Life as Jamie Knows It @3QD, with some remarks about intelligence

I was half-considering tacking “aka writing about a retard” to the end of my title, right after “3QD”, but the word “retard” is just too ugly and there’s no way of indicating that I’m not serious about it. And yet in a way I am, almost.

Jamie, as you likely know by know, is Jamie Bérubé, who has Down syndrome. His father, Michael, has just written a book about him, Life as Jamie Knows It, and I’ve reviewed the book for 3 Quarks Daily. Writing this review is the first time I have had to actively think about mental disability.

The word is “actively.” Sure, back in secondary school there were “special ed.” classes, and the students in them had educational difficulties. But those classes were somewhere “over there”, so those kids weren’t really a part of my daily life. Beyond that, I am generally aware of the Special Olympics and this that and the other.

Moreover I was already somewhat familiar with Jamie’s story. Michael ran a blog between 2004 and 2010, which I started following late in 2005. Jamie was a frequent topic of conversation. There are stories in Life as Jamie Knows It that I first read on Michael’s blog.

Still, all that is just background. To review Michael’s book I was going to have to think seriously about Jamie, about Down syndrome, and about disability more generally. And then I would have to write words which would appear in public and which I would therefor have to own, as they say. When I asked Michael to have a copy sent to me I didn’t anticipate any problems at all. I knew he was an intelligent man, an incisive thinker, a good writer, and a bit of a wiseguy. I was looking forward to reading the book and writing about it.

But, I hadn’t anticipated Jamie’s art. I noticed that Michael had posted a lot of it online and I started looking through it. Pretty interesting, thought I to myself, why don’t I write a series of posts here at New Savanna as a lead up to the review over there at 3QD? And that’s what I did. The penultimate (aka next to the last) post was about work that Michael termed “geometrics” and I had decided to call “biomorphics.” I concluded that those biomorphic images were interesting indeed. And so I found myself writing:

Does this make Jamie a topologist? No, not really. But it makes it clear that he’s an intelligent human being actively exploring and making sense of the world.

That word “intelligent” brought me up short once I’d typed it. Did I really want to use that word? I asked myself. Yes, I replied, without thinking about it.

And THEN I started thinking.

Ngoma kids perform

Click the arrows at the left and right to scroll through the photos.

Kids these days...need to have sword fights

Kids these days...need a place to play

When I was a kid I lived in a suburban neighborhood that was on the border of a semi-rural area. A neighbor up the road had a small wheat field. If I walked a quarter of a mile in one direction I cam to a small wooded ares, but large enough so we could go in there and get lost, build hide-outs and stuff. A mile in another direction there was a much larger and more mysterious wooded area, right next to the mink farm. And I was allowed to roam the neighborhood freely. We all were.

Yes, there were rules. I had to be home for dinner, get my homework done, and get into bed at the proper time. And there were restrictions as to where I could go, restrictions that got loosed as I grew older. And that was true for my friends as well.

I keep reading, though, that that's over, that kids these days are scheduled and regulated in a way I find, well, borderline pathological. Anyhow, the NYTimes addresses this in an interesting story:

The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play! 

A Silicon Valley dad decided to test his theories about parenting
by turning his yard into a playground where children can take
physical risks without supervision. Not all of his neighbors were thrilled. 

By MELANIE THERNSTROMOCT. 19, 2016

The whole thing's worth reading. Here's one representative passage:

As part of Mike’s quest for a playborhood, he began doing research and visiting neighborhoods in different parts of the country that he thought might fit his vision. The first place he visited was N Street in Davis, Calif., a cluster of around 20 houses that share land and hold regular dinners together. Children wander around freely, crossing backyards and playing in the collective spaces: Ping-Pong table, pizza oven and community garden. Mike told me the story of Lucy, a toddler adopted from China by a single mom who lived on N Street. When Lucy was 3, her mother died of cancer. But before she died, her mother gave every house a refrigerator magnet with a picture of Lucy on it. While the founders of N Street formally adopted Lucy, the entire community supported her. Mike pointed out that the childhood Lucy was having on N Street may be akin to one she might have enjoyed in a village in rural China, but it was extraordinary in suburban America. Lucy could wander around fearlessly, knowing she had 19 other houses where she could walk right in and expect a snack.

