Before we go deeper into the mind of an autistic child, I would like to generate a hypothesis that might trigger some ideas for us to further study on an autism My thesis is:
Children with autism have a straightforward mind, brave and confident, imitative and naive.
How can we relate the assumption on creative artworks by an autistic child with artists and their artworks? We can correspond the hypothesis to the concept and intention of an artist to the works by the autistic child. Basically, what I understand through art movement, surrealist creates art through their subconscious mind, the naive artist creates art through imitation and self-conscious. Let us focus on naive art, which is very close to my assumption. The characteristic of naive art is always, simple, unconventional, non-representation and non-traditional.
Naïve art is characterised by childlike simplicity of execution and vision. As such it has been valued by modernists seeking to get away from what they see as the insincere sophistication of art created within the traditional system.
(source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/n/naive-art)
Now lets us have a look at the drawing below:
The output looks spontaneous, simple and full of stylization of images. I’m trying to find whether there is a correlation between this artwork and the artwork by the naive artist. The composition is unstructured, but all images seem to be related to each other. I’m not saying that this art is at par to the naive art, but what I’m trying to say is the characteristics of the drawing seems to be in-line with the naive art. This might reflect the way how they think and react to their surroundings.
The videos above show an 18 years old autistic boy in action. Through my observation in this video, I found that a person with autism is brave and confident. He just ‘do’ whatever he thinks suitable for him. His expression is ‘pure.’ It seems that his mind is influenced by his ‘inner-self.’ Even though I asked him to ‘copy’ object, Yes, he copies it, but the outcomes are ‘not real’ and ‘abstract.’
There so many exciting things that happen in the mind of a person with autism. We need to dig as deep as we can to find types of phenomena in an autistic mind. Through art, this is possible, because the interpretation of art moves from implicit to explicit, with qualitative data will enable us to go further for more inferences.
Naive Art by an Autistic Mind, Video and Images by Zahari Hamidon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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