A life packed in pictures

6 August 2010
Every week in the Christchurch creative space Floyds Creative Arts, Joanne McGimpsey uses paint and paper to communicate a remarkable inner world.

She writes her name, carefully. Joanne Lynne McGimpsey. Age 39. She's profoundly Deaf so communication is difficult but watching her paint is a pleasure.

She is also autistic, which affects her ability to empathise with other people. But her paintings are full of feeling and much more than just a catalogue of her experiences. A rabbit, drawn with unusual vigour, is the one that bit her – and there's the mark to prove it on the back of her hand. The cigarette, flaming red, is there because she smoked once, and got a mighty telling off. The ice-cream, dripping with flavour, is just all those good things in life.

For Joanne the miracle occurs every Thursday at Floyds Creative Arts, where she uses house paint straight from the pot.

Saturated with images

Tutor Joyce Gunther  says that Joanne has two distinct styles. "When she's calm, she paints a single object. But other works are saturated with images, which represent a busyness in her mind."

Her paintings number in their hundreds. You can see many of them for sale on the walls. Joanne looks at them and bursts out laughing, her cheeks as pink as the puppies in her picture. They’re tiny unformed things, dozens of them, on a purple hillside jammed with flowers and claws and walking boots and ice-creams and rowing boats and a razor- toothed rabbit, all bricked off by a castle with a little hole for arrows. Is this a Sunday picnic or a shootout? She doesn't know, can't tell. But this is her life, packed in pictures. Her illustrations are her way of relating to the world.

Joanne’s mother, Janet, has a tale of her own about the time she made Joanne wild. "She drew a dog with the most ferocious teeth; they were meant for me. I tell you, a picture of Joanne's paints a thousand words.”

At Van Asch School for the Deaf, Joanne made furniture. Later, she sewed from her own patterns. Janet McGimpsey recalls a stunning dress – with a different front and back.

She says Joanne gets her gift from her granddad, a landscape painter who had "the same eye for detail".