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

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Oh hello Professor X. Seeing your post has made my morning!

I have old cotton clothes for painting. Just loose cotton pants and mens singlets. In winter, cotton sweat shirts and old jeans. I also paint in striped pj's a great deal. I buy soft cotton men's pyjamas from Coles and in summer I often wear them. I only wear cotton. I cannot wear other fabrics.

FOr years I used tungsten lights - artificial light in my studio. Like a dark cave. I cannot cope with bright outdoor light and always wear sunglasses. Of late however, I have changed the lighting. I have opened the roller door and placed a cotton sheet over it which filters the direct sun and gives daylight without any glare.

there's a pic of me in painting pyjamas on my facebook page.

At present I feel like dying and giving up on life...again. But instead at 6.00am i will get dressed and go for a walk with my dog peggy. i will look at flowers and try to think joyful thoughts and look at the trees and the sky.

How are you doing today and can we have a link to your Facebook photo?

lucky I checked in. 4.27 am.
Youcan see the painting if you go to my website - its details are in my account settings here on WP.

How am I doing? well,it was a case of 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter," which for those of you who do not know is a brilliant book on suicide, By JD Salinger. The roof beams in my studio have been looking exceedingly low of late...the right height for a chair and a rope.

I mean that. That is what I live with at times and I feel sure many, here.
My stimming and pacing has been really bad, and i had almost stopped talking completely at home. I rock in front of the computer and in the studio on the blue chair.
People think I am a freak. People I know in 12 step programs came over to tell me I seem in a bad way.
So...yet again i try to go off medication....7 months i lasted this time.... and i have surrendered to meds again.

It's really hard, because the way I am off medication...well...maybe the reality for me is i have to just take medication. I won't be around if i stay off them. I get really severe perseverative thinking that is negative and looped. I cannot be around people at all. I cannot even look at peoples teeth (I trained myself to do this years ago.) I am back to staring at the ground and not one glimpse up, or a fae turned away from people when they are talking to me.
And I hate taking medication - any medication. I do not realise how severe it is until I come out of it. THe past two sessions with my ASD psych - well, he has gently suggested going back on meds...and he is not an advocate of dosing people up on stuff. If I do not stay on meds my life is stimming obsessively, no contact with anyone, terror of sounds and noises and change to routine, rigid adherence to routine to the point of incapacity actually. I have the joy of my special interest, but even that has been disappearing of late because of the anxiety and depression co-morbids.

My son gets scared of me.

I've been back on some medication about 5 days now. I am dejected about it, but I am here. The suicidal stuff is lifting. The self-harm tendencies are lessening. I am not jumping and covering my ears at every sound and then shouting at my son to stop dropping things because it hurts my ears. He needs that.
I've joined the Asperger Womens Association .
I am alive.
whoopee doo.

I'm glad you're doing better now. I was worried. Do you think this crisis was caused by lack of medication or anything that happened?

No. It is just what happens eventually when i come of medication> I come off for a while and i do alright. Then, the less savoury and more difficult aspects of my autism end up prevailing and ruling my life.

I am quite severe in some ways with my ASD.
it's really hard.
Certainly, because the recession has impacted my career, that has added to it.

But it is not so much that.
It's always been like this.

Temple Grandin talks about it in her writings...managing one's ASD with the need for some meds.
I wish i didn't need to. i really do.

At least I am not in the era of the Ship of Fools. I would have been on the boat, or one of those women in rags down in the dungeon asylum chained to the cold, dank stone.
got to be grateful it is 21st Century AND first world country in my case. I am luckier than a lot.

Hi millie,

I'm glad some of the symptoms are lessening. Since your recent encouragement, I've produced a few drawings and an oil painting (not quite finished), which I'll post sometime. I was admiring the stripey pyjamas paintings; The A Life in particular. Are you going to paint many more autism-related ones?

oh wow - outlier. post them up in the art thread so i can see. I am so glad to hear you are painting and doing some more work.

I love that A LiFe painting, and the stripey pj's painting is a bit of fun. I like my more absracted works - the interiors. They are the hardest works for me to paint - the most challenging - so i am most interested in those. they are also about autism, but less obviously. every part of me comes alive when i paint those. that is the special interest intoxication/in the moment process that I love so much.
I just posted them up on Facebook, and someone contacted me and has bought one. and the best thing is she spoke about the joy the paintings give her - she has three sons and their dad died so she has brought them up on her own. It's been hard. The painting makes her feel good.

You see, I am not so good with social chitter chatter face to face, and with going and meeting people. so i can give through my special interest. that makes me really happy.

I understand. I hate being on medication too, but as of necessity (depression and horrible negative spiraling thinking, same as what you said) I am back on it.

I lasted a whole year without, somehow.

