Gregory Blackstock

1946-2023 · Seattle, Washington, USA

For twenty-five years he washed pots at a Seattle athletic club. On his own time he drew the complete taxonomy of nearly everything: every dog breed, every knot, every tool.

The life

Blackstock was born in Seattle in 1946 and was misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia before being recognised as an autistic savant. He worked as a newspaper carrier, a hotel janitor and then for twenty-five years as a dishwasher at the Washington Athletic Club, where he began drawing for the employee newsletter. His first gallery show came in 2004, when he was fifty-eight, and the book Blackstock’s Collections followed in 2006, with an animated PBS short about him in 2021. He died in Lacey, Washington, in January 2023, one day after his seventy-seventh birthday.

The work

Great classificatory arrays in pencil, black marker and coloured pencil: dog breeds, plants, tools, vehicles, musical instruments, knots and buildings, researched from library reference books, each sheet hand-titled in carefully coordinated lettering. The obsessions run personal, from Vermont buildings tied to his grandmother’s gifts to the dogs he loved but could never own. His work is held by the Blanton Museum of Art, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and the Seattle Art Museum.

Why we love them

The world is a mess and Blackstock filed it. His lists beat any encyclopaedia because you can see the love in every entry.

Go deeper

• Gregory Blackstock at the Outsider Art Fair
• Gregory Blackstock on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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