Jamie's Investigations: The Art of a Young Man with Down Syndrome

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.

Keywords: art, psychology, perception, Down syndrome, disability