Jessica Park

In his book Uniquely Human (2019) Dr Prizant shares experiences of working with individuals who are on the autism spectrum. One of these individuals is an artist named Jessica Park.

Park is a self-taught artist from Massachusetts in the USA. Her work depicts architecture in bright, vibrant colours using acrylic paints. Her work has been exhibited widely.

Jessica Park has, herself, been featured in publications such as Time Magazine and The New Yorker and has also been part of a film by Dr Oliver Sacks. In 2003, Parks was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

The majority of Park’s original work is held in private collections, but the Massachussets College of Liberal Arts have produced two books about Park and her art , The Jessica Park Project (2020).

Park’s mother and father were professors who taught English literture and Physics, respectively, and both published authors with her mother publishing two books about her daughter.

Park’s work is so precise it could have been drawn by a computer. The lines are absolutely straight in the walls and roofs of her buildings. The bricks in paintings like The Jessica Building in New Jersey, precisely lined up, even above the archway over the door.

As a teenager, in school, I remember having to draw a picture of an alleyway. The aim was to demonstrate how perspective works. It has been one of those images that when I’ve sat down to draw something over the years, I eventually return to.

At the end of the alleyway are always houses but the precision with which the brickwork in my images is drawn, compared to Park’s, could not be further away, the lines making up walls and roofs are never straight. The only time my drawing of brickwork approaches that of Park is when I try to bring three or four bricks to a viewers attention.

Her mother has suggested that Jessy’s choice of rainbow colors might emanate from a school assignment in which she had to paint a snow landscape in fantasy colors.

Painting the World With a Rainbow: Jessica Park | The Folk Art Society of America (s.d.)

Reading the quote from her mother, Clara Claiborne Park, my going back to the same drawing over the years, has a similar sense to it. One of comfort but also endless possibility. Although the subject of the drawing might be the same each time, there will always be something different about it. The positions of bricks and tiles, the style of the doors and windows, the width of the alley. The positions of doors in the alley. All of these will be different from image to image.

Very rarely have I ever used colour in these images. When I have they are drab greys and browns, never the bright colours that Park uses. Perhaps that is the influence of growing up in a working class home, on a housing estate, in a town in the Welsh valleys, an influence that instills a down-to-earth attitude in you.

Jessica Park’s attention to detail and the accuracy of her work can be seen in the paintings The Great Stained Glass Doors. The floorboards, the brickwork on the floor, the patterns on the windows are identical. It feels like if you overlayed the images that they would match, the only difference being her choice of colours.

It is also her use of colours that makes her paintings so eye catching. To say that the colours aren’t realistic would be untrue. Go to Bristol in the UK, and look up from the city centre and you can see a row of colourfully painted houses. These may not be as colourful as Park’s but they could easily have taken her paintings as their inspiration.

My understanding of autism is very limited but from what I’ve come across when listening to, far more knowledgeable, people, Jessica Park’s work shows a number of qualities that are found in other who have autism. Attention to detail, comfort with repetition, but also shows a sense of individualism and creativity that is part of every human being.

If I take just one thing away from Jessica Park’s work, it is never to underestimate the abilities of any person, no matter who they are, or what conditions they may have that differentiate them for what society says is “normal”. To do so is to deny yourself the chance to see beauty and wonder.

References

1. Jessica Park | Raw Vision Magazine (s.d.) At: https://rawvision.com/articles/jessica-park (Accessed 30/12/2020).
2. Painting the World With a Rainbow: Jessica Park | The Folk Art Society of America (s.d.) At: https://folkart.org/mag/jessica-park (Accessed 30/12/2020).
3. Prizant, Dr. B. M. (2019) Uniquely Human – A Different Way of Seeing Autism. (1st ed.) Great Britain: Souvenir Press.
4. Snellgrove, C. (2012) Inspiring Story: Self-taught artist with autism, Jessica Park – Parenting Special Needs Magazine. At: https://www.parentingspecialneeds.org/article/inspiring-story-self-taught-artist-with-autism-jessica-park/ (Accessed 30/12/2020).
5. The Jessica Park Project (2020) At: https://www.mcla.edu/mcla-in-the-community/bcrc/mcla-gallery-51/jessica_park/index.php (Accessed 30/12/2020).