradox of someone nearly their own age who acted like a four-year-old when she wasn’t acting worse, yet could draw anything set in front of her, they appointed themselves interpreters between her and the busy teachers. They were among the few who could draw better than she could, and they decided to really teach her to draw. They didn’t go for cubism or weird subject matter. Theirs was the tried and true method of the Renaissance workshops, and it was exactly right for a person with autism; they made model drawings and had her copy them. There was nothing “creative” about their assignments, nothing expressive. Once or twice people had tried to get Jessy to draw a “happy” or “sad” picture; she had no idea what they wanted of her. The twins were concrete, definite; they told her firmly what to do and she did it. They set her subjects she never would have chosen — flowers, interiors, even those portraits. She developed a line of exquisite sureness; a drawing of Anna seated (reproduced in The Siege) looks almost like a Matisse. Only the date makes it credible that it comes from the same year as the last of her books. A portrait of her father is an instantly recognizable likeness, of him as well as of the wicker chair he sits in — while in the foreground looms a large bare foot. It’s Jessy’s own, there in the drawing as it was in her line of vision as she sat opposite him on the bed. What child of five has not absorbed the social knowledge that you don’t include your foot in a picture of your father? But Jessy drew what she saw. It is the mind, not the eye, that selects.

  Jessy’s portrait of her father, done in her teens, about the same time as the 78 drawing.

  The twins taught her academic drawing, and year after year, for the nine years she remained in high school, the teachers taught her too. When Anna and Diana went off to college, Jessy, unless in school, rarely took up a pencil.

  Or a brush. For before the twins got to work, Jessy had had another teacher. Valerie was a painter. Jessy had painted in nursery school — repetitive triangles, squares, zigzags — abstract patterns, oddly neat for a small child, balanced, controlled, composed. She had paints at home — she understood that red and white make pink before I told her — but unless I set them up she preferred the ease of crayons, using them to draw, not to color. But Valerie had acrylics, and acrylics are quick-drying, as easy to use as the poster paint
s of nursery school. With Val’s encouragement, Jessy’s colors — and her obsessions — bloomed into glory. That summer’s recurrent theme was Dutch elm disease, three trees healthy and one afflicted, a background of greens and blues and rich reds, or stars and rainbows, or the variously rayed sun. But Valerie lived with us only one summer. It would be years before Jessy would — except on assignment — paint again.

  . . .

  Even while admiring Jessy’s increasing competence, we mourned the vanished strangeness. But the art of normal children, too, loses its freshness when the demands of realism take over, and few children regain it. Perhaps, we reflected, we should welcome Jessy’s academic realism as normal development, not regret it as a sacrifice. After all, we had no plans to make her into an artist.

  We couldn’t have guessed how time, and luck, would bring everything together — luck and the principle of numerical reinforcement. We took Jessy to an autism meeting where I was making a speech. She was already twenty-one, too old for the children’s activities provided, and I suggested she sketch to keep her busy. She made an accurate, ugly sketch of the ugly building we were meeting in, a man who’d heard my speech offered five dollars for it, and that’s what started her career. A later chapter will describe how in her teenage years she’d worked for “points” to build skills and improve behavior. Money worked the same way. For years she had had no reason to paint or draw. Concepts of creativity or fame, of course, were meaningless. Money didn’t mean much more. But numbers did, and she liked to see them rise in her checkbook. The staff at the Society for Autistic Children were very kind; they gave her a little exhibition, and sketches and school paintings were sold for small sums. The glorious colors began to come back, and then to proliferate. Perhaps she remembered a school exercise from years before, when she had been told to paint a snow scene, first in its natural white and evergreen, then in whatever colors fantasy might suggest. Who knows? At any rate, Jessy was drawing again, not because she was told to but because she wanted to. Once more she was finding her own subject matter. She drew, then painted, not snow landscapes, still less portraits or even buildings; she drew radio dials, speedometers and mileage gauges, clocks, heaters, and electric blanket controls. People with autism like such things. Jessy’s fascination gave these new paintings an intensity that her academic drawings had lacked. Not that these weren’t realistic, but a dial is more than a dial when it is realized in apricot and turquoise. Jessy’s dials and gauges dazzled; her heaters throbbed with color as in a dream, transfiguring the simple grid perceived by her geometrizing eye. Sometimes they achieved an instant surrealism; what more natural than to honor three enthusiasms together? So against an electric blue she combined a rock group logo, an album title, and a heater, to yield the bizarrerie ofBoekamp Heater with Women and Children First.

  Electric blanket controls, in an untitled painting by Jessy.

  Jessy had reverted to the abstract patterns of her childhood. But now they were abstractions in the true sense — patterns perceived in, drawn from, abstracted from, the visible world. There was a window in a house near us; through it, by some architectural quirk, a chimney could be seen, right up against the glass. Fascinated by the pattern of the bricks, Jessy painted it four times: first just the chimney; then the chimney and the window; then chimney, window, and roof; finally chimney, window, roof, and the night sky with stars.

  Jessy Park: Dagmar’s House with Chimney in the Window, 1984.

