Autistic artist brings a methodic intensity to his drawings

Gregory Blackstock says he speaks 12 languages and is happy to prove it, bellowing greetings in a rapid succession of diverse tongues. Not only does he have perfect pitch, he can play any instrument he picks up but prefers the accordion, because it's loud.

ART REVIEW

GREGORY BLACKSTOCK'S DRAWINGS

WHERE: Garde Rail Gallery, 4860 Rainier Ave. S.

WHEN: Opening tonight, 7-10. Through March 27. Hours: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

He'll be playing his accordion at his opening tonight at 7 at the Garde Rail Gallery. Bring earplugs if you value your hearing.

Garde Rail specializes in outsider art, a bankrupt term for the romantic, late 19th-century idea that the crazed, the criminal, the God-obsessed, the seriously eccentric or otherwise mentally afflicted may possess an aesthetic clarity beyond the reach of the educated, who lose theirs when they leave childhood.

Blight cannot create a bloom. As many have noted in discussions that grew heated midway into the 20th century, a diseased flower that manages to bloom does so in spite of the disease, not because of it.

The argument would be over, save for the artists who continue to come forward, carrying powerful totems they carved on some back porch or paintings they made on beer coasters from a bar in which they spent 40 years pushing a broom.

When these artists are good, they are very good, and they fit no category other than their own.

Blackstock, 58 and autistic, is one. Personally, I heartily dislike the notion that autism gives him a leg up or a taproot to sink in the art version of a collective unconscious. If he weren't afflicted in this way, I think he'd be an artist anyway, a different kind of artist, one whose focus is not so intensely methodical, but an artist, no doubt.

Let's give Blackstock the credit for his accomplishment, not the neurons misfiring in his brain.

His 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. Each of his drawings is a list, and the paper is often cut and taped together into a kind of scroll that catches his successful depictions and lets the others go.

For each kind of thing, there is a different kind of gravity.

His "Single-bar Ladies' Shoe" has a rippling gleam along its toes, and his "Dull Woman's Pump" plods onto the page. His cross-trainer comes with suction cups that hold it steady on the ground, and his "James Bond Movie Villains' Make-Up 'Deadly' Switchblade Shoe 'From Russia With Love' " would be fatal in a kick fight.

Jails loom large, swelling from their bases to their blind, little windows. Nuts for him have the meaning that flowers held for Georgia O'Keeffe. His mackerels look alive, and his baskets cut across cultures, from basketball hoops to Native American grass weave.

Blackstock retired in 2001 after 23 years of washing pots at the Washington Athletic Club. This is his first show and won't be his last.

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