Autism and a gift for art

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For 25 years, Cory Norton has worked with children who have varying mental disabilities, including many with autism. Invariably, when people learn of his work with the autistic, they assume the same thing: “They think these kids are like ‘Rainman,’ ” says Norton. “They think I’m working with a bunch of Kim Peeks.”

Kim Peek was the famous “savant” from Utah and the subject of the 1988 movie, “Rainman,” with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. In the movie, he was portrayed as having autism, but he had other brain abnormalities — and, of course, an astounding gift of memory.

Norton, who works at West High School now, once worked at the Columbus Community Center, which also employed Peek (he died in 2009 in Murray). Norton personally witnessed Peek's abilities. Peek, for instance, memorized the name of everyone who had ever played on the University of Utah basketball team, which has been around since 1908. If you asked Peek who was on the team in 1949, he could tell you.

“We got computers when they first came out and a lot of employees were having trouble with them,” recalls Norton. “Kim had memorized the Mac manual. If someone asked how do we fix a certain problem, he would quote the page number and the page from memory.”

Norton has spent his career working with people who have mental disabilities, but he has never seen another “Rainman.” “I get a lot of questions from people thinking that they’re all like 'Rainman,' but they’re not,” he says. “But they all have unique abilities. It’s surprising what people with autism can accomplish.”

He points to one of his current students as an example — Chayanne Garcia, a 14-year-old West High student with autism. Norton and his aides marvel at the boy’s artwork. Chayanne spends most of his waking hours making paper re-creations of the puppets he sees on "Sesame Street." It might not sound like much, except he does it entirely from memory and never uses scissors. After sketching the character, he uses his fingers and sometimes his teeth to slowly and meticulously tear the shape of the character out of the paper.

Without looking at a picture or a TV, he remembers to include every detail in his work — the hair, the shape of the mouth, the ears, everything. He creates them in 3D — open the mouth of one of the characters and there’s a tongue.

He colors them with crayons, often mixing crayons to create the exact color he saw on the TV version of the character. Most kids have to be taught hues and values, but he seems to have figured it out for himself; he seems to have discovered, for instance, that mixing yellow and red make orange and so forth.

“His artwork is fantastic because it is all done from memory,” says Sharon Vinick, a speech therapist.

He looks at the computer occasionally to find new characters and then re-creates them from memory. He churns out five to 10 of these creations a day, often with his coat draped over his head. Some of the art might be described as impressionistic. As his mother, Ivonne, explains it, “Sometimes he doesn’t want the character to look exactly like it is — he does it his own way. It’s his interpretation.”

He used to throw away his artwork at the end of the school day and start over the next day, but then someone encouraged him to save them in a large cardboard box. Chayanne has filled the box with hundreds of his puppets. He has another large collection at home. Each year he seems to be more prolific.

“We try to find places where they have good prices for paper,” says Ivonne.

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