Mike spent some time in the Lyman Place neighborhood in the Bronx, where grandmothers and other residents organized to watch the streets — so dangerous that children were afraid to play outside — and block them off in the summer to create a neighborhood camp, staffed by local teenagers and volunteers. Mike also found his way to Share-It Square in Southeast Portland, Ore., a random intersection that became a community when a local architect mobilized neighbors to convert a condemned house on one corner into a “Kids’ Klubhouse”: a funky open-air structure that features a couch, a message board, a book-exchange box, a solar-powered tea station and toys.

Universality of facial experssions is being questioned

Science Magazine, 17 Oct 2016:

For or more than a century, scientists have wondered whether all humans experience the same basic range of emotions—and if they do, whether they express them in the same way. In the 1870s, it was the central question Charles Darwin explored in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. By the 1960s, emeritus psychologist Paul Ekman, then at the University of California (UC) in San Francisco, had come up with an accepted methodology to explore this question. He showed pictures of Westerners with different facial expressions to people living in isolated cultures, including in Papua New Guinea, and then asked them what emotion was being conveyed. Ekman’s early experiments appeared conclusive. From anger to happiness to sadness to surprise, facial expressions seemed to be universally understood around the world, a biologically innate response to emotion.

That conclusion went virtually unchallenged for 50 years, and it still features prominently in many psychology and anthropology textbooks, says James Russell, a psychologist at Boston College and corresponding author of the recent study. But over the last few decades, scientists have begun questioning the methodologies and assumptions of the earlier studies. [...]

Based on his research, Russell champions an idea he calls “minimal universality.” In it, the finite number of ways that facial muscles can move creates a basic template of expressions that are then filtered through culture to gain meaning. If this is indeed the case, such cultural diversity in facial expressions will prove challenging to emerging technologies that aspire to decode and react to human emotion, he says, such as emotion recognition software being designed to recognize when people are lying or plotting violence.

“This is novel work and an interesting challenge to a tenet of the so-called universality thesis,” wrote Disa Sauter, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, in an email. She adds that she’d like to see the research replicated with adult participants, as well as with experiments that ask people to produce a threatening or angry face, not just interpret photos of expressions. “It will be crucial to test whether this pattern of ‘fear’ expressions being associated with anger/threat is found in the production of facial expressions, since the universality thesis is primarily focused on production rather than perception.”

Late Fall in Liberty State Park

Ethical Criticism and “Darwinian” Literary Study

Angus Fletcher, Another Literary Darwinism, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter 2014, 450-469.

It opens (450):

There are, Jonathan Kramnick has remarked, just two problems with literary Darwinism: it isn’t literary and it isn’t Darwinism. By allying itself with Evolutionary Psychology, it has not only eliminated most of the nuance from contemporary neo-Darwinism but reduced all literature to stories, taking so little account of literary form that it equates “Pleistocene campfire” tales with Mrs. Dalloway (“ALD,” p. 327).

Most of the article is intellectual history: Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells and the “New Biographers” in the early 20th century. From my point of view it’s all preliminary throat-clearing until very near the end.

What has caught Fletcher’s attention is the interest in behavior (p. 467):

There are no religious commandments or categorical imperatives or natural rights or anything else to give a spine to human life. This state of absence, as the Victorians discovered (and more recent thinkers such as Thomas Nagel have lamented), is unlivable. Because we are participants in a physical world, we must do something, and rather than surrendering us to the blind impulses of nature or the idols of moral idealism Huxley’s literary Darwinism reminds us of a neglected source of practical ethics: behavior. Over the past fifty years, the traditional place of behavior in ethics has been diminished by new trends in both the biological sciences and literary criticism.

