Gregory Blackstock  The fact that Seattle artist Greg Blackstock
is autistic is both irrelevant and integral to his art. It's
tempting to forget that he's an autistic savant who spent 25
years working as a dishwasher for the Washington Athletic Club
and lose yourself in these sly, funny drawings. The works,
mostly monochrome, are filled with berries, handsaws,
speedboats, fighter planes, freight cars (as in Our Old-Time
Freight Train Equipment, pictured), terriers, Monsters of the
Deep, things that make noise, and police vans, just to name a
few. The captions, with their deadpan, Ripley's Believe It Or
Not tone, are absolutely brilliant, and there's something
strange and wonderful about the way Blackstock crams all sorts
of stuff into his pictures, like an anthropologist or a modern-
day Audubon. As much as he's a talented artist in his own right,
there's no denying that autism is an essential part of these
compulsive, fanatically detailed pictures. Blackstock also
happens to be a talented accordion player (he