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   Autism and The Arts, Page Three

 

The Baby Gate: Hand drawn animation takes longer than an ice age to complete. And yet, I am trying to make a “stream of consciousness” bit of film that just falls onto the page like a nightmare.

The premise of this snippet centers on an infant’s dream while in his crib. Perhaps he is teething, and this discomfort gives rise to nightmarish visions in a bedroom doorway.

If you are paying attention to my YouTube Shorts, you will see sketches piling up on pages that spill over a number of videos in my timeline.

 

Nancy Binary (oil on panel): This YouTube short features a small oil painting completed on wood panel. Occasionally in my work I appropriate popular culture icons from my youth. Tweaks and unusual distortions are added. These images are often flat cartoons, whose original two dimensions are embedded in a 3-D space. This strange juxtaposition makes the cartoon feel like an intrusive collage element. I discuss my relationship to creative “intrusive thinking” among the blog pages on my website. (See link below.)

 

Stare At The Love: Stare at the Love is a belated valentine and presents a cynical view of relationships. Our protagonist might be in love, or he might be buried in a graveyard where a lawn mower man circles overhead. It is for the viewer to decide whether his fate is real or symbolic.

The main figure is lifted from a vintage valentine card. This is the sort of thing we used to give each other as children in grade school in the 1960s. I have tweaked his sickly sweet appearance and turned him into a ‘grotesque’.

 

The Autistic Artist versus The World: Here is the greatest paradox autistic creators face: Your perspective on a given creative undertaking is often novel yet untested. An abnormal degree of perfectionism drives you until you achieve something unique. You do not care that others see little value in what you do because your journey has been its own reward.

Unfortunately, this achievement often occurs in a social vacuum—and the internet abhors social vacuums. Without friends and followers by way of social media, you are alone and without champions because you have not cultivated them.

How often has this pattern repeated throughout history? The internet has changed nothing about how autistics get on in the world, or about how success, in the short term, is more about who you know than what you do.

 

Germs of Balloons (Animation): More toddler nightmares. Here we encounter baby spit, puppy spit, and germ cultures on balloon animals. Meanwhile, Saturday morning cartoons reside in a background fever dream. Another YouTube short.

 

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