Continuing on (p. 468):

To begin with, behavior is purely physical, and so it survives Darwinism’s metaphysical purge untouched. Moreover, as the New Biography demonstrates, the behaviors (or to use a more literary term, the practices) encouraged by literature can foster a sense of purpose, meaning, and hope that Darwin’s theory cannot. Such practices are not absolute or prescriptive — the more we explore the diversity of our literary traditions, the more we recover a library of different possibilities — but they do allow us to transition from a theoretical existentialism into a practical experimentalism. Where raw Darwinism carries us to a state of general tolerance, literature can help us seek the practices that allow us to thrive in our own particular fashion.

And now we get the payoff, ethical criticism (468):

If Darwinism leads toward a negative approach to ethics, and if literature’s role in this ethics is behavioral, then a major focus of literary Darwinism will be to identify literary forms that increase our ethical range by inhibiting intolerant behaviors. Many such behaviors originate in what seem to be permanent features of our brains: our emotional egoism, for example, or our diminished empathy for people of a different phenotype. Nevertheless, these behaviors can be reined in by other areas of our cortex, and if literature could uniquely facilitate such reining in, then it could be claimed as a Darwinian remedy for some of the antipluralist outcomes of natural selection.

And (469):

Where existing cognitive studies of literature have suggested that literature can exploit or improve our existing mental faculties, this behavioral approach to literary Darwinism thus opens the possibility that literary form might liberate us from certain aspects of our evolved nature. That is, instead of being a biological adaptation, literature could help us adapt our biology. This possibility is, of course, speculative. To test it would require intensive collaboration between literary scholars and biologists, and, as Kramnick points out, recent literary Darwinists have done little to foster the mutual respect necessary for such cooperation to occur. Yet here again, Huxley can offer us hope. Rather than displaying a “literary . . . resistance to biology,”84 his version of literary Darwinism clears away Lamarckism, vitalism, and other forms of pseudoscience. And rather than reducing literature to Pleistocene stories, it shows that works such as Eminent Victorians can encourage original ways to respond to our natural condition. Huxley, in short, makes evolution more Darwinian and life more literary, so, unlike the literary Darwinism that inspires Kramnick’s critique, Huxley’s version does not imply a zero-sum contest between aesthetic and biological value. Instead, it does for Darwinism and literature what it did for the warring subfields of evolutionary biology in the 1940s. Revealing them as partners, it urges them to embrace the comic opportunity of life.

Just what this means in practical detail is not at all obvious to me, nor is it to Fletcher. He seems to have some idea that, yes, evolution has bequeathed us a human nature, but we’re not necessarily stuck with it.

I’m with him. My preferred metaphor for thinking about this is that of board games, such as checkers, chess, or Go. Biology provides the board, the game pieces, and the basic rules of the game. But to play a competitive game you need to know much more than those rules. The rules tell you whether or not a move is legal, but they don’t tell you whether or not a move is a good one. That’s a higher kind of knowledge. Call it culture. Culture is the tactics and strategy of the game.

Literature, among other cultural practices, is a compendium of tactical and strategic practices. But a psychology that is going to tell us how those practices are constituted out of, constructed over, the raw stuff of biology will have to be more robust than any psychology currently being employed either by the Darwinians or the cognitivists. It will need the constructive capacities inherent in computational approaches, a matter which I’ve discussed often enough, see e.g. my working paper On the Poverty of Cognitive Criticism and the Importance of Computation and Form, or these posts.

High tech partnership to ease public anxiety about computers and robots talking all the jobs

From the NYTimes, Sept 28:

The Partnership on AI, unites Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft in an effort to ease public fears of machines that are learning to think for themselves and perhaps ease corporate anxiety over the prospect of government regulation of this new technology.

The organization has been created at a time of significant public debate about artificial intelligence technologies that are built into a variety of robots and other intelligent systems, including self-driving cars and workplace automation. [...]

The group released eight tenets that are evocative of Isaac Asimov’s original “Three Laws of Robotics,” which appeared in a science fiction story in 1942. The new principles include high-level ideals such as, “We will seek to ensure that A.I. technologies benefit and empower as many people as possible.”

Michelle Obama and the Stealth Transition: Gardens Across America

Just a reminder about the out-going First Lady. Originally posted on 8.31.12.