  People liked the dials and heaters; if we’d lived in New York they’d have gone over big as pop art. But art, for an autistic person, can be a vehicle of social learning. Jessy had already learned, reluctantly, that people won’t buy just anything, that she had to put time into her work; now she learned that though people like dials and heaters, most of them prefer houses, trees, and stars. She had begun to spend hours poring over the Field Guide to the Stars; astronomy was a new obsession. Jessy wanted to paint a starry sky, but she didn’t know how she could paint the house and the chimney when everything was dark. She needed the support of tactful suggestion — tactful, for she had become very sensitive to what she perceived as criticism. Honoring surrealism and strangeness, her father showed her Magritte’s painting of an evening street scene against a bright sunny sky; reversing Magritte, she could keep the house in the daylight yellow of her earlier versions and still have stars above. So she painted the sky “purple-black,” and Orion with Betelgeuse and Rigel in their correct colors and magnitudes, and Venus. A friend saw it and wanted one like it. Of course Jessy could have made another chimney in the window; she never minded repetition. But we suggested she tailor it to her client, an astronomer specializing in the Southern Hemisphere. So Jessy painted the professor’s house with the Magellanic Cloud and the Southern Cross, and from then on her path was clear.

  . . .

  That was almost twenty years ago, and art has continued to make its contribution to Jessy’s social education. Back then she was indifferent to praise of her paintings; now she smiles in pleasure. She likes it when people come to see her work. She can tolerate the interruption; she can even tolerate making one of the mistakes she calls a “painto,” a word she invented on the analogy of “typo” (to be joined immediately by “cooko,” “bake-o,” and “speako”). Paintos used to elicit the banshee wail, even when they could be fixed easily with a stroke of the brush. It’s not the ease of repair that counts if you’re autistic, it’s the simple fact of error, in a world that seems controllable only when things go exactly according to plan.

  Exactly; that’s the word. There is no vagueness in her painting, no dashing brushwork, no atmospheric washes. It’s hard-edge stuff; it always has been. No impressionism for Jessy, and no expressionism either. Even in nursery school she never overlapped one color on another, never scrubbed them together into lovely, messy mud. There were no free splashes, no drips, no finger paints. Her very first paintings were as autistic as these today.

  Her art is autistic in other ways too. Autistic literalism has its visual equivalent; Jessy’s eye acts like a camera. Should we be surprised? Jessy is the seventh autistic person to come to my attention who drew in perspective before the age of eight. Perspective drawing seems to us a mark of artistic sophistication; we know that European artists did not master it until the Renaissance. Yet if we consider art historian E. H. Gombrich’s insight that the normal child draws not what it sees but what it knows — not its perception of the thing but the idea of the thing — we need not wonder at the ability of some autistic people to draw in perspective, even when severely retarded. Cameras do not ponder, they record.

  And there is the lack of shading. Only in the last ten years has Jessy learned to gradually alter an expanse of color to make it seem to recede or appear round. Even so, most of her colors remain flat. Indeed, that unsettling tension between the prevailing flatness and the few bits of round is part of what makes her realism surreal. No shading. No nuance. Like her speech. Like her simplified comprehension of what people say, of their expressions, their emotions and needs. I recall the autistic man who when asked of six test photos of faces, “How do they feel?” replied, “Soft.” There is no shading in the way Jessy apprehends the world. Nuance means shading. Call it a metaphor of her autism, or more than a metaphor.

  But if Jessy’s painting bespeaks her handicap, it is a handicap not surmounted but transmuted into something rich and strange. Here is autism in its core characteristics, literal, repetitive, obsessively exact — yet beautiful. In her paintings, reality has been transfigured. Who wouldn’t want a painting of their house, recognizable to the last detail, but shimmering in colors no householder could conceive? Especially when they can get their favorite constellation thrown in?

  I should not, however, allow a metaphor to engulf all autistic art. Stephen Wiltshire, the best-known autistic artist, also has a camera eye, but he makes little use of color, and his fine draftsmanship is as free as Jessy’s is controlled. 1 Mark Rimland works in delicate watercolor washes. Individ
uals are individuals as well as autistic. Jessy has her own obsessions, her own style, her own family, her own genetics. She’s good at numbers. Her father is a theoretical physicist. She can draw. So can I, and her grandfather was a painter. Would she have been a painter — or a mathematician — if she had not been autistic? Who can say how heredity and environment and disability come together?

  Nevertheless, the autistic art I have seen has strong commonalities. Buildings are a common subject, and usually one can see every brick. Often these are done from memory, as Jessy drew the science building. Often they are seen from above, or some other viewpoint the artist cannot possibly have occupied. Usually there is characteristic subject matter; one woman obsessively draws traffic lights as people. And there is a characteristic absence; like Jessy, they are unlikely to choose to make portraits. “Too hard.” Again we are drawn back to the autistic core. Buildings are straightforward, straight-edged, their outlines clear. Human beings are… nuanced. Architectural perspective-taking is easy. Social perspective-taking is a different matter.

  And that was the handicap we were always at work on. Art is important in itself, as autistic obsessions grow beautiful. But for Jessy it has other kinds of importance. It brings her into contact with people. It enhances her communication skills. It gives her a productive way to fill the empty time after work is done. Compared with these advantages, it hardly seems significant that it allows her to make money.