Tonight on Greentea: Aspie artist making it...MILLIE ! !!

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What do you expect on an aspie talk show?

This is one of those threads people do for fun and relaxation =)

any more questions Greentea?

You really should be making a lot of money as a stand-up writer. I'm not kidding.

Millie and everyone - Just to remind you, all questions posted by the hostess or the public are optional. You needn't address the fact that you're not answering a certain question or that you've decided to stop the interview. (This is in fact what caused the misunderstanding, because I didn't call your attention to the fact that you'd stopped answering, as I promised I wouldn't interfere with such a decision, but in fact you hadn't noticed the new questions, hahaha!). You can check the "notify me [by email] when a reply is posted" to always be updated immediately when there's a new post.

Two questions come to mind reading your first answer of the last batch:

Did your parents wage war on you at the time to stop engaging in your artistic pursuits? My parents made my life miserable till I stopped acting in theater.
Weren't you worried that choosing an artistic occupation and not going to uni might be setting you up for a life of financial duress, in the sense that you'd have to put up with lots of humiliation that financially-poor Aspies get because they have no good connections nor money?

I ask these two, because those were the things that pushed me to the (nightmarish for me) corporate world.

ok - so here goes....

Did your parents wage war on you at the time to stop engaging in your artistic pursuits?

My parents are quite strange - or were when i was younger. I think my mother may well be ASD (Asperger's) and so the plight of her 8 children was never really high on her agenda. Well, it was perhaps high on her agenda but her public expression of her feelings regarding her kids was problematic and skewed. She could not adequately communicate and express her feelings to other people. I know she had them. But it is the difficulty with any kind of communication that is emotional and non-analytical. she is one of us i believe. She was more obsessed withe her various partners - one of whom was an electrical engineer who barely talked and who cataloged every photo he ever took (his special interest) and who moved in with us when we were teens. (He died when i was in rehab 11 years ago.) Her other previous partner was a junk shop hoarder and junk auction obsessive who scrunched his eyes s**t tight when talking and looked down at the ground and whistled fanatically and was all out odd and eccentric. (I suspect you are all getting the picture!)

So, my parents did not wage war on me to stop my artistic pursuits. They moaned a bit about another brilliant child going "to the dogs" or some such thing, and then carried on with their respective lives.
For example, when my sister left home at 16 - moved to new zealand and disappeared - my mother barely noticed she was gone. There was no correspondence with her and no worry about her or pursuit of her. My uncle to this day - who found her - talks about how strange our family was in this regard, and to this day he feels annoyed with my mum and my dad for their neglect of us.

My father was a bit different and as they were divorced, he and my mum did not live together. He was much more authoritarian. I lived with him when at uni as i could not stand the mayhem of my mother's house and all the noise and people. HE was however, still wrapped up in his own life and world - and that was that. Authoritarian but neglectful< sat in his chair drinking vintage wine and reading Latin. He had a seminary education so he is a bit of a classicist and is actually a bloody pedant who is a stickler for perfection and unfortunately competed with most of his kids. I out-whizzed him in some ways so we had a kind of mutual respect. He also neglected his kids though. He was more interested in his book collection and his hyn composing, his latin scholarship or his collating of Neapolitan Love Songs and his wine collection than he was with his kids. that is how it came across. (It was actually my stepmother and not my mum or dad who had me put in a psychiatric hospital - which i mention earlier. )

When i was a teen on drugs, my mother did not even notice when i was gone for three days. She really was a strange mother.
She admits to many AS traits and knows a lot about autism and ASD's because of me and her grandson and she realises she is very odd.
She did moan about me dropping out, but really she was not that inclined or interested. or that is how it seemed. IT is still like that a bit. But i am like that too in my family. I do not think it is malicious o her part. It is simply that she processes things somewhat differently from a typical mother. And in spite of this i love her. I also know she loves me. She loves our ASD talks on the telephone. she is just like me.


Weren't you worried that choosing an artistic occupation and not going to uni might be setting you up for a life of financial duress, in the sense that you'd have to put up with lots of humiliation that financially-poor Aspies get because they have no good connections nor money?

well, regarding money - what can i say? it is fuel. And i have never really been very interested in it at all. I never even thought in terms of "building" a material life or the notion of financial duress. I really didn't think in those terms and still do not.
I worked a few part-time jobs in my life, but in the entirety of my 46 years, the only time i ever fronted up to a job full-time was for a period of a few weeks. I have never been able to contend with normal society or normal ways and i really have lived peripherally and have not been able to work full time or cope around other people day in and day out.