The way I see it, the smart money is on First Lady Michelle Obama, not to do a Hillary and go for the Big One in a later Presidential Ritual Contest (aka election). No, to do an Eleanor (Roosevelt) and have a major effect on the nation while her husband does the military strut.

How, pray tell, will she do this? you ask. With her garden, says I, with her garden.

Veggies for Health

As you may know, she’s very much interested in gardening, in particular, growing vegetables. She’s set up a garden on the Whitehouse lawn, grown veggies, had them served in the Whitehouse and has recently published a book on gardening and nutrition.

That’s her angle on gardening. Vegetables are good and good for you. They’re essential to a proper diet, and a proper diet is necessary to prevent childhood obesity.

Her interest in and commitment to gardening is deep, predating her husband’s nomination:

"Back then, it was really just the concept of, I wonder if you could grow a garden on the South Lawn?" Michelle Obama says. "If you could grow a garden, it would be pretty visible and maybe that would be the way that we could begin a conversation about childhood health, and we could actually get kids from the community to help us plant and help us harvest and see how their habits changed."

She was a city kid from Chicago's South Side who had never had a garden herself, though her mother recalls a local victory garden created to produce vegetables during World War II. One childhood photo included in the book shows Michelle as an infant in her mother's arms — the resemblance between Marian Robinson in the picture and Michelle as an adult is striking — and another depicts a young Michelle practicing a headstand in the backyard.

... After the election, she broached her idea to start the first vegetable garden on the White House grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden in the 1940s.

Since the garden's groundbreaking in 2009 — just two months after the inauguration — she has hosted seasonal waves of students from local elementary schools that help plant the seeds. Groundskeepers and dozens of volunteers weed and tend the garden. Charlie Brandts, a White House carpenter who is a hobbyist beekeeper, has built a beehive a few feet away to pollinate the plants and provide honey that Michelle Obama says "tastes like sunshine."

So, the First Lady has a garden on the Whitehouse lawn and she’s preaching the garden gospel. Good enough.

Gardens in the Transition

The thing is, regardless of why a family or a community decides to grow a vegetable garden, the moment they start doing so, they’re also participating in the Transition Movement. By that I mean the movement started by Rob Hopkins in England and that now has groups all over the world:

The Transition Movement is comprised of vibrant, grassroots community initiatives that seek to build community resilience in the face of such challenges as peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis. Transition Initiatives differentiate themselves from other sustainability and "environmental" groups by seeking to mitigate these converging global crises by engaging their communities in home-grown, citizen-led education, action, and multi-stakeholder planning to increase local self reliance and resilience. They succeed by regeneratively using their local assets, innovating, networking, collaborating, replicating proven strategies, and respecting the deep patterns of nature and diverse cultures in their place. Transition Initiatives work with deliberation and good cheer to create a fulfilling and inspiring local way of life that can withstand the shocks of rapidly shifting global systems.

Distort and the Red Trees

An Empirical Study of Abstract Concepts

Felix Hill, Anna Korhonen, Christian Bentz, A Quantitative Empirical Analysis of the Abstract/Concrete Distinction, Cognitive Science 38 (2014) 162–177.

Abstract: This study presents original evidence that abstract and concrete concepts are organized and rep- resented differently in the mind, based on analyses of thousands of concepts in publicly available data sets and computational resources. First, we show that abstract and concrete concepts have differing patterns of association with other concepts. Second, we test recent hypotheses that abstract concepts are organized according to association, whereas concrete concepts are organized according to (semantic) similarity. Third, we present evidence suggesting that concrete representations are more strongly feature-based than abstract concepts. We argue that degree of feature-based structure may fundamentally determine concreteness, and we discuss implications for cognitive and computational models of meaning.

From the concluding remarks (173-174):

Instead of a strong feature-based structure, abstract representations encode a pattern of relations with other concepts (both abstract and concrete). We hypothesize that the degree of feature- based structure is the fundamental cognitive correlate of what is intuitively understood as concreteness.

