Book Review: Drawing Autism

Drawing Autism, curated by Jill Mullin, is, at the most literal level, a collection of art and descriptions by autistic artists (some descriptions by their caretakers).  It could also be considered a deep dive into the unconscious minds of various autistic artists.  The contributors are mainly from the US, Canada, and India, but there are a few additional contributors from places like Singapore and Lithuania.  

Art isn't really my thing, so I picked this up more out of curiosity than the genuine desire to immerse myself in art.  Part of the reason I'm not really an art person is because I don't process visual detail terribly well, so to see what everyone else sees in seconds, I have to take minutes.  Then there's the mystique that apparently separates art from whatever poorly crafted crap I doodled in my notebook in school... and in a lot of cases, when I go to art museums, I look at the modern stuff and go, "but why is this art, and why this person over, say, me, or my friend who draws stuff that looks way better?"

Presumably I'm doomed to be an art heathen.  At any rate, I gave this book a fair shake.

The types of art in the book range from Temple Grandin's technical drawings to child's marker scrabbling I might technically have been able to reproduce, to near photorealistic landscapes, to collages.  The emotions covered are everything from joy to deepest frustration and rage turned into petty cruelty.  

After I read this book, I decided I was going to have to go through it and pick one piece of art that I connected with emotionally, because this was going to be a painfully short review otherwise.  So, on page 44, there's this piece, made with colored pencils and pastels.

The artist says he drew this after his niece and nephew died in a fire.  He was so sad and desperate that he didn't have words to express his emotions, so he drew this werewolf.  

This caught my attention because I have quite literally done a very similar drawing, for a similar depth of unexpressable emotion.  I spent about three weeks in college, between doing my summer job, trying to learn how to draw semi-people because the piece wouldn't stop tormenting me until I drew it.  

It actually took me about a half hour to dig up the scan of the piece, find something that could view the Photoshop file, and then screenshot it so you can look at it.  

This is titled "HEAR ME!" and as you can see, I have no formal (and precious little informal) art training, never mind any sense of how wing anatomy works.  The being there is a half-dragon paladin, and she's a character I created in Dungeons and Dragons.  (Why yes, she was a self-insert and that is why her body shape is roughly the same as mine, why do you ask?)  Rather than mourning the crushing loss of family like the werewolf above, she is expressing my despair at the state of the world and the apparent silence of God.  

Funny how that feeling seem to be perennially relevant.  If I were a better artist, I could have put more strain into her form, as she reaches upwards futilely, trying to experience the divine and failing.  But simply getting the anatomy as close to human as it is, was a strain on my artistic talents, so...  It is what it is.  I did try to clean it up, but the fact that I drew it on lined paper kind of means there's only so much to be done there.  

At any rate, the werewolf howling in despair at the moon struck me as markedly similar, and so that's the piece I chose.  

There are very many more pieces in this book, many cheerful ones as well as other less cheerful ones.  There are bright colors and subdued ones, many and varied art styles and subjects, and different levels of realism and seriousness.  If you like art and find meaning in such things, this book has something to offer you.  

Read This Book If

You like art and want to experience the autism spectrum by way of art.  There's 40 plus artists represented in this book, and a dizzying variety of styles, emotions, mediums, colors, subjects, and ideas.  I'm not a big art person myself, but I strongly suspect there's something for everyone in this book, if you're willing to take the time to find it.