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Mickey Doolittle | |
Mickey Doolittle
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Mickey Doolittle was born in 1939, when doctors knew very little about autism. They incorrectly thought it was caused by bad parenting, particularly cold mothers they called "refrigerator moms." He stayed at home with his parents and his two older brothers and a sister until he was six, not going to school or talking and spending his days quietly cutting out pictures from Life magazines.
But he had a habit of wandering away into the woods and one day both his legs were broken above the knees when a car hit him and he had to live in institutions since then.
Mostly these were in Connecticut, where his family also lived. He spent all his spare time drawing pictures of whatever he saw, and a local visiting artist at the state hospital took an interest in him and got him art supplies so that he began to color his drawings, mostly with colored pencils. He learned to read and write to some extent, and he understands what you say although he talks very little, only a word or two very abruptly.
When Connecticut began to close down its large institutions Mickey was moved to a group home in the northwest corner of the state where he has been ever since with four to five other residents. He does janitorial work in a nearby town for two hours a day and spends the rest of the time painting He has a small studio in the residence with a large drawing table. He works at lightning speed, almost as fast as his hand can move, first a sketch and then filling in the colors. Sometimes he will stack up many sketches and then add the colors like an assembly line, all the blues in one sketch and then on to the others, and then back to the beginning to put in all the reds and so on until he is satisfied. His other interests are listening to music on the radio and playing tunes on a small flute, but mainly it is his art.
Recently Valerie Rode, an aide in the home who had art training, took an interest in Micky and introduced him to acrylics and other media, as well as taking him to museums and on drawing expeditions to museums and on drawing expeditions.
He prefers to draw buildings and people rather than landscapes, and the colors he selects are the ones he thinks would look best and not necessarily the actual colors. He paints on canvas and on paper and often on large sheets of cardboard cut from boxes by his family.
His memory for scenes he has seen is photographic. Once in 1992 he did a sketch from memory of a hospital he had attended in California when he was a little boy just after World War II. In front of the hospital there was a sign on which Mickey printed the hospital name. He did not learn to read until he was a grown man years afterwards in an institution back in Connecticut, which means that he must have remembered the shape of those mysterious markings on that entrance sign and was able to reproduce them nearly half a century later by heart so that you could read the letters today. If he did one of his lightning sketches of a building in a nearby town for instance, and that sketch showed 62 windows in a building you could go back to that building and you would find that it had exactly 62 windows.
Like most people who are severely autistic, Mickey cannot read facial expressions or recognize emotion in others. He rarely looks directly at a person and rarely talks except to reply with a word or two to some question. It is unusual for autistic artists to draw people, they generally prefer architecture and buildings. Mickey likes to draw those too, but he also enjoys doing people and being around people, although he seldom has anything to say. Drawing is his way to communicate. Many of his subjects are the fellow residents and staff in the group home where he lives and is happy.
***Mickey's moneys will go into an account for him and will be used to fund more art supplies, trips to museums and field trips so he can get out and explore more of the world around him thus expanding his wonderful artistic calling.
Our Art Gallery also has work by Reverend Howard Finster, Inez Nathaniel Walker, William Edmondson, Thornton Dial, Missionary Mary Proctor, Miz Thang, Nancy Valelly, R A Miller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Mose Tolliver, folk pottery and all the great outsiders new or old.
Any and all sales are final - no refunds.
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