By this account, computing the similarity of two concrete concepts would involve a (asymmetric) feature comparison of the sort described by Tversky. In contrast, computing the similarity of abstract concepts would require a (more symmetric) comparison of rela- tional predicates such as analogy (Gentner & Markman, 1997; Markman & Gentner, 1993). Because of their representational structure, the feature-based operation would be simple and intuitive for concrete concepts, so that similar objects (of close taxonomic cat- egories) come to be associated. On the other hand, for abstract concepts, perhaps because structure mapping is more complex or demanding, the items that come to be associated are instead those that fill neighboring positions in the relational structure specified by that concept (such as arguments of verbs or prepositions). Intuitively, this would result in a larger set of associates than for concrete concepts, as confirmed by Finding 1. Moreover, such associates would not in general be similar, as supported by Finding 2. [...]

Linguists and psychologists have long sought theories that exhaustively capture the empirical facts of conceptual meaning. Approaches that fundamentally reflect association, such as semantic networks and distributional models, struggle to account for the reality of categories or prototypes. On the other hand, certain concepts evade satisfactory charac- terization within the framework of prototypes and features, the concept game being a prime example, as Wittgenstein (1953) famously noted. The differences between abstract and concrete concepts highlighted in this and other recent work might indicate why a general theory of concepts has proved so elusive. Perhaps we have been guilty of trying to find a single solution to two different problems.

I note that they say nothing about conceptual metaphor theory.

The Art of Jamie Bérubé

I’ve consolidated my posts about the art of Jamie Bérubé into a single document with the title Jamie’s Investigations: The Art of a Young Man with Down Syndrome. You can download it at the usual places:

Academica.edu: https://www.academia.edu/29195347/Jamie_s_Investigations_The_Art_of_a_Young_Man_with_Down_Syndrome

SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2853372

Abstract, table of contents, and introduction are below.

* * * * *

Abstract

Jamie Bérubé is a young man with Down syndrome in his early twenties; he has been drawing abstract art since he was eleven. So far he has explored five types of imagery: 1) fields of colored dots in a roughly rectangular array, 2) tall slender towers with brightly colored horizontal ‘cells’, 3) pairs of concentric colored bands with one pair of concentrics above the other, 4) colored letterforms above a set of colored concentric bands, and 5) arrangements of fairly complex biomorphic forms. Taken together types 1&2 exhibit one approach to the problem of composing a page: place a large number of small objects on the page in a regular array. Types 3&4 exhibit a different approach: position relatively large objects in the center of the page. In some ways Bérubé’s fifth approach, arrangements of biomorphic objects, can be considered a synthesis of the two other approaches. Moreover the individual objects appear life-like and their arrangement on the page is dynamic, properties not otherwise evident in Bérubé’s art. It is his most recent form of art and may be considered the product of long-term experimentation.

CONTENTS

About Jamie Bérubé and His Art 2

Emergence: Jamie Discovers Art 3

On Discovering Jamie’s Principle 9

Scintillating Rhythm: Towers of Color 14

Composition: Concentrics and Letterforms 21

Biomorphs, Geometry, and Topology 32

What We Have Discovered? 39

Jamie’s Evolution (so far) 39

Biomorphic Complexity 40

Color, Eye Movement, and Composition 42

About Jamie Bérubé and His Art

This is about the art of Jamie Bérubé, who has Down syndrome. He is the son of Michael Bérubé, who has just published a book about him: Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up (Beacon Press, 2016). Michael–I can call him that, as he is a friend–wanted to include a generous selection of Jamie’s art in the book, but, as you know, color reproduction is expensive. Instead, he put it online . I took a look, became fascinated, and decided to write a series of posts about it.

Jamie has settled on a few themes and motifs and has covered countless sheets of paper with them. He has no interest in figurative art; all his work is abstract. I suspect that is because the relationship between what you see on the page, as an artist, and what you do as you draw is quite direct in the case of abstract art, but oddly remote for figurative art.