When I was younger I never had medication, but I did go through severe periods of depression and negative obsession, (as well as periods of uplifting special interest obsession) and did barely scrape by in tasks necessary for living (such as passing school, and other daily things) and failed in many others. I got away with not managing because I was a "kid" and less was expected of me.

I don't have the same problems with sensory stimuli (for the most part) - but my obsessive thought processes can get really bad.

What was your childhood like before you first started going on medication?

my childhood was completely out there and strange. neglect, problems, autistic traits in family, dysfunction (but what does that actually mean??)

It has taken a long time to tease out what is AS from what is trauma related.....

there wasn't much support for any of us kids. My siblings and I - all 8 of us - really vrought ourselves up and managed as best we could. An educated "Ma and Pa Kettle scenario," with not so man sit down meals....... but the focus was on music, literature, the arts, religion, poetry..... and no-one hsowed us how to get a job or open a bank account or live in the world - no-one thought to. My mum lived in her own world, my dad had left and we still went and visited him on fortnightly weekends, and all was pretty chaotic, especially for me.

One sister moved out at just 16. Another had to live somewhere else from about 14 onwards because she and my mum couldn;t get on. it was pretty crazy.

Now for a few questions to millie the artist...

Who is an artist?
What is art?
How important is studying the works of the great painters in order to improve your own?
What has taught you more about painting than anything else?

I'm interested in all this from my point of view as an intermediate-level photography amateur... I've been really studying a lot lately.

Who is an artist?
Kids are the best artists. Kids and outsider artists - those ones who have different kinds of brains that help them to see the world a little differently. But in my view, anyone is an artist. The shame is, most people who are very talented, never fully realise it.
If we are talking about "professionalism," then an artist is someone who does art,w ho goes into the studio and works on their own and creates. Commodification doesn't have to come into it. The art scene is very corrupt. It has as much to do with art as the golden arches of Macdonald's fast food chain. Although I will add disclaimer here and say my new gallery is really fantastic and really understanding of me with an ASD. They understand I do not go to all the openings, tey know i am reclusive, they do not pressure me, and they contact me via email a lot and phone only when they really need to have a long talk. They respect my need for minimal contact.

What is art?
Creativity.
Spirituality.
Open to all.


Studying the works of other artists is for me, the best way to learn. I learn more this way, than with an interaction with a teacher, (for obvious reasons that have a lot to do with my autism.) Others may gain more from interaction with a tutor. I teach, but I cannot be taught by another person. My relationship with painting began with the masters. It was Signac who helped me realise at age 6 or so (?) that i was to be a painter. We grew up with a lot of creativity in our home. I lived for quiet time with dog-eared and scruffy art picture books about Velasquez and Goya, Picasso. I think the Spanish artists have always been my favourites. Although that is such an arbitrary statement really, as I tend to like whatever I am learning most from, at any particular time. I look - all the time. It fills me with joy. Rembrandt, Della Francesca for heavenly lightness and weightlessness. Braque. Matisse, De Kooning, Mary Cassatt, Elisabeth Cummings in my country. Ian Fairweather, some of the indigenous artists.

the thing that has taught me most about art and painting is doing it. There is no substitute for learning and doing.

I think i am still an average artist. I am told I am very good and "gifted" but at the deepest level, i feel average, and i always hunger to improve and develop. I am never satisfied and always striving and persevering.

Thoroughly artistic millie topic

We should sticky you, millie!

This is a great topic! And it deserves an AUTSCAR!

sticky millie. millie is stuck.

thanks sartresue.
and we should give you the creative language award, here on WP.

A couple more questions here, just things I've always wondered about artists and galleries in general...

Do galleries give an advance before they sell an artist's painting? If so, how much in % would be normal?
How does the artist know for sure if the gallery has sold his painting and so he's due to get paid for it? Is it a question of trust?
What's a common mark-up on a painting in %?
When an artist turns in a piece of work, does the gallery give them a receipt? How does the artist ensure the gallery won't steal the painting?

Galleries take on consignment for the most part. They rarely give any advances, although some amazing gallerists (now an extinct breed,) have been known to do so.

The artist does not know if the work is sold or not sold. It is a trust issue. However, good gallerists will notify you immediately as part of their business model. Good gallerists understand the symbiotic flow between artist, gallerist, client.

The split is 50-50 or 60 to artist and 40 to gallerist.

I have had paintings stolen. One went to my old gallery from a few years ago. the work was not good enough and when i got it down there I told them not to show it. I actually forgot about it. A woman contacted me to say she had bought it for 10,000 dollars. The work was worth nowhere near that. The same gallery stole a whole lot of my drawings.

You do fill out a supply form and keep records. I am not good a some of that stuff because of my executive dysfunction.
I also went with gallerists who were quite corrupt and I could not actually gauge them well because of my ASD.