In 1998 my youngest brother, Kelton, was diagnosed with autism, a developmental disability that affects communication and social interaction. Autism currently affects 1/88 people in the United States. Kelton is a talented individual who runs cross-country and track, wrestles, plays the drums, loves history, and collects bobble heads and keychains.

This year Kelton decided to enroll in his first art class where he discovered his skill for drawing. His unorthodox style made me reconsider my artwork and examine the differences and similarities that exist between our perspectives. According to Paul Collins’ Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism, artists are four times more likely to have autism in their families. Considering the number of artists in my family, this statistic made me question the similarities that exist between Kelton and me. For this reason, we have decided to draw one of his 6,481 keychains a day for one year. These drawings will be as simple and uninhibited as possible. This project will explore our individual perspectives and examine the similarities that exist between us as artists.

Day 356



For the rest of the project I'm going to have a few

people in Kelt's life write guest posts. This entry is by our grandma.


I'm Kelton’s grandmother and would like to add a little story to his blog.


Kelton loves history – any history, whether it be famous people, wars, or just history in general. Could he be on Jeopardy? I think so. He's smart! To help himself with history he has developed a special way to learn the facts that interest him. He reads each paragraph in his books and rewrites them in a journal. Yes, he rewrites them! This takes many hours and lots of patience by his parents and siblings because he asks numerous questions about the words he doesn’t understand. Also, he's not satisfied with just any answer. It may take several inquiries before he gets the answer he thinks is suitable. He uses the computer dictionary, but is not satisfied with just any answer because he wants to understand what he's reading. I don’t know if there's a word that fully describes his passion for history, but to give you an idea, he has rewritten 16 journals of history facts.


Kelton would like to be a historian someday. Webster describes a historian as “a student or writer of history, one that produces a scholarly synthesis.” Of course I'm bias, but I think he's already a historian and will continue to write and improve. He's attending community college and I hope that his studies will include more history and, yes, he will get an A in the course!


We love you Kelton,

Grandma and Grandpa

Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)