Peter Myers is a British artist with autism. I’ve previously written about him here. He attained a diploma in applied design from the Darlington College of Technology, a higher diploma in applied design (precision modelling) from Sunderland Polytechnic, and worked as a model maker for many years. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome after he recognised some of his behaviours while reading Donna William’s Nobody Nowhere in 1992 (Myers, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2004).
Myers’ work LEAVES, FEATHERS + FISH was created with metallic ink pen on 28 June 1999, in York. Myers describes isolating and concentrating on part of an image to create a pattern. Scientific co-authors Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright believe Myers’ art can teach scientists about the minds of people with ASD. They conclude that the artworks show how the minds of people with autism work precisely, with exactness and attention to detail, though without impaired planning skills, the “global whole … envisaged just as well as the local parts” (Myers, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2004, p. 73). Rather than exhibiting “weak central coherence”, one of the main theoretical explanations of the attention to detail exhibited by many people with autism, Myers’ art shows that the person with autism is simultaneously able to pay attention to detail and to the whole picture (Myers, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2004, p. 20).
Baron-Cohen and Wainwright do use Myers’ art to challenge at least one key assumption about people with autism, but their analysis remains trapped in the deficit model. We can compare their third-person explanation of LEAVES, FEATHERS + FISH and the subjective explanation offered by Myers. “Peter created this picture simply because he was interested in the skeletal patterns in leaves, feathers and fish” (Myers, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2004 p. 43, italics mine). The description in Myers’ voice is different: “An exploration of things sensed. Skeletal patterns – the ‘bare bones’ of underlying structure” (Myers in Myers, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2004 p. 43). The phrase “simply because” reduces the motivation for the piece to an interest in patterns, while Myers in contrast speaks poetically of sensed internal structures. Myers also describes his experience while creating patterned works. Of another patterned piece he says: “It is representational of what one might feel, sense, experience when ‘in the zone’, whilst engaged in some simple solitary pursuit (e.g. meditation, gardening, drawing, some simple repetitive task), sort of inner contemplation, a universal oneness, inner peace…I am happy there” (in Myers, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2004, p. 29). While Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright see Myers’ patterned art as external evidence of the way his ‘exacting’ autistic mind works, Myers finds meaning, even spirituality, in the experience of drawing the pattern and focussing on detail. His ‘in the zone’ is comparable to Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’, the state of utter absorption in a task that is linked to wellbeing (Chilton, 2013).
Scientific, diagnostic-driven descriptions cannot adequately capture the lived experience of people with autism. It is the artist’s first-person account of their experience that shows us attention to detail and pattern is meaningful. This artwork, along with Myers’ description of his process and experience, shows us that detailed attention to line and colour are not simply external manifestations of a pathology, and that the creativity of the person with autism is just as rich, subtle, and spiritual as any other persons’.
References
Chilton, G. (2013). Art Therapy and flow: A review of the literature and applications. Art Therapy, 30(2): 64–70, DOI:10.1080/07421656.2013.787211
Myers, P., Baron-Cohen, S., & Wheelwright, S. (2004). An Exact Mind: An Artist with Asperger Syndrome. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.