Financial security is a lot less important to me than special interests and living as i need to live as a woman with an ASD. I really am extremely unconventional in my need for time alone and my need to be free from constraint so that i can live in accordance with my own routines and individualized way of doing things. i have scant regard for material empire building. I am much more interested in ideas and creativity... and the consideration of a life of penury did not ever really enter into my consicousness perhaps until about the age of 41 when i had a child. THat changed my relationship to "security." Up until 40 or so, I was on a disabilities pension....So, i was this superbrain who was on a pension becuase i could not cut it with life on life's terms. It is better now, at 46 than it ever has been.

When younger, perhaps i just never really considered it possible for me to live any other way. I do not think i could adequately conceptualize what was so different about me until i was diagnosed. BUt even in my early 20's i knew i simply could not live how others live. So, having the usual kinds of aspirations others have in terms of school, uni, career , career building and 9-5 life, was fleeting and always fell apart (as typified by my uni experience.) any time i tried at "normal" life i failed. IT was hard bumming out of uni as i was a brilliant student. But it was my autism. Life around people is just too much for me - and it was worse back then when i was younger. I am happy to say however that i am at peace with that today. I feel accepting of it and lucky to know more about myself than i ever have. I am doing ok now. I feel as if i am finding peace with myself here and there.

So long as i have art supplies to paint with , I really am ok. If i can do my work and enjoy it every day, i am content... but a day away from my special interest and i start to fall apart.

Money is fuel. I've never had a lot. I have more these past 6 years than i have ever had. I part-own a house and it is a nice house. It has a pool. I drive a bomb car. I live for my work and special interest and i know it is more important to me than anything. If i can do it i am happy. For an autistic, that is far more important than all the money in the world.

When I sell a work, all that happens is that i buy more art supplies and that is about it. I am just not very materialistic. I do not buy lots of clothes or make-up or anything. But you will find me spending up big at Australia's best art supplies store where i have an account.

I agree with Temple Grandin. If we can, it is good to turn our main special interest into a career. The great irony is i have made more money from painting than from anything else.

When did you sold your first painting and what was it?

When (age) did you start really pursuing art as a career?

Wow, wonderful questions, computerlove, thank you!!

Millie, your family sounds like my wet dream, what with me having been raised in a Swiss clock kind of family where each tiny movement had to get parental approval until I left home at 23.

Two questions I'm extremely curious about for when you have the time (please take the interview at your own pace!):

I was wondering how you managed to live just on social benefits. Did you have to share an apartment? If so, how did that go? I ask because this was the reason I turned to a nine-fiver. I knew it'd be hell, but I needed to stop having flat mates because they abused me, what with me being an Aspie, poor and without close friends.

I once started writing a novel about an Aspie sculptor, but then I told myself that the character is not realistic, because how can someone with such problems with intuition (as an Aspie has), be an artist? I mean, isn't art an intuitive realm per definition? I'm extremely curious about how you experience this polarity within yourself.

When did you sell your first painting and what was it?


I sold my first painting in my twenties before i succumbed fully to heroin addiction. It was in the 1980's. It was some dark wasteland type of thing. I sold a bit of work back then.


When (age) did you start really pursuing art as a career?


I knew as a small child art was my passion. I knew when i saw a painting by Signac - that i wanted desperately to be a painter. I have an image of this work in my files on my computer. I was amazed at the capacity to develop from through colour in the way the pointillists did. I was about 8 I think. Interestingly, i was pulled toward the patterning of the pointillists too.
I won my first art prize at 6 at school. It has always been my primary special interest. I had breaks from it in my life (universtiy, and my drug hell - the latter took over my life completely - and when i was away from it i was always miserable - as if i was dying inside.

I really pursued it in my twenties fully as a career for a while.

MOST fully - when i got clean and at the age of about 38. it has been every day since then - maybe a few days off here and there. But i am either doing it or obsessed with thinking about the next work.

What a shame that you never got a chance to go to Art school... Would you go now if you had the chance?

I was wondering how you managed to live just on social benefits. Did you have to share an apartment? If so, how did that go?

