Gregory Blackstock, The Great Americas Jays, 2012
(graphite, colored pencil and permanent marker
on paper, 31 x 41 in.)
A show of the self-taught, Northwest artist's recent works on paper opens November 15 at Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle (with a booksigning for his 2006 monograph, Blackstock's Collections, from 6 to 8 p.m.).
The artist, who is autistic, has a prodigious memory for visual objects, musical tone and compositions, and foreign languages. . . . For Blackstock, the world is made up of countless things which need to be identified, ordered, and arranged. One thing or another is seemingly of no greater weight but, once he decides to draw the chosen subject, he seeks to record all of the specific variations within that group.