I suspect that is because the relationship between what you see on the page, as an artist, and what you do as you draw is quite direct in the case of abstract art, but oddly remote for figurative art. While natural scenes often have a complexity that is easily avoided in abstract imagery, that is not, I suspect, the primary problem. The primary problem is that the world exists in three dimensions while drawing surfaces have only two dimensions. Figuring out how to project the 3D world into a 2D surface is difficult, so difficult that artists have at times taken to mechanical means, such as the camera obscura, a pinhole device used to project a scene onto a flat surface where the artist can then simply trace the image. Some years ago David Hockney caused a minor scandal in the art world when he suggested that the some of the old masters used mechanical aids, such as the camera obscura, rather than drawing guided only by the unaided eye.

But that’s a digression. The point is simply that figuring out how to place a line on a flat surface so that it accurately traces the outline of what one sees, that is a very difficult thing to do, so difficult that many artistic traditions have simply ignored the problem. By choosing to work only with abstract imagery, Jamie sidesteps that problem. He has chosen to work with round dots, concentric bands, rectangular towers and cells, and intriguingly biomorphic geometric objects. While that is a limitation, we should note that many fine artists have opted for abstraction over the last century and that a major family of aesthetic traditions, those is many Islamic nations, have eschewed representational art (as sacrilegious) and developed rich traditions of calligraphy and geometric patterning.

Jamie has chosen materials he is comfortable with and has thrived from doing so. What of others with Down syndrome? The late Judith Scott had Down syndrome and she achieved international acclaim as a fiber artist. Michael informs me, however, that he doesn’t know of anyone else with Down syndrome who draws as extensively as Jamie does. Is Jamie’s level of artistic skill that rare among those with Down syndrome? I certainly have no way of knowing.

What would happen if children with Down syndrome were exposed to Jamie’s art, perhaps even watch him doing it (most likely through video or film)? Would they imitate him and develop their own preferred motifs and themes? Could people be trained to teach the Jamie method?

Ursula Le Guin profiled in The New Yorker

Julie Phillips writes:

Ursula absorbed these stories, together with the books she read: children’s classics, Norse myths, Irish folktales, the Iliad. In her father’s library, she discovered Romantic poetry and Eastern philosophy, especially the Tao Te Ching. She and her brother Karl supplemented these with science-fiction magazines. With Karl, the closest to her in age of her three brothers, she played King Arthur’s knights, in armor made of cardboard boxes. The two also made up tales of political intrigue and exploration set in a stuffed-toy world called the Animal Kingdom. This storytelling later gave her a feeling of kinship with the Brontës, whose Gondal and Angria, she says, were “the ‘genius version’ of what Karl and I did.”

Gifts:

In fact, it was the mainstream that ended up transformed. By breaking down the walls of genre, Le Guin handed new tools to twenty-first-century writers working in what Chabon calls the “borderlands,” the place where the fantastic enters literature. A group of writers as unlike as Chabon, Molly Gloss, Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler, Junot Díaz, Jonathan Lethem, Victor LaValle, Zadie Smith, and David Mitchell began to explore what’s possible when they combine elements of realism and fantasy. The fantasy and science-fiction scholar Brian Attebery has noted that “every writer I know who talks about Ursula talks about a sense of having been invited or empowered to do something.” Given that many of Le Guin’s protagonists have dark skin, the science-fiction writer N. K. Jemisin speaks of the importance to her and others of encountering in fantasy someone who looked like them. Karen Joy Fowler, a friend of Le Guin’s whose novel “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves” questions the nature of the human-animal bond, says that Le Guin offered her alternatives to realism by bringing the fantastic out of its “underdog position.” For writers, she says, Le Guin “makes you think many things are possible that you maybe didn’t think were possible.”

BFF hanging out at Wayquay's

Jamie’s Investigations, Part 6: What We Have Discovered

When I started investigating Jamie Bérubé’s art I had no particular expectations, just a reasonable belief that it would be worthwhile. Now that I’ve examined each of his genres it is time to review the investigation. I want to begin with a quick overview of his aesthetic evolution, and then take up some details.

