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.
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 paints 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 of Bockamp Heater with Women and Children First.
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.
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.