In Australia, one could live just on social benefits, and sometimes I would have some small part time job working in a take away food place or something. I was hideous to work with...always carving out obsessive routines around my tasks and if ever anyone got in the way i would have a mighty fit. I would usually work in 4 hour shifts or so.


how can someone with such problems with intuition (as an Aspie has), be an artist? I mean, isn't art an intuitive realm per definition?

I think we have an enormous capacity for arriving at summations about things through analytical means which, if developed, can be quite sharp. that is the compensation for a lack of intuition.
Like you, Greentea, I analyse everything. I am sharper than the average NT tac, but it is just that i remain blunt IN CONTEXT WITH OTHERS.

As an ASD artist I feel. If anything my sensory integration dysfunction means i feel SO MUCH that i have a rather difficult time. This hypersensitivity is at the heart of my work and can be harnessed. IT is the key to good art. Van Gogh had it. Cezanne. Our WP Outlier has it in her drawings. So does Oinon. In fact, I would say being autistic is actually a boon in this regard. the feeling comes through the brush or pen or pencil in a very sensory way. It is hard to describe. That is what is required MORE than intuition. so there is a distinction between FEELING and INTUITION. We feel, but to intuitively know - and this perhaps pertains most to social realms and people - is a struggle. The latter is really superfluous in the realm of art in my view. IN fact, its absence can be a good thing as the compensatory analysis leads to better work.

The key to a REALLY good artist is hypersensitivity AND a fantastic capacity for analysis. and little interest in people face to face! That is why the best artists are often autistic OR exhibit many, many autistic traits.
Art in fact requires deductive reasoning, systematic thinking. It is a language - a visual language. The best artists are those who can understand and analyse and break things down in a way that becomes their own. That is my life goal. (perseverative - no wish to be a one hit wonder!)
When i Am on my own i feel complete and ok as a human being. When i am in the studio i have enough solitude and peace to actually get a handle on who i am - something that is hardly achievable when in communication with others.

What is at the heart of good art? Not so much intuition as the cognitive capacity to analyse and transform the material world into your version of it. That requires in fact requires systematic thinking and a clear understanding of how to do this - in my case - through paint. Artists are actually visual translators. We feel, analyse, build, translate and then communicate to a public that cannot do such things. The key is, over a lifetime, to develop a PERSONAL visual language that is carved and hewn out of one's autism. That is my lifelong task.

It is not about intuiting anything in relation to anybody else.
It is about perceiving and also translating my experience of the world...my visions, my sensory experiences, my feelings, my life, into paint. That is one of the most systematic processes you can pursue.

As an autistic person, I feel. If anything, i feel acutely. In context with others i am most often alexythimic. On my own, i can grasp my feelings and the most complete is when i am able to express them through the art process. Then, everything comes together...the physical part of me, the spiritual through the pursuit of Truth and a god force (for want of a better term), the emotional - which is only ever clear to me in isolation.

It is actually not that different from engineering or plumbing. You have a system of procedures and eventually you develop your own. You also search and go about developing your own specific visual language. I have an approach called Harmony Through Disparity - which will take a lifetime and which is very much about my rather fragmented shifts in my work all coming together. I do not have a centre of self people and like other artists - they tend to stick with "one style" or one method of paint application or "one vision." My process is far more complex than that and is very much about somehow fusing all the fragmentations that are me. I experience the world as a fragmented person who cannot multi-task. This carries through into how i develop as a painter. I am the female autistic chameleon par excellence. One thing at a time. one sharp shift at a time.This has affected my journey as an artist and how i approach it and how i learn. I have been criticised by the art scene for it. I am not easily "brandable" or definable and that is what most tidy little people want and what we as autistic people usually cannot give because we are - on the whole - far too complex for many. That has always been hard for me.

But good, spooky things are happening to me since being diagnosed. I personally NEEDED to be diagnosed. My life has been so difficult and i was so ignorant of ASD's and AS that i just thought i was mad. I lived in such terrible terror and pain throughout my life. I once heard Temple Grandin talk about the autistic terror when she was on youtube. I identified.
I am finding peace in my process. My art process and my idea of Harmony Through Disparity is also coming together - as if there is somehow this great overview of who i am that has finally been answered. I am finally whole. In pieces. But whole. This has been my life's aim - to find out why i was always the way I was and find a unifying answer to my desolation, to my fragmentation, to my hyperfocus, rigidity, routine and pain and loneliness.