Jamie’s Evolution (so far)

We can divide Jamie’s work into roughly three phases: 1) Preliminary, 2) Compositions, and 3) Biomorphs. By Preliminary I mean Jamie’s early work, which we examined in On Discovering Jamie’s Principle. Jamie did this between 11 and 14 years old. In this phase the sheet of paper was simply where he made marks of various kinds. Jamie doesn’t have any conception of a sheet of paper as the locus of a particular ‘work’, if you will. Nor did he have any sense of overall composition; he simply placed objects wherever there was room, and, with the exception of some sheets of dots, different kinds of objects could exist on the same sheet.

In the second phase, which we examined in Investigations 1, 3, and 4, Jamie conceives of an individual sheet of paper as the locus for a coherent set of objects. First we examined his dots images, then towers of color, and finally (in a single post) pairs of concentric bands and rows of letterforms paired with a set of concentric bancs. In both the dots and towers schemes Jamie approached the problem of composition with a scheme he could execute with his attention focused on the local area where he is drawing. In the concentric schemes local attention is not sufficient. Jamie has to attend to all four edges when making his initial marks, some of which will not be near one or more edges.

Note that I haven’t observed Jamie drawing. My observations follow from the inherent logic of the drawing situation and take into consideration variations in the images themselves.

For a dots sheet Jamie can start at a top corner and then either move down the sheet, following the adjacent edge or move across the sheet following the top edge. Each successive dot goes next to the previous one; dots are of the same size and same distance apart. When he has finished one row Jamie can begin the next one, right next to the one he has just completed. Jamie continues drawing row after row until either the sheet if filled or until he otherwise stops (perhaps because he is interrupted).

This is Jamie’s simplest kind of drawing. The tower procedure is more complex. I note that we saw examples of dots sheets in his Preliminary phase and towers sheets as well, though the towers were horizontal rather than vertical.

While visually similar, a large number of more or less equally spaced color patches, the towers of color are more complex. For each tower Jamie 1) uses a pen to draw a tall slender rectangle, then 2) he crosses the rectangle with a large number of lines from one side of the rectangle to the other. The cross lines almost always extend beyond the original rectangle. Finally, 3) Jamie uses crayons to fill each cell with color, not bothering to stay strictly within the lines. Starting at either the left of the right edge, Jamie moves across the sheet until it is filled (or he is interrupted).

The two kinds of concentrics sheets are similar in that, in order to draw a set of concentric bands centered on the midline Jamie must attend to the left and right edges. Not having observed him draw I don’t know whether he draws the innermost circle first or the outmost; the latter makes more sense, though, as it make it easier to position the two sets of bands with respect to one another (in one case) or one sect with respect to the letterforms above and the edges left, right, and below. This is a more complex composition problem than Jamie faces with either the dots or the towers. Here Jamie has to conceive of the entire composition before he makes his first marks in a way that isn’t necessary for the dots and the towers. In those cases he has a local procedure which, if followed, will produce a good result. Jamie’s attention has to be more global for the concentrics.

On the whole was Jamie drawing dots sheets and towers sheets before the two types of concentrics sheets? In a sense the answer is yes, because we see such sheets in his early work. We see letterforms and concentric bands in the early work, but they are on sheets with various other graphic objects. We don’t see those compositional forms covering early-phase sheets. If we examined the distribution of sheet-types over the course of months and years, what would we see? What I’m wondering, of course, is whether or not the concentrics began to proliferate only has Jamie had gained confidence from drawing dots and towers. Michael notes, moreover, “He stopped making these towers a few years ago, but recently resumed them, much to our delight.” What’s up with that?

Finally, I have placed the biomorphs in a third phase (though I assume that he’s been doing other kinds of sheets even as he does these). For one thing, as I have noted before, Michael tells me these are his most recent type, “dating over the last couple of years.” Moreover, as I have argued in my post about them, these are more sophisticated than Jamie’s earlier schemes.

Biomorphic Complexity

For one thing, the individual graphic elements are fairly complex. They are irregularly shaped; no two are alike (no, I’ve not checked, but this does seem to be the principle); and each of them has an interior line from one side to another. These objects are individualized in the way that letterforms are (notice that Jamie doesn’t repeat letterforms in the concentrics&letterform sheets). Each is its own little world.