She started as just the center panel, wild in Her garden. When I finished Her, I showed Her to a friend, "Is She done yet?"

My friend looked Her over, "You're not showing me everything; you're hiding from me. Her world is so much bigger and richer, and I want to know the rest."

She gave me the images for the left and right panels then, instantly, so fully formed in my mind's-eye that painting them was almost trivial. Sometimes it happens like that. The chaos-garden She tends produces the flowers of mathematics and machines, the petals of poetry and paint.

I do not think in this language that I type here. All words are a flattening of the internal language by which I think; words are always inaccurate, always a poor translation of what needs to be expressed. I do not think in literal images either, but literal images are closer to my native thought than words. In a literal image, complex, non-linear associations and simultaneous ideas can be expressed in a way that they cannot when they are flattened into linear word-based language. I've always expressed myself through drawing and painting, and drawing is one of my primary means of communicating even mundane ideas.

My primary method of painting involves first creating a collage layer as an under-painting and then drawing the disparate elements of the collage layer together into a cohesive whole through the use of paint. This is not so different from how I process most things--perceiving first what seems like a chaos of disconnected elements and gradually ordering them based on patterns into something comprehensible. Often the patterns that emerge are unexpected and delight me with their beauty.

Dora Raymaker
artist, scientist, autistic
BFA 1995, Maine College of Art
E-mail: image@uncivilization.net