Recently (pleasantly), Instagram has been serving me a lot of posts with calls for artists/ open submissions. This is a pretty welcome upgrade to the usual trash it puts in my feed, in place of, you know, the people I chose to actually follow. (le sigh).
One of those recent calls was for a little magazine called Pencil, the mission of which “is to create an opportunity for artists and writers to connect or reconnect with an unsung, basic tool for creative expression — the pencil — and to inspire our readers to make time and space for analog experiences.” YES PLEASE. In a time where so much of the work I am doing is digital, and even when analog, I’m painting in color, I was so charmed by the idea of going back to my greyscale roots and try my hand at some old school drawing.
The call for artists was pretty open ended, with the themes “attention” & “eraser” being offered as a prompt.
With the work I’ve been doing on my neurodivergence, I thought this could be a perfect opportunity to explore these topics through that lens.
The idea of “attention seeking” as someone on the autism spectrum fascinates me. I’ve spent my entire life AVOIDING being noticed, being observed, being the center or attention. I hated having pictures taken of me. I was, famously, not a fan of Christmas, because I was worried “Santa” was watching me and would be offended if I didn’t respond appropriately to a gift he’d left me (I remember this feeling so clearly— I don’t remember if I knew Santa was my parents and it was them I was afraid to let down or not though). The thing is, for so many autistic people, the experience of being autistic is categorized by what is seen from the outside, as opposed to what it actually feels like. We learn to mask so we can “hide” the things neurotypicals find irritating, grating, repetitive and annoying. We DON’T seek attention but it’s foisted upon us.
So in this piece: “Attention Seeker”, I am going about my day, managing, juggling, slipping up, when a spotlight shines on me and me… and I am called an attention seeker, against my will.
In the second piece I submitted: “The Eraser”, I am literally masking, so I can’t see the way I am being observed. From my vantage point, I am hiding all the things that make me stand out— the things that make me annoying and a spectacle. What I don’t realize (or maybe I do) is that my chest is wide open; people can still see inside me. I’m not erasing anything except my control over the observation.
I won’t know if these pieces have been picked up for publication for at least another month or so, but even if they don’t “go anywhere”, the act of drawing again, with that scritch, scritch, scritch of graphite on paper, and the stories they tell were so worth it.
