Brief story on autistic painter-who's 5

Post Reply New Topic

http://www.newsreview.com/reno/Content?oid=882397

I found this while poking around the News and Review site, which is a left wing weekly rag with offices in Chico, Sacramento, and Reno. Pretty stereotypical article, but this time the autie is female, and she can paint. It's not really a special interest per se. She's more like a prodigy in a sense. The parents run a small business that fixes air conditioners and central furnaces, and which doesn't cover the costs of having an autistic kid.

wow!! ! and her paintings are absolutely amazing, i wish i could paint as good as her haha, i even mess up on stick figures lolol she could def teach me a lesson hehe.

very nice

Personaly I don't see what's so great about it. It's no diffrent than that of the art of another child her age. It's just a bunch of scribbling on a canvas. There's nothing special about it. She actualy seems a little delayed if she is five and still just scribbling. I was drawing stick figures and little animals when I was three. But then I'm one of those people who just can't get why people are willing to spend thousands of dollars on paintings that are nothing but squiggly lines and the paint litterlay thrown on the canvas. If this girl was NT, I doubt this sort of attention would be lavished on her. She's autistic and autistic is a hot topic in today's media so this was a "hot topic". There is nothing special about her art.

Is it just me or do they kind of make her out to be a monster st first?

I agree with Punkykat. There was nothing great about it. They were pretty colors and she enjoys doing them but why do they make a big deal out of it?

I'm not terribly impressed. I guess it's good her parents are good at marketing her, the public will find it novel to buy an autistic child's paintings , in much the same way monkey or elephant created paintings are novel. The reason they may seem "deep" or to have meaning is just the parents naming of them because she obviously isn't giving them the titles. Of course I have never seen the point of abstract paintings so how could I judge, and after going to an art school for three years I learned most of art is just based on the rubbish you make up about it any ape( meaning human) can slap paint on a canvas and if they make up a good enough story people will buy it. This comment is not to insult the girl if she is enjoying painting she certainly should be allowed to do it,and maybe when she is an adult she herself an profit from it, but she probably won't because being a successful artist involves a lot of networking and social skills.

They had to use the s word. What makes them experts on the extent of her suffering? Granted, she comes across as fairly low functioning, but...

I can't even finish reading the article. It'll just piss me off.

That said, the one painting I did see looked like anything else a child her age would do. I'd compliment on the use of color, but something tells me her parents set out the colors, keeping out objectionable colors (golden oranges, blacks, browns, etc) so that nothing would clash. I read articles on "child prodigies" all the time. Usually, there's no angle. It's just about people who actually pay a fortune for abstract art.

Well, I think it's awesome art.

The arrangement of colours and patterns is really amazing. And the composition is very advanced for her age too.

That's also the kind of art I'm drawn to for reasons that are beyond me. Like being drawn to patterns and such.

she looks uncannily intelligent, especially on that bottom pic with the yoghurt...

objectionable colors? when I was 5 we had warm colors and cool colors...

Maybe this will shut up all those people who wander around in Modern Art museums saying 'my 5 year old could do that'...

By objectionable, I meant colors that wouldn't have fit with the theme of the painting. You notice how the colors used are all in the same family. They don't clash.

I've seen videos of other child prodigies and the parents pre-selected the colors.

To me, it doesn't really matter if she's good at it or whether dad is helping her with the colors, what's important is that it helps her communicate. Autistics have such a hard time communicating, even HFA's do, and a lot of times we'll be destructive in trying to get heard like wrecking things or having meltdowns, so I think that if painting can help her so that she's not melting down constantly like so many LFA kids do, that's great. I once read about two autistic brothers whose parents had fought tooth and nail to get them mainstreamed at school, and they were having a super tough time, so the parents bought them a drum set and an electric guitar, and eventually they got together with a couple other kids from their special ed classes and formed a rock band. They've got nothing on the pros of course, and they couldn't write their own music, but it stopped the meltdowns and made them liked at school. Then there was the teen autie girl who couldn't speak or take care of herself but could sing, on demand and on key. THAT was more echolalia than anything, but she could do it at will, and she was actually tolerable to listen to. She performed at benefits for autistic kids.

That's true. And, it's something that she enjoys and it keeps her calm. Really, it's great that she's found something she likes and can do. When I was five, I only had the typical little kid things like cartoons and whatnot. I didn't have anything with actually stability, so this is pretty neat for that alone, that it's something with structure.