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.[29] Mark Rimland works in delicate watercolor washes. Individuals 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.
Certainly people buy her paintings, and the checks are no longer nugatory. Clients choose.their building; Jessy works as readily from photographs as from her own sketch. (The photos must, however, be sharp and detailed; Jessy can combine, but any attempt at invention will be vague and unconvincing.) Jessy’s carefully kept notebook contains seventy-five names and addresses; many of the clients are people she’s met. But not all paintings are paid for, and that too is a social lesson, as she works on her gifts for family and friends. A painting is a fine graduation present for a special housemate — she’ll make sure that her view of his college dormitory shows his window. And she will provide him a description.
One of the many challenges that confront the family of an autistic person comes when she or he turns twenty-two and school is over. (For the past twenty-five years, federal law has guaranteed education for the handicapped until age twenty-two.) The teachers at Mount Greylock Regional High School had worked with Jessy on reading and writing for nine years. She had achieved what might be called a fourth-grade competence, and we didn’t want her to lose it, as she certainly would if it wasn’t exercised. So we provided her with factual material on her obsessive interests books on the planets, brochures, newspaper accounts of power outages — and she read of them what she could. We had her write thank-you letters; written politenesses were actually good. Her journals were done at our suggestion. But the descriptions were Valerie’s idea, Valerie who had known her so long, and who was still a friend. When Jessy made her a portrait of her bathroom heater, Val suggested she write a description.
The first descriptions were only a couple of sentences, and those heavily prompted. Jessy had no idea how to begin or how to continue. More significant for effective communication, her defective „theory of mind“ afforded no insight into what a viewer would find obvious and what he would need to be told. So each description gave not only practice in grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and spelling („vermilion“, „carmine“, „cobalt“), but in that fundamental aspect of writing, and living: imagining the reader’s point of view. I asked questions: Do you think they’ll see the different pinks? How many are there? What do you want to tell them next? And over the years — not months — I was suggesting less and less, and the descriptions got longer and longer. (Several are reproduced in Appendix I.) They became a habit, then an unbreakable routine. Jessy would finish a painting; that night she’d say, „We will write the description“.
But one night — seven years later? ten years? I can’t keep records of everything — I was going out. „We can’t write it tonight“, I told her, „we’ll do it tomorrow“. And when I came back it was done. It was a draft, we edited it a bit together, but Jessy had written it. So slow, so gradual, is the building of a simple, essential skill.
I have in this chapter already exhibited my own penchant for metaphoric thinking. It’s a tempting activity, to read our own meanings into Jessy’s pure colors and shapes. „Earth shadow, resembling a rather menacing tornado, hovers behind her sister Katy’s house in Cambridge“. But the writer of that vivid, and accurate, sentence, knew Jessy well enough to draw back from his suggestion. Describing another painting he makes it clear: „The lightning bolt and the black windowpanes, which contribute to the ominous, almost Gothic quality of this painting, are merely the signs of a power failure for Jessy“.[30] When another viewer felt that quality, he remembered Jessy’s astronomical interests and speculated about a black hole. But Ernie knew the true source of that intensity. „A blackout, the phenomenon that temporarily disrupts the flow of the appliance world, is cause for great excitement and planning. If rain is in the forecast, Jessy will make sure to set her auxiliary battery- powered alarm clock, lest rain turn to thunderstorm, thunderstorm cause power outage, and power outage stop the clock“. Now that would be ominous.
In short, Jessy’s codes are not ours. Once someone asked for happy colors and Jessy was nonplussed. Once someone thought she should be frightened of the dark. Once someone thought outer weather could symbolize inner weather. But symbols, if they communicate at all, carry socially attributed, agreed-upon meanings. For Jessy, things are what they are, and if they have meanings, they are wholly idiosyncratic. To understand her is to understand that.
Painting has become part of Jessy’s life. It’s part of my life too. When she’s working on a commission I want to see it every day, not to check up, but to delight in the unfolding process, as color by color, shade by shade, Jessy
