MY NOTHINGNESS GONE, MY WORLD SPEAKS

An artist and writer offers painting, pottery, and poems reflecting her autistic worldview in this collection of verse and art.

The visual arts have long been a source of release and exploration for Eyer, based on Washington state’s Whidbey Island. As she explains in her introduction, “We autistic people develop love through visualizing every object as we wish it to be, pottery clay and color folds and molds as values touch and materialize.” Her paintings are generally abstract, though they evoke the wildness and dynamism of the natural world, as in the reds and yellows of “Mt. Rainier in Fall.” The sculptures are often figurative—dogs, iguanas, human faces—though these sometimes, too, are less definable, recalling the mix of organic and inorganic forms of ancient objects recovered from the sea floor. A blend of the natural and the human is also found in the poems, like “Realize Life’s Freedoms”: “Seas swell sad when a quiet afternoon yields way to death / From reasons each wave ascends and crashes.” The poems, written in both prose and free verse, explore topics like womanhood, friendship, God, and the passage of time. The poetry tends to be a bit overwrought, as in the prose poem “Eventide”: “Only fascinating hate underlies it all. Just think there is no sense in symphonies by God conducting concerts lost in destiny’s noiseless ears.” But the art—the paintings, in particular—displays a tremendous amount of vision and control. The deconstructed landscapes of the eruptive, green-dominated “Spring” and the pine-forested “Memories of Beauty” and “River Serene” manage to stir and calm at the same time. Eyer shows her humor in works like “Bee Careful” (which features a swarm of splotches reminiscent of honeybees) and her powerful sense of composition in the dramatic, mournful seascape “Lost Haven.” Taken together, the works demonstrate Eyer’s highly impressionistic and idiosyncratic perspective—just the sort of viewpoint an artist should have. The color and texture of words as well as paint provide the necessary intensity to give voice to her experiences and emotions. It’s an intensity that readers will carry away with them.

An uneven but impactful portfolio of work across genres from an inventive creator.