Blackstock’s Collections: The Drawings of an Artistic Savant

Gregory L. Blackstock
Foreword by Darold Treffert, MD
Introduction by Karen Light, Garde Rail Gallery
Princeton Architectural Press, 2006
Trade paperback, 144 pages
ISBN: 1568985797
$18.95

Gregory L. Blackstock is an autistic savant who creates visual lists. Each drawing presents a category whose boundaries reveal the genius of life’s variety. Once he decides upon a topic—be it airplanes, ants, or Airedale terriers—Greg does meticulous research at the library for details. The resulting freehand drawings offer a unique look inside the mind of an autistic man making sense of life through art.

Drawing is not Blackstock’s only talent. He is an accordionist with a repertoire of hundreds of songs and a talented mimic; he is conversant in a dozen languages and is able to recall events with uncanny precision. Although his mother was an artist, Greg has had no formal artistic training. He began making his pictorial lists at age 40, and in 2004, at 58, he had his first gallery exhibition.

Tributary Books and Seattle’s Garde Rail Gallery are collaborating to produce a book that will introduce Blackstock’s beguiling drawings to a broad audience. This will appeal to readers intrigued by the graphic arts, interested in autism, or simply captivated by Greg’s splendidly original taxonomy.

Purchase this book

Go to Garde Rail Gallery for more information on Gregory L. Blackstock and sample of his drawings.

View sample pages from Blackstock’s Collections

“Blackstock’s method gives a taxonomical calmness to some unruly and unsettling subjects, not just to noisy bells and birds, but to more charged categories, such as prisons, paddy wagons, and World War II bombers. But even the sweeter subjects radiate a kind of anxiety; the sheepshanks, the shoes, the flowers are all pressing in their muchness, in the implied infinite overwhelming variety of things. Blackstock is no automaton; a fine sense of humor and a generous sense of categories relieves some of the anxiety of the drawings.”
—Emily Hall, The Stranger

“The vivid inner logic of Blackstock’s forms has something in common with the slanting, crystalline worlds of medieval illuminated manuscripts, as well as with Agnes Martin’s obsessive graphite grids.”
—Elise Richman, Seattle Weekly

“[Blackstock’s] drawings are wonderful. He uses paper and pencil to make visual lists of what fascinates him: varieties of baskets, nuts and fish, flowers and tools, ships and planes, shoes and jails. He draws from memory the images he has seen in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other source books, starting with outlines and shading in... For each kind of thing, there is a different kind of gravity. This is his first show and won’t be his last.”
—Regina Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligencer