A Mom’s Portrait of her son as an artist

Thanks to his detail-oriented mind and incredible memory, he has also helped me find all sorts of misplaced things in the past.

“What are you doing?” he asked the help one time when he noticed she had been sweeping the floor and vacuuming the rugs in earnest. “I’m looking for your mom’s earring,” she answered.

Gabe said he had seen it: “Come, I’ll show you.” And he walked to my room, opened the top drawer of the bedside chest, and took out an earring. He had found it on the floor, recognized that it was mine, and kept it in the drawer.

If I had been told, when Gabe was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at age four, that he would grow up and function someday as my private Sherlock Holmes, I would have found no hope or humor in it.

How could I? Though not bleeding, I had a dagger to my heart. I felt betrayed. I had thought an army of angels was watching over my beautiful baby boy. But here was this doctor telling us about a lifelong disability that would limit Gabe’s chances at finding work, friendship and romance.

Still, we were lucky to have had someone who didn’t say, as most doctors were wont to say to the generation of parents that preceded us, “Your son has autism and there’s nothing you can do about it. Just leave him in an institution to live out his life.” This good man was instead telling us that our son’s future was going to depend on our every choice. Well, then, I wasn’t going to piddle around with such a diagnosis. I left that appointment determined to surround Gabe with favor—because he’s my son and I love him and I’d do everything I could for him to live as good a life as possible, the odds be damned.

On the way home from the clinic, half-crazed with grief, I asked my equally sad husband to stop the car at a mall. Didn’t the doctor say that some autistic kids turn out to have phenomenal music skills? So, I walked into a music store and rented a piano. How would we know if Gabe had any talent for music if there was no piano around?

That was 34 years ago, and guess what happened to the piano. Nothing. Gabe never touched that piano.

Not that he doesn’t like music. He listens to his Spotify all the livelong day. “What’s the title of that song?” he asked me one time that Heartbreak Hotel was playing on the car radio. The song was recorded by Elvis Presley some 30 years before Gabe was born. “I want it on my playlist,” he said to his sister, which meant download it to his phone.

Sometimes, just by the opening bars, he and I simultaneously say “I love this song.” It’s really not uncanny because his preferences, as with his older sister, have been naturally influenced by the music his dad and I listen to—the Beach Boys, Moody Blues, the Beatles, Lennon of the Yoko Ono years, McCartney of the Wings years, Andrea Bocelli, Diana Ross, Annie Lennox, Madonna and so on.

He also loves musicals, from Carousel to My Fair Lady, from The Wizard of Oz to Grease, from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to the more recent Wonka. At the top of his chart are the Disney musicals.

Like many kids with autism, Gabe has loved Disney movies from boyhood. His obsession with these animated fairy tales, in fact, sparked his interest in drawing.

Because he was not allowed to cut his Disney books, of which he had quite a collection, he kept pestering me to draw his favorite characters on paper that he could cut out and move around, much like paper dolls.

Unfortunately, this mother has zero drawing skills. “How about I just write you a new fairy tale?” I’d say to try and appease him. No deal. The poor boy’s frustration over my sorry attempts at drawing often escalated into a tantrum.

Luckily, I discovered a clever way of tracing Disney characters off the book by using onion-skin paper. That made him happy. Once done, I would hand him the paper and, always to my amazement, he would add all the details that I missed. The cute bows on the shoes. A few more whiskers on the chin. And eyelashes. Every Disney princess had to have eyelashes. Even Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck.

Soon Gabe was doing the tracing himself and adding color to his cutouts. Being a perfectionist, he would do his drawing over and over if he made the mistake of coloring beyond the line.

It took a long time for him to be able to color within the lines but when he did, the wait was worth it. Colors are Gabe’s strong suit. He likes bright, vivid colors. He rarely copies the exact color of objects he is painting. Always, he varies the background too. He marches to a different color wheel. Hindi kopyang kopya. In this way, what he paints becomes his own.

My sister Naomi Huertas, herself an artist, gave Gabe his earliest art lessons. She always believed that Gabe could make colorful art and never gave up on him. For weekly lessons, Gabe’s dad took him to artist and art educator Fernando Sena, who gave of his time and knowledge generously to awaken the creativity in Gabe.

His attention to detail is definitely an advantage but his short attention span is limiting. During art lessons, Gabe balks at being given a big canvas because he wants to be done painting before lunch. Believe me, nothing can come between him and his chicken nuggets.

Lacking formal training, unable to grasp the rules of perspective, Gabe is what the sophisticated art world calls a naif artist. His work is instinctive, crude in some aspects, never studied, never self-conscious.

Art by individuals with autism is lumped under outside art, the term used for work created by people “who have not trained as artists or worked within the conventional structures of art production.”

Gabe paints only what he sees. That’s all he is capable of at present. Although he has a photographic memory, he still cannot transfer the images inside his head onto the drawing paper. And he won’t argue with you about the merits or demerits of, say, a particular still-life arrangement because his verbal skills are inadequate. But he’ll sit down and paint whatever you want him to copy, with the precision and singleness of purpose everyone on the spectrum learns so well.

It will be pretentious to say that his strokes and colors have been influenced by Van Gogh, Matisse, Kahlo or O’Keefe, among other artists who are known for using intense colors. The truth is Gabe has not heard of them, and he cannot be bothered to read about art. Now, if Disney makes a movie of their lives, that’s another story.

By 2012, Gabe was trying his hands at drawing people, with his family as his models.

I love his portrait of mom. When I used it as my Facebook profile photo, my friend Sonia Araneta commented that Gabe’s style reminded her of Italian painter Amadeo Modigliani’s elongated faces and figures. “Do we have a budding Modigliani?” she asked. I was just thankful Gabe ignored my double chin.

In 2019, before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, four of Gabe’s paintings went up the walls of ArtAsia Gallery in SM Megamall as part of the Al Perez and Friends exhibit. Uncle Al, who died of a heart attack recently, gave Gabe his first gallery exposure and introduced him to famous artists, the likes of Manny Baldemor, Edgar Doctor, Raul Isidro, to name a few.

As always happens when I’m with Gabe outside the confines of our home, I hovered over him at the exhibit, a bit apprehensive about how he’d respond to this new experience. We even rehearsed before the opening day, just in case someone decided to talked to Gabe:

Mom: Are you an artist?

Gabe: Yes!

Mom: What do you paint?

Gabe: Flowers.

Mom: What do you use?

Gabe: Craypas.

Mom: Who taught you to paint?

Gabe: Tita Honey and Mr. Sena.

Mom: Will you sell your paintings?

Gabe: No . . . Yes.

Mom: How much?

Gabe: P500. 

Mom: Naku, anak, sa frame lang talo pa tayo!

All four paintings sold. So can Gabe make a living out of painting? That’s the big question for me as his mother, now that I’m in the evening of my life.

Gabe is the younger of our two children. When we’ve gone to the light, his sister will be left alone to take care of him. I have no doubt she’s extremely capable of doing so. As the big sister, she has been around ASD from a young age. She has watched us deal with her brother’s disability, watched us love him, watched how the world treated someone like him. The experience has motivated her to study and make a career out of speech pathology.

As a family we had to redesign our life around Gabe and his disability after he was diagnosed. The doctor had said that his future depended on us, so we set our sights on his treatment. In other words, we tried our best to get him off the spectrum, make him “not autistic”—with speech therapy, occupational therapy, applied behavior modification, inclusive classroom education, and extensive in-home tutoring. For a condition that doesn’t come with physical pain, autism sure brings suffering—for both the patient and the family.

Now that he is in his 30s, have we lightened up on our approach to his disability? I think so. We have shifted our focus to what would make his days more pleasurable rather than just less oppressive to him.

This is what I mean when I say to other parents of kids on the spectrum that “there will be better days.”

But, first, we had to do the hard work. We made sure Gabe used his words instead of behaving badly to get what he wanted. We taught him self-care. We gave him functional skills—washing the dishes, watering the plants, folding and putting away clean laundry, chores like that. We got him involved in family gatherings. We took him with us everywhere we went as a family. We didn’t just leave him with the babysitter or the yaya. As the novelist Elif Shafak pointed out in his TED Talk, “If you want to destroy something in this life, be it acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls. It will dry up.”

After getting him more or less adjusted to the world, we shifted gears. I weaned myself from the therapist/teacher role and became full-time Mom. I took Gabe to the movies once a week. His dad encouraged him to try food other than fried chicken, and succeeded in getting him to eat noodles, pork, beef, non-fried chicken, with a side of fresh cucumbers and carrots at every meal. We took him on trips out of town and out of the country. We gave him opportunities to experience the wholesome things that make life worth living. We want him to be himself and have fun.

And now allow me a transcendent moment as Gabe’s Mom to say a prayer for my son. I ask for time and energy to mount an exhibition of his artworks. I ask that he may be given friends who will care for him as he is. I ask that he may not just continue to receive love but learn to give it generously. Amen.