Artists/Writers Poets/Musicians: AS/ASD Affect Your Art?

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I'm just curious to know from the artists/poets/musicians/etc if AS/ASD and their traits affect, for positive or negative, how you create/produce your art. Any takers?

Me: I'm a poet, and I know I am a highly visual thinker. I translate back and forth between images and words. A good degree of my poetry is highly visual, and I've had to discipline myself to not allow myself to become tangled in my own web. I'm literally trying to "write what I see".

I am an artist and I have difficulties with focusing on one thing at a time. I have a bunch of ideas swimming around my head and I cannot get those ideas out of my head and onto paper. I have lots of unfinished projects. I also have a problem with inactivity from time to time which prevents me from working. I feel AS have an overall negative effect on my work. I could have done way better at art school if I had known that I have AS. My wish is to be diagnosed and get some therapy.

I always make stuff out of bits and pieces and see how they fit together as a whole. One load of work was almost forensic in piecing it together. Somehow I know what the whole thing should look like, and don't ever bother to stop until it does. I bin 90% of stuff because it doesn't have integrity. I actually like about 1% of the stuff in that is saleable 10%, and I don't like that 1% very much. I don't have any art on my walls because it reminds me of work. I don't go to galleries unless I'm trying to flog stuff. Sometimes I see something in a magazine that someone else has done or on the internet and think that is brilliant. I get really weirded-out when NT's go all nice around me because they like my work, but put up with it because they give me cash. I often pretend my wife has done all the artwork because it make it easier to sell.

I like objective poetry and prose. Haven't written any for years. Not sure If I want to. There's a tautology in "feeling" like writing objective poetry. Hate fiddliness of words and bucket of frogs sense they all want to jump off page.

Read Shutter Island one night last week and wish I had written that.

Oh and polishing poetry is as mind numbing as grinding stone.

I'm not sure how AS affects my graphics. I know I need physical models or morgue photos for most things unless its something I've drawn a million times.

In writing, I find visual scenes and dialogue fairly easy. What's hard for me is writing those musing soliloquies that put the reader inside the character's emotional life. I suppose that falls under the Theory of Mind dysfunction.

I'm not real Artist, but I am compulssive drawer and when I draw sth, I see that people don't have facial expression and expression at all.
My pictures are heavy-looking and detailed.
When I write sth, there are no feelings and relationships.
When I sing, my voice sounds like programmed with deep effect - interesting thing: Helium effect makes it quite normal

But I'm still trying.

No such thing as a "real" artist, well there is , but the distinction and underlying thought in work isn't a clear boundary. More of a spectrum with a few flashes here and there . A lot of real artists are taking the p*ss out of the establishment in their day work. It is sooo boring to have to get something as they want to buy it. Ifg you do abstract they ask you what is it after they decide to buy it.

I think given how hard it is sell work, and given the problems we have in dealing with folk there must be a huge stash of stuff that no one ever has the confidence to publish. - Give you an example of current problem. Big gallery buyers ( just for expensive gift shop, not gallery itself- i'm not that good) are usually decent people to deal with and patient. They have confounded things called assistants when not there. One Assistant is french- and I can't understand her words through her accent. I tell her this ,and she deliberately gives me the wrong Email address for her boss, twice. Her boss has already given me her Email but I wrote it down on a scrap of paper a month earlier, got everything ready to send to her so she could choose of course lost paper. ( have worked for them before) Now Assistant gets angry when I ring up. Hence in institutional Aspie-lock.

This is why I refer painting outside of houses.

oops DP

I'm a musician, got my master's degree in composition, and dabble in songwriting every now and then.

For the most part, having AS is a gift because once I get started on a project, I'm sure to carry it through to completion.

Since much of my time was spent in electronic music, I've decided to hang up composing for a while and concentrate more on sound design. At the moment I'm trying to get a good handle on synth programming. For practice, I bought an Akai S2000 sampler and an old Mac off Ebay, created some waveforms in Absynth, and then started writing programs to use those waves to create a wide variety of synth sounds. When I'm away from my home studio, I write patches for the Thor soft synth in Reason. I'm trying to create a library of patches inspired by and imitative of the Yamaha DX7 FM synth. I'll eventually write patches for Subtractor, POSSIBLY Absynth, Redrum, and I'll create an NN-XT version of my Akai library when I finish working on that.

I also plan on writing my own DX7 programs as well as patches for the Roland Alpha Juno 1 synth. I have too much unused gear taking up space, so this summer I plan on converting the Roland and a Yamaha TX7 into compact rackmount units. I've also have a custom synth that is on order (just tied up in making arrangements for a freight carrier to deliver it), and that will likely become the core of my sound design/composition. All combined I should have pretty good resources for building my own Reason Refill and hope to take those kinds of products to market. We'll see how it goes!

As for the problems AS creates for me, I do get really obsessive about my work. When writing a composition, everything note-for-note has to be absolutely perfect to convey what I want to express. Often times I use 12-tone technique, and I have my own system for implementing it that works really well for me. The problem is that I get so stuck in the process of creating something that it takes a long time to make a musical point or develop a musical idea. Not fun. And ending a work? Wow... That's a trip. I absolutely despise writing endings, and those are the kinds of things I agonize over. I probably have a symphony written by now that will never be heard because I can't bring myself to complete it.

