Algae and Amoeba

I offer a video that talks about this art on my YouTube channel, so if you’d rather watch than read, here’s the link to that: https://youtu.be/xyHKINDMEa8

This was my first piece of Autistic Expressionism (that’s what I’m calling my artistic style). It was birthed from confusion and overwhelm. As an autistic artist, my mind seems to always have about 35 tabs open and it can get really difficult reigning in all those thoughts. I need time to process, to divide and conquer them. I often have said over the years my mind is a tornado. I even made a tornado sculpture for a conference I went to once because they asked us to bring something about ourselves for a table centerpiece. I thought I would fit right in there with other artists, but even they looked at me like I was strange, as so many others have done in the past!

Some of the thoughts running through my mind at the time of this painting had to do with my life over the past year. My daughter was sharing things I didn’t know how to handle, my mom had fallen and come to live with my husband and me, and I had learned a few months before that I was autistic and was still processing all of that. In the nearly two years that we had lived in Nebraska, I had struggled with all of these things as well as depression. I had previously thought that moving to Nebraska would be a calm life, but it hasn’t been, so that day I sat down and just started painting.

I chose a color palette of lime green, a grassy green, several different blues, and white. I am very organized and even OCD because I struggle with boundaries, and organization and structure help me to function more easily, so for this piece I pulled out my ruler and decided to create boxes, aka, boundaries. I turned on some good worship music and since I wasn’t too far from finishing a series of doodle videos for my YouTube channel, I just started doodling lines and patterns and squiggles and dots inside those boxes. It’s in essence a stream-of-consciousness art style, like you do in writing sometimes, except with a paint brush. I didn’t think too much about what I was creating as I processed thoughts and emotions that were overwhelming me.

I love flowers, so I made some petals, which then made me think of rain so I made some drops. I liked the darkness of the color I chose, so I traced inside with white and the contrast extremely satisfied me. I doodled more flowers. I made a circle and criss-crossed it with random lines. I played with pen nib sizes and made dashes and scratches, experimenting with alternating colors. As I continued making lines and dots and squiggles, my mind calmed. I took each thought captive and analyzed it, evaluated it, and accepted, rejected or processed it into my psyche.

When I finished, I felt like a different person. I was calm and ready for whatever came next. The painting looked very much in my peripheral like water and things that live in it, and that’s how it got it’s name. Since this process was so soothing, I continued it for as of this date, 50 more times!

Thanks for visiting my art space. I hope I inspire you to create something!

Dawn