Katie Miller on Autism and Painting

Artist Katie Miller notes that "her autism is a positive influence in her work" in an interview with WJZ. The recent winner of the Wynn Newhouse Award for artists with disabilities---one of her paintings will be exhibited next month at the VSA Armory Show in New York---Miller says:

"I think of autism as a gift because it gives me an excellent attention to detail. I'm able to stay in my studio for really long periods and not notice anything else. I'm very sensitive to color, to detail, to line and shape and that really helps my art."

No doubt some will hasten to pronounce on Miller's statement for her positive view of autism with comments about how that's all very well for her, but not for those with a "severe" autism diagnosis. This is perhaps inevitable; putting the words "positive" and "autism" together has been known to spark controversy (and all the more when some refer to autism as a "radioactive" word). But it's what Miller also says in her artist's statement about her work that strikes a particular note in me:

My current body of work comments on the relationship between the mundane and the surreal, and how it relates to changing contemporary and romantic notions of childhood. My work explores the fine line between the disturbing and the comforting, the innocent and the provocative, the powerful and the vulnerable.

Children and babies are depicted in Miller's current work; of the babies---newborns, she notes that "Newborns have a gawky, awkward imperfection, not unlike that of adolescents. I'm struck by Miller's grouping of the "gawky, awkward imperfection" of newborns to that of adolescents; "gawky" and "awkward" are words that could describe my son, finding himself in a rapidly growing and changing adolescent body.

Further, Miller's paintings suggest those pairings of the "mundane and surreal," "the disturbing and the comforting, the innocent and the provocative, the powerful and the vulnerable." Not only are these conflicting feelings that one might feel towards newborns (and in the newborns as painted in oil by Miller) but they seem to be the feeling registered on the faces and body languages of random individuals towards my son, as he's now older and now that his being disabled is more immediately noted. "Mundane" and "surreal" particularly captures something about our days, I must say, thinking one moment about plumbing and the next about what autism might be according to the DSM-V and presidential policy all while running up a hill in freezing cold wind with Charlie hurrying ahead.

And it's a sign of some sort of progress in understanding when you realize, they're interrelated; that the surreal is a mundane matter, and what seems mundane and boring to most (that walk that Charlie and I take a couple nights a week on the quiet boulevard of our condo development) is something out of this world.

Image from Empty Easel.