I’ve decided to start a new monthly feature called art work of the month.  I’m going to pick out one of my works and tell you the story behind it and its production.  Hope you come to enjoy the feature and if you are also an artist, feel free to use the comments section to tell people a story about your own ARTism and don’t forget to check out the sites of the many artists listed over at http://www.auties.org.

The art work featured here is called Back to Normality .  It’s part of a series which includes the works Imaginary Friend, Here They Come and The Lunatic. They are all on vinyl wallpaper which seeing them up close gives them a wonderful texture.  The backgrounds are spray art.  My brother, Duel, is a renowned spray artist, quite different to me but seems we both independently developed our spray art styles. The characters are painted in quality water based acrylics and I use light and shadow which I feel are part of the story.

I like working in almost monochrome sometimes, so this one is in dusty pink and burgundy hues with cream  warming up the work and creating an interplay of warmth and formality which work with the topic.

The characters represent different ‘normalities’.  The one in the background is in the midst of flapping excitedly, arms pulled  in and up at the ready as he dares to take a step forward toward what’s making him buzz, completely fixated on the source of his own hedonistic pleasure.  The character in the foreground, however, is commiserating, caught up in mourning over the other character’s ‘abnormality’. Ironically, the concept of autism is here turned around, for it is the non-spectrum commiserator who has now gone deeply into his own world, unable to share in the hedonistic joy of the autistic character flapping in interaction with a sensory experience in the external world.

Notice that the chair of the non-spectrum comiserator has bars on the back of it.  These represent prison bars for he is imprisoned by his own depression and mindset.  There is also a question in the painting.  If the hedonist is caught up in a solitary pursuit of hedonistic pleasure and the non-spectrum carer is  comiserating alone, no longer interacting with his fellow non-spectrumites, socially isolated, and presuming that the perhaps non-verbal autie in the background can’t help, how do these two realities meet and balance one another?  The indirectly confrontational social system of ‘simply being’ I described in Somebody Somewhere might have helped these two but they are divided by something deeper – the status quo- one firmly stuck in it, the other just as stuck avoiding, diverting from and retaliating against it.

I find this painting to be a visual poem, an ‘in joke’, an irony, a sort of visual Zen koan.  I hope you like it too and look forward to your comments on it.

It’s currently in an exhibition at Grenfell Gallery in Adelaide where you can visit it.

Warmly,

Donna Williams *)

author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter

http://www.donnawilliams.net

http://www.myspace.com/donnaandtheaspinauts.