By the way Greentea - your capacity for analysis is just what is required for fiction writing.

Interestingly, since my dx and finding peace with my autism, I am reaching a point of holistic self-acceptance...this "harmony through disparity" thing - which is really becoming the mark of my work.

In this respect it is a very very exciting time for me artistically. Ten years every day in the studio - and things are starting to really only come together a little bit now. I am not defined by one polarity - but by many. That has been part of my struggle and part of the struggle i believe for many autistics who experience things SO differently from others at times. But the best experience in the past year or so has been the realisation and the dx and the knowledge that there is something singular and unifying about me. It is my autism.

I envy you - like most people of my background (Third World middle class) I have an abject terror of poverty - I'm not really materialistic or obsessed with money, and know from experience I can cope with living on a very tight budget, it's not that I'm obsessed with being rich but that there is this deep fear of living hand to mouth. It wasn't actually my parents that drilled this into me (they've always been careful with money but never obsessed with it), it's like something you breath in.



I love Goya too, there's something so raw and honest and powerful about his work, even in the titles he have his works. I have reproductions of a couple of his engravings in my bedroom. I particularly love his engravings and the Black Paintings.


What media/techniques do you use? Did you start with one and then explore others, or did you dabble with a bit of everything?

I do some painting and drawing in my spare time, I'm teaching myself oil painting. Unfortunately my dexterity is pretty bad (though it has improved) so it takes me forever to get something I'm satisfied with. Actually, I started drawing again (I hated it in school) precisely to improve my manual skills, as I kind of needed them for my main occupation (chemistry), I discovered I liked it, and sort of moved onto painting. I think I used to hate it because it had deadlines, assessment, prescribed techniques and subject matter, etc - I'm now free to do as I please.

I'm also into literature and arthouse films. Do you have other strong interests outside visual arts?




Thanks Greentea and millie for arranging this interview, it's fascinating.

Greentea, art school and being around people everyday for hours really is beyond me.

Also, i learn by my own means, methods and systems. Art school cannot accommodate how i approach my work or my process.

In the early stages of my return to my career a decade ago, i was told by a major gallery in my country I HAD TO GO TO ART SCHOOL. I told them i would show them! i have no interest in art school. I go to life drawing, i learn on my own. I have studied colour theory on my own. composition. tone. I do know i could have benefited in the sense that a couple of really excellent teachers could have guided me and short-circuited some problems i have had with my work. BUt art school? what would i have done there? I would have learned a bit and painted a bit, been forced into a curriculum that distracted me from my own process of individualised learning and development, and i would have simply been exhausted and confused by all the people, the sensory overload, the networking and the the crap.
NO thank you.

i am showing them. I am completely committed to how I do my career and not constrained by the social structures that perpetuate the myth that the mainstream way is THE WAY and or the BEST WAY. I am not saying this is an easy path, but it is the best one for this autistic woman and really the only one available to me. I have chosen to make the most of it and say FRIG OFF to the arty farty art scene detractors who i want nothing to do with. Just give me home, garden, studio, painting, dog Peg, cat William, two free-range guinea pigs, the birds, nature, my household my ex who is my friend, and my son and sale of a work here and there and that is paradise for me.

art school for me = codswallop.!


And i also want to encourage other ASD people to think outside the square..to find strength and to embrace the deficits and turn them into assets.

Last edited by millie on 30 Apr 2009, 6:16 pm, edited 3 times in total.

^. Thanks pb. nice to read your post.

What media/techniques do you use? Did you start with one and then explore others, or did you dabble with a bit of everything?

I stick mainly with oils - my studio is geared for it. But i also draw (one must) and i also have used acrylics, gouaches, and everything.
Oils are best in my view. hardest to master. and the best.

GOYA IS MY HERO -- boring society painter turns into a genius master!!

Do you have other strong interests outside visual arts?
i am interested in WP, autism and am pretty much single focused on painting and the visual arts. I do get minor secondary and tertiary special interests popping up here and there, but nothing as pure or orgasmic as painting.

Greentea, your interview concept is amazing and millie, it is wonderful to get to know you and get a glimpse of how brilliant you are.

