Last Night: Gregory Blackstock At Garde Rail Gallery

There he sat, perched on a stool in the middle of the Garde Rail Gallery, dressed in a knit cap and bulky winter coat, squeezing the breath out of his old accordion. For the opening reception of his latest works, Gregory Blackstock did the other thing he does best; he belted out Christmas carols in his grumbly voice.

It's a real trip seeing art aficionados in thick-framed glasses react to an artist like Blackstock, who is an autistic savant. Sometimes, it's like Blackstock's too real for them. He's the kind of guy who shows up to his own art openings with a can of pasteurized cheese in his back pocket...and not an ounce of irony about it.

Blackstock's new pieces were all completed over the last year, some of them reflecting his travels to the East Coast. About fifteen of them are drawings of Vermont sugar maple factories, maple sugar candy fruits, and assorted maple-themed products such as maple-leaf shaped candies and dark maple leaf syrup bottles. Other pieces included in the new collection are catalog-style illustrations of various fireworks, turnips, Rottweilers, and extinct American birds. As with his previous work, each piece is child-like, and they all offer the chance to learn something you probably never knew. For instance, did you know there is a difference between black-and-tan rottweilers and black-and-rust rottweilers? Or that the black-and-rust rottweiler is the most common? Did you also know there were eight different kinds of single-color bell peppers?

Among my favorites, however, were the dense, text-heavy pieces, such as the one above. Here's Blackstock makes massive informative listings of such things as "Theme Park Law & Order Signs" (above), "Augmented Triad Chords", "Major Key Chromatic Scale", "Major Foreign Alphabets", and his own "Greg's Improved Special Exotic Soups and Dishes". I could get into all sorts of reasons for why I dig these text-heavy pieces (the gray scales, the obsessiveness, etc.), but really, I dig them because I like Blackstock's handwriting.