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Modern life is an ever-accelerating barrage of people, buildings, vehicles, creatures, and things. How much can a curious mind take in? And what can it do with all the data? Gregory L. Blackstock, a retired Seattle pot washer, draws order out of all the chaos with a pencil, a black marker, and some crayons.

Blackstock is autistic and an artistic savant. He creates visual lists of everything from wasps to hats to emergency vehicles to noisemakers. In the spirit of the Outsider art of Henry Darger and Howard Finster, Blackstock makes art that is stirring in its profusion and detail and inspiring in its simple beauty. He has never received formal artistic training, yet his renderings clearly and beguilingly show subtle differences and similarities — enabling the viewer to see, for example, the distinctive features of a dolly varden, a Pacific Coast steelhead cutthroat, and fourteen other types of trout.

Each collection is lovingly captioned in Blackstock's unique hand with texts that reflect facts from his research as well as his passions and preferences. Blackstock's Collections contains over 100 extraordinary examples of his splendidly original taxonomy, offering a unique look inside the mind of a man making sense of life through art.

Check out his book here, and more about him here.

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A group of German matchbox labels from the 70s and 80s on flickr - along with more from India, Russia, Japan and Czechoslovakia. Some nice labels on show but also the grouped thumbnails look great! Thanks Shailesh Chavda.

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There's a bit of me that likes organising. It's not universal. Some things have to be arranged others can be left to their own devices. I do like things that are visually organised - collected, grouped, arranged, ordered.

A collection a day is a blog project showing different grouped objects every day for a year. What's the point of that? you might ask. This is for those of you who don't need to ask.

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Some more sheds for Sue. From an American company called Modern Shed based, I think, in Seattle. Sharp, modern styling but a bit pricey. They make larger ones as spare rooms or offices and even multi-sheds as community buildings.