You've touched upon it in the interview, but if I could ask a question(s), How did you view / think about yourself before you learned about the Autism Spectrum and and then after? How important was that discovery in unifying the pieces of your experience?

Z

Hello Zonder. I shall answer this.
I am 46 and I learned of my ASD in 2008.
Prior to that i struggled with a belief i was insane. My father told people I was crazy. I have always suspected I was mad.
I have lived y whole life being very fragmented and also knowing i was DISTINCTLY different from most others i come across.
I did learn to feign being like everyone else to some degree, but an adherence to this was exhausting and also futile as i would invariably collapse, have a breakdown and end up in seclusion and isolation and suicidal desolation again.

I have spent a lifetime filled with incredible self-loathing and a great deal of inner doubt and unsureness about how i interact with people. the world has been a guessing game with a code i could not crack. I spent 46 years trying and feeling terrible about myself and my inability to feel connection with people, to know what "love" is in the way others do, to cope with life as others do.
I am a funny thing. I relate to Glenn Gould. He is my hero. People liked him and lots of people have always liked me. But i cannot feel any connection - or - if I am to feel connection with people I have to work very hard and cognitively to self-talk myself into feeling a connection. For the main it is a cognitive process and it can get tiring. and i do not understand how anyone could prefer people to a special interest. People face to face actually annoy me, mainly. I

My view of myself was also that i was a mystery to me...an awful way to live. My days were filled with gnawing questions - "why do i do that? WHy can't i cope like others? Why do i need to retreat? WHy do i squint in the sun so badly? Why do i hate all the things people tell me i am supposed to like as a human being, like social gatherings, parties, dinners, openings, family get togethers? why am i always retreating to a magazine or the television at someone's place if there is more than one on one conversation? Why do I talk over the top of people? why do i not understand talk about anything except my art? Why do i polarize people? why am i so sensitive? Why do i have such a weird way with intimacy and sexual relations? Why can't i feel love for people in the moment in the way others tell me i am supposed to? Why am i so smart but i cannot do the shopping properly? why do i leave the washing in the washing machine for three days and yet i was a brilliant student with original ideas and interesting associational though processes and connections? Why is it that i am so desperately lonely, but if i invite people into my world and my life I am exhausted by them and mystified and bored by the majority of them? Why do I have such terribel tantrums and meltdowns and why can;t i do more than one thing at a time. Wy am i such a good cook, but if i have to cook with multiple saucepans on the top of the stove i start crying and burn things because i cannot keep up with the multi-tasking? Why do i monologue? why do i prepare scripts if i have to talk with people? why do i worry about every exchange i have with people face to face? Why do i obsess and worry over conversations that are over and gone? why does it all feel so weird and awkward? Why do i move all the time and rock at times? why do i always home in on little parts of things i am looking at? Why do i look only at peoples' teeth if i look at their faces? why do i feel sick and nauseous if i look at people's eyes? Why do i have such heightened sense of smell and why can't i stand anyone touching me softly and gently? Why do i feel so terrified? Why do i HAVE to eat with my own special cutlery and plates? Why do i have very specific ablutions routines? Why Why Why?
i could go on, but i suspect you will get an idea of what I am illustrating, particularly if you are an older person with an ASD who was dx'ed later in life. THat is a tragic way to live. IT robs one of acceptance, peace and self-love.

So, prior to my dx i basically hated myself. I have felt suicidal most of my life. The only thing that alleviated this was a retreat into painting - where i created my own alternate world.

An awareness of my ASD is starting to bring some peace.

Like Temple Grandin, I spent a lot of years (since I got clean) on a very minuscule dose of antidepressants. Now i am off these, and i am feeling as if i can actually accept who i am. I am far more reclusive and I have a lot more trouble with things in some ways, but i feel more connected with who i really am. I am seeing a really good ASD psychologist who is teaching me how to manage my ASD and my life. I am implementing suggestions. I am being released from a wish to die. I am feeling some hope. I am seeing how special i am and how special my ASD friends are.

We are glorious misfits. We must all learn to hang onto that.

I am feeling as if I just might have a second half of my life that has a little bit of happiness and joy in it. That is very profound for me. I am looking forward to that as a possibility.


My life experience has been UTTERLY and COMPLETELY unified by my DX. It has been revelatory. Like a Second Coming and a rebirth. in this respect I feel blessed.