I also do some production on the side. I'm producing a demo for my band so we can give bars/clubs something to promote ourselves and get gigs. What happens is that I get so caught up in getting the "perfect" sound or fixing the problems that I can't focus just getting the job done. When I'm finished with the whole Phil Specter thing and let the band hear it, they hate it and I have to start all over. I figured the best way out of this is to directly involve our guitarist, who sat next to me in his kitchen while I corrected and mixed one song--which took THREE HOURS to do!! ! My cover was saying that I needed someone else's input. My real reason was that I needed at least one other member of the band to see personally how much work is involved.

This year my goal is to create a Christmas instrumental album--clarinet, piano, EWI, synth, mariachi, etc., featuring my own arrangements. I'm hoping that with all the programming I'm doing the actual production will go quickly. By making a Christmas album, I have to set a deadline for mid-November so that I'll HAVE to finish AND get everything else done that I want to do.

The AS part is mostly a big help. But it's a real pain to me and my family when I get stuck on something! My wife says if I'm up to 2am or 3am ONE MORE TIME, I'll have to find another place to sleep!

I think my AS traits in many ways have caused my artistic tendencies. Despite being verbose when I do speak, I still have great trouble communicating. I can talk a lot but I can't interact very well. I try, and it seems as though I am, but I know full well I am not coming across as intended.

So I have come to try and get through to the world the way things feel to me. I can see that they do not feel what I do from the world around us, and I get all sorts of reactions to my own reactions... and these tell me that I need to find a way to explain why I did what I did, why I panicked in the library, why I was so abrupt to a friendly person, why I started to cry, why I seemed to have nothing to say.

I have trouble because like others I get very caught up in the creative process and do not like to have to stop. It not only is very hard to recollect my thoughts and get back into the place I was when I had to quit, but can be difficult in a more tangible sense. Paint dries and because I prefer to leave out everything I work with (it's a heck of a lot easier to know where I left off if I leave the room as it was at the time) but cannot because of the kids, sometimes I hate to even begin because I know I will be interrupted.

I have been into drawing cartoon characters ever since I was a small child. It's something I've always been really good at doing, and when I was in grade school the teachers and other kids were always amazed by how I could just draw something without tracing or copying. When I entered middle school, however, my love for drawing and cartoons became a real obsession, it seemed to be all I cared about back then, and it probably was. Anyway, I have always been drawn to detail in my cartoons. I was a bit too drawn to it as a teenager, in fact. I used to wear myself out by drawing patterns and designs on wallpaper and bedsheets and clothing over and over in my comic strips. I don't do that much now. I also always see my characters moving and ding things as if they were in an animated cartoon, so my drawings on paper are like a 'freeze frame" of one of those scenes, I guess. One major problem I've had ever since I was a kid is trying to come up with original, funny stories and plots for my cartoons. I just can't figure out how professonal cartoonists do it, putting something new in the paper every single day! If I made daily comics I'd probably have to hire a writer, which I can't. I feel like I don't have a very good imagination although people have said I do. Also it's a bit odd since i have Asperger's, but I love drawing facial expressions on charcters. Of course, I learned how to do it from other cartoons and books on how to draw, not real life.

As a writer, I tend to focus on introspective, loner-type characters like, well, me, who tend to stick to a small social group and are generally confused and frustrated by the rest of the world. Also I like to describe small details--a hand opening a door, light filtering through a dirty window--and tend to completely overlook the larger world. Science fiction boggles me, as well as huge, complex storylines that people seem to be able to come up with. Don't know if that has anything to do with AS/ASD.

As an artist, I have to have to have to focus on small details--the curve of an elbow, facial features. Also I am really struggling with facial expressions, and my body language tends to be ... awkward. Butthat'swhatIlike.

And. I can't. FINISH anything. *seethe*

Now that's one thing I forgot. It seems impossible that I can write a beginning, middle AND end to a story. It's as though I just can't compel myself to do it. Mind you, that's what the various brainstorming tools are for, but again, to really throw myself into it I'd need hours and hours with no distractions. I don't even get one hour like that, usually.

I guess it does, to an extent.

When I do 3d art, I don't focus on closeups of the face, or intense emotion (but part of that is just Poser's open mouths look scathingly fake... I don't do large groups that much (again, Poser tends to choke if you import too many high-polygon figures and...y'know...maybe that's not AS at work...

When I write fiction, I tend to gloss over deep background on the characters; usually I go with hair and eye color, maybe a physical attribute, but developing backstories, etc., doesn't really get into the characters, if you know what I mean.

I tend to let dialog carry a lot of the weight, as it's easy to write (if only I could edit what comes out of my mouth, instead of my fingers...

There's probably other things, but that's what comes to mind.

Yes and no. My analysis of 19th century sentences helped to cultivate literary harmony, but I can't emphathise with the character - what they do, etc. On the other hand I'm better at analytical writing. Hope to write an existentialist novel - doesn't look too promising though.

In the last month or so something rather peculiar has happened to my imagination and I don't know if Aspergers has anything to do with it. I normally dream each night about three to five different very visual dreams but not necessarily with photographic clarity. Recently I have had the odd experience of waking about an hour before I normally get up in the morning and, with my eyes closed, I see a huge series of brightly colored highly imaginative paintings. I do a lot of graphic art but these pieces, which come spontaneously from no inspiration I can figure, are extraordinary and I cannot possibly remember them all or their different styles to actually render them once I am awake. I simply do not have the time or the resources. It's a very frustrating business to have all this creativity thrown at me in large bunches that usually end up fading away in my memory.