"Draw this," I said, and gave Jose my pocket watch . . . "He's an idiot," the attendant broke in. "Don't even ask him. He don't know what it is - he can't tell the time. He can't even talk. They say he's `autistic', but he's just an idiot." Jose turned pale, perhaps more at the attendant's tone than at his words . . . "Go on," I said. "I know you can do it." Jose drew with an absolute stillness, concentrating completely on the little clock before him, everything else shut out. Now, for the first time, he was bold, without hesitation; composed, not distracted. He drew swiftly but minutely, with a clear line, without erasures . . . Jose had drawn the watch with remarkable fidelity."
From The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks
They live not in a universe but in a "multiverse", Sacks wrote. Autistic artists were "not supposed to exist", yet the autistic imagination is not rare. Seldom open to influence, their fate is "to be isolated, and thus original".
The strikingly tall and handsome young man who stood observing the crowd in Kenny's Gallery in Galway last weekend is one such. Adrian Tarpey from Renmore in the city will be 23 at the end of the month, and this is his second art exhibition in three short years.
Profoundly deaf, he couldn't hear the moving speech by Michael D. Higgins, the former arts minister, and couldn't discuss it afterwards with those standing close to him. But his mother, Rita, says he was well aware of what was happening. "He might be looking at the ceiling at times, but he knows what's going on." She quotes her sister, who once referred to Adrian's ability to "X-ray a room in seconds".
Her first-born and only son - one of a family of three - was two when he started to draw. He had poor physical control and had already been diagnosed as profoundly deaf, yet Rita identified his fascination with his hands and how they moved. With the crayons and marker pens she gave him, he began to make images: cars, houses, Christmas trees, anything he saw. When he was four, he was declared autistic.
His education was at special schools, most recently at the Galway Association's school and training centre in Snipe Avenue. Throughout, he continued to draw and paint and won two Texaco children's art awards. Then, when he was nine, it all stopped. It had been his only form of communication, apart from the signing he had developed with his family. His parents were told he wouldn't paint again.
Eight years later, the darkness lifted. While attending school, he copied the work of his teacher, Mary O'Brien. She encouraged him to continue. Assigned to St Joseph's Training Centre, he was placed by the unit director, Sue Patching, in the personal care of instructor Margaret Parry. Through the encouragement he was given there, he continued to work on his artistic skills.
As Parry notes in her contribution to programme for the exhibition, Tarpey could have gone one of two ways. "Having autism complicated by profund deafness, it was possible that Adrian would retreat into the impenetrable world from which he first emerged to display his gifts." Instead, he learned, paid close attention, worked on types of paint and their application; worked on how to use a palette knife to create a textured surface; and learned how to "maximise the fluidity of watercolours to express subtlety and tenderness".
"He has mastered the chalky qualities of soft pastel," she writes. "This medium inevitably leaves him covered in coloured dust." Yet it has become an "integral part of the process" and is accepted by him, often with amusement.
"Adrian's relationship with his materials is a very intimate one," she explains. "They are not only a means to an end, they are an end in themselves. He savours the shape and texture of his work tools, reshaping his paintbrushes with his fingers after use, straightening all his paint tubes and carefully chipping or peeling away any stray flakes of paint from around the thread underneath the cap."
In April 1998, he staged his first exhibition at the Bank of Ireland in Eyre Square, Galway; it was his first public statement, and Rita still remembers the impact - and the shock of an RTE camera thrust in front of her and her husband, Vincent. Since then, with constant encouragement at home and from his tutor and carers, he has built up a new portfolio.
Fuchsias, petunias, hydrangeas and daffodils are some of his subjects in the current display, which is regarded as remarkable by Tom Kenny, the gallery's owner, and reflects his love of bold, primary colours. He enjoys a wide canvas, yet has acute attention to detail. Though he "cannot read", he can clearly write. Reproduced in one of his acrylics, the cigar tin he uses to hold his brushes even includes the small print on the base.
Kevin Whelan, a writer and part-time carer, has known Tarpey for four years and describes him as an autistic savant. "That word `savant' is interesting," he says. Though it comes from the French word for `know', "we cannot know Adrian".
"Autists generally are not `big' on talk or chat, regardless of whether they are deaf or not. It isn't their style," Whelan says. He regards this as a healthy antidote to the "contemporary trends of our culture, which almost demand that all of us speed dial one another or tap away on computer keyboards in a frenetic rush to say more, and do more, and be more." And "exactly how much communication is going on is anyone's guess."
Often described as like being marooned on an island, autism is no longer perceived to be the "death" some would classify it as, according to Oliver Sacks. "For though `horizontal' connections with others, with society and culture, are lost, yet there may be vital and intensified `vertical' connections, direct connections with nature, with reality, uninfluenced, unmediated, untouchable, by any others," he says.
He refers to the Japanese experience of leading autists from an untutored and apparently unteachable childhood giftedness to professionally accomplished adult artistry. Apart from applying special instruction techniques and encouraging drawing as a means of communication, the technique demands an intimate, empathic relationship - a sharing of spirit, like that between mother and child. Clearly, Adrian Tarpey has shared, and been allowed to share, his spirit with those close to him.
Silent World: Colour as Language, an exhibition of paintings by Adrian Tarpey, continues at the Kenny Gallery, Middle Street, Galway, until Thursday