By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff | March 22, 2009
WILLIAMSTOWN - Much of what matters to Jessica Park can be found in a small room on the second floor of a rambling old house in this western Massachusetts college town. The walls of Park's bedroom, which doubles as her art studio, are covered with posters of rainbows, lightning, Las Vegas, and astronomical phenomena: the constellations, galaxies, the moon. Perfume bottles and body creams, dozens of them, are lined up on a dresser. Trays of paints fill the shelves next to Park's drawing table, which holds a sketch for the artist's current commission, a painting of the Taj Mahal.
In a couple of months the architectural jewel will be rendered in Park's signature style: each spire, minaret, balcony, and dome transformed with a meticulous hand and mysterious vision into a precise riot of color.
"I use acrylics. Sometimes come straight from the tube, but usually mix them up," Park says of her brilliant hues. "I like how they look!"
Park is autistic, and her room is a window on what she calls enthusiasms and others call obsessions. Her previous enthusiasms - the subjects of Park's early paintings - include radiators, dials, and heaters. In recent years, Park's artwork has been dominated by Victorian houses surrounded by weather anomalies and set against night skies made of "purplish black," her favorite color. The skies are invariably filled with stars, painstakingly depicted in their correct positions and dimensions.
It would be hard to overstate just how keenly, and to what powerful effect, Park's art is an extension of her autism. As a small child, largely uncommunicative, Park was fascinated by abstract shapes and color gradations. She is also a mathematics savant, able since she was young to create her own complex number systems. (It took a mathematician to recognize the seemingly random series Park wrote on a piece of paper when she was 12, which turned out to be the squares of the numbers from 51 to 100 arranged according to the number of powers of 2 they contain.) Order, as it is for many autistic people, became a driving force in Park's life.
And so it is in her artwork, a selection of which is now up at Endicott College in Beverly. The well-defined edges and controlled patterns of brick, stonework, clapboards, and shingles appeal to the 50-year-old artist, according to her mother, Clara Claiborne Park, a former English professor at Williams College and author of two highly-regarded books: 1967's "The Siege: A Family's Journey into the World of an Autistic Child" and 2001's "Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life with Autism."
During a recent visit to the Park family's home, exchanges with Clara, who is in her late 80s and has speech difficulties, were limited. Jessica's sister Rachel, who imports Asian art and artifacts for sale online, facilitated an interview with Jessica. (Another sister, Katharine, is a history of science professor at Harvard.)
Conversation focused on the tasks that make up Park's days: working as a clerk in the mailroom at Williams College's Paresky Center (in 2007 it was officially christened the Jessica H. Park Mailroom), a job she's held for nearly 30 years; taking care of household chores in the home she shares with her mother and her father, David Park, a retired physics professor; and cooking.
"Spaghetti sauce. Fish chowder. Eggplant. Tuna noodle casserole. And chocolate cake," Jessica Park says, when asked about her favorite dishes to make. Unable to engage for long, she regularly jumps up from her chair to look at the Las Vegas photos she and her sister Rachel have collected, or check the WeatherBug on her computer, or bring more tea and cookies to the living room. And while the formerly mute child is now capable of some social interaction, Park suddenly becomes agitated - as she has all her life - when a visitor asks a question that begins with the word "what." No one knows why.
Park's art is displayed throughout the house, a patchwork of well-worn rooms and narrow hallways, as is an honorary doctor of fine arts degree she received in 2003 from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her father says that Park's evolution as an artist has played an extraordinary part in forming his daughter's identity.
"There are so many things she can't do, and we've always tried to emphasize the importance of this thing that she does well and use it as a support for her ego, her sense of self, her sense of her own value," David Park says. "I don't know how Jessy's mind works. But I do think this has meaning for her."
Jessica Park works slowly. One of her large pieces, which can be up to 24 inches by 18 inches, will take several months to complete. Park receives around $2,500 for a commissioned painting, according to her brother Paul, a science-fiction novelist, and around half that if the client is a family friend or affiliated with the autistic community. Park is also represented by Pure Vision Arts, a New York exhibition space for artists with developmental disabilities.
"It's not exactly a living," says Paul Park, "but that's because my mother hasn't run it as a living. If Jessy is working and being productive, that's what's required. The selling part of it is big, but not because Jessy likes to spend money. Jessy likes numbers. And she likes them to go up, not down."
The earliest work included in the Endicott show is a childlike abstraction made when Jessica Park was 10. But as the show's catalog notes, even this simple painting is characterized by a striking degree of order and precision - no overlapping of colors, strong patterning, and decisive composition - that is the key mechanism by which Park relates to the world around her. Noted neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, who told her story in a 1998 documentary film for the BBC series "The Mind Traveller," wrote the foreword to both of Clara Park's books as well as the exhibit catalog.
"For Jessy, artwork is not a hobby or a pastime or even a profession or a vehicle for expressing herself to others," Sacks writes. "It is, for her, a crucial way of exploring the varieties of life, within the tight constraints of her methodical systems. It is a way of balancing her life."
Everyone around Park agrees that her artistic development made a dramatic, and perhaps life-changing, leap when she met schoolmates Anna and Diana Saldo at Mount Greylock Regional High School, which Park attended for nine years. Intrigued by this girl who would rock and scream uncontrollably in class but could also, by that time, really draw, the twin sisters (both talented artists who would later go into special education) took Park under their wing. They became, in Anna's words, like peer tutors, accompanying her to gym and art classes despite jeers and teasing from other kids, and they spent two summers living with the Park family on Block Island.
"We didn't have a lot in supplies, little watercolor sets and cast-off printer paper, but we did art lessons that also went into life skills," recalls Anna Saldo, who lives in Williamstown and has Park over for dinner every Monday night. "Initially we modeled what to do, and she would do the same. Jessy was very withdrawn and socially inept, but there was obviously raw talent there. It was nurtured and cultivated, and it bloomed."
Park's artwork may be the gripping subject of books, a film, and gallery exhibitions, yet the artist herself couldn't be less interested. She would rather talk about the difference between perfume and eau de toilette. Her brother Paul can't say whether she actually uses the lotions and potions that hold so much fascination these days. All he knows is that they spend hours at the mall looking at containers, and that for Park skin care isn't so different from numbers, or rainbows, or painting.
"It's an autistic person's paradise, 50 products at each counter. Is this one a.m. or p.m.? Before or after bath? Cream or powder? Everything has a category with tiny gradations, and because she's got a powerful intellect Jessy turns it into a system that she invests in. She's the same way with bathroom cleansers and appliances and vitamin pills," says Paul Park. "It's the way she does her art."
Source: http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_art...cision_is_all/
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