By DePaul Healthy Trailblazer Journal reporters | Lonnie Smith and his son Kambel once had a tumultuous relationship.
When Kambel was a boy, Lonnie said, he couldn’t understand him very well. Kambel was not speaking clearly, but he was expressing a lot of anger. Kambel had been diagnosed with autism, and Lonnie didn’t know how to communicate with him. It was as if there was a wall between them, he said, until Lonnie discovered his son’s talent for art—by accident.
In an interview with the Healthy Trailblazer Journal, father and son recounted their journey from their difficult relationship to one of mutual understanding.
Years ago, Lonnie noticed that the cover of the heating vent in Kambel’s bedroom was tilted. “I went to fix it and discovered there were all of these drawings,” Lonnie said. They were on crumpled-up papers depicting superheroes and villains. “He had a bunch of enemies. One of the enemies was me. I was his archenemy.”
Lonnie found that Kambel’s characters seemed to carry the same sadness he saw in his son’s eyes. Kambel was expressing his feelings through the drawings in ways that words couldn’t say.
“I took the drawings with me to work and wrote stories and brought them home. I started to talk about the stories [with Kambel],” Lonnie said. And the wall between them began to crumble.
An important moment came when Lonnie decided to kill off a character, a car, in one of the stories. He said that Kambel, who had not been speaking clearly until that point, protested, “‘Why do we gotta kill the car?’ I told him if you want the car to live you have to come up with another way.”
By the next day, Kambel had new drawings, Lonnie said, and the drawings changed their relationship and helped bring them closer as father and son. In addition, with Lonnie’s stories and support, Kambel was beginning to explore his artistic talents.
Without training, Kambel moved from drawing to painting on canvas to creating architectural models using cardboard, foam board, glue and paint. He builds these pieces to scale—meaning the proportions match those of the original building—and he does it freehand, without measuring tools, relying entirely on his natural spatial sense and vision.
These abilities make Kambel what the Smith family calls “autisarian,” which is a “person born with superhuman abilities due to the condition called autism.” That’s the definition on the website they’ve created, autisarian.com.
Today, Kambel is an adult, and he and Lonnie continue to work together.
Kambel said his dad went from being a villain in his drawings to being his biggest motivator. “My father reminds me I’m a cardboard genius,” Kambel said.
Illustration by Kiana, 8th grade, De Paul, 2025-2026.
