The Drawings of the Electric Pencil

In 1970, a young boy rifled through a large trash container in Springfield, Missouri. He reached in his hand and pulled out a handmade album knit together with fabric and leather. Opening it, he saw drawings, 283 in all, that had been somewhat lovely sewn together into the old album, each hand numbered, and each drawn on ledger pages from the State Lunatic Asylum No. 3, located in Nevada, Missouri. As art critic and curator Lyle Rexer puts it in his commentary text, “The drawings are mysterious, meticulous and hauntingly lovely.”

We are lucky to have them today, gathered together for us and as lovingly bound in this new book as they were in that original leather and fabric album.

The boy took the drawings, kept them safe and, some 40-odd years later, posted all the drawings on a website that was hosted by a local historian. As author Rexer continues:

“Interest was so intense, it prompted a book dealer from Kansas to make a preemptive strike, driving directly to the owner’s hometown and buying the entire album outright. He then sold them to a St. Louis collector. When the collector decided after the fact that he did not want to tie up so much money in a single purchase, he contacted Harris Diamant, a New York artist who had also seen the Internet images. Diamant bought them, and that is how the drawings have come fully into light.”

Indeed, but that is only the lesser mystery solved—the issue of how the drawings were preserved and brought to light. The mystery of the drawings themselves and of the identity of the Electric Pencil remains.

The Drawings of the Electric Pencil is perhaps the most outstanding collection of American Outsider Art that the reader has ever seen; it is as amazing for the quality of the work as it is for its provenance.

That someone gave a stack of ledger papers to be used for artwork is known. The time of the gift was likely 1910 or soon after, as the papers all are imprinted with a date column listed as “190_,” meaning that they were useless after 1909 and could be freely given.

The artist—likely a patient at the State Lunatic Asylum No.3—is usually considered to have been male, given “his” predilection toward slavishly drawing steam boats, horseless carriages, and other cutting-edge technologies of the day, although some specific plates fly in the face of this: Drawing #124, with lovingly depicts three hand fans, of the sort that ladies often stirred the air with and hid behind, floating in a summer breeze, one decorated with a very small singing bird—and all set against a sky featuring a South-flying school of birds set against a landscape of trees dancing in a gentle wind; or drawing # 134, which contains a meticulous (to use Mr. Rexer’s word) creation of what might be a wedding bower, lushly covered with vegetation that is heavy with fruit and flowers, underneath which sits a long table and matching chairs, with a heavily detailed tablecloth.

The Electric Pencil, whether he was a man or woman, was a poet of sorts, without a doubt. And the assemblage of these drawings, like the gathering together of a book of poems, creates narrative of sorts. Given that the Electric Pencil was at best functionally illiterate, and perhaps even dyslectic, as has been suggested, he perhaps turned to drawing as a means of self-expression when words quite literally failed him.

Even the name the “Electric Pencil” connotes the poetic. It was given the artist because of his drawing #197, a portrait of a lovely lady in high Victorian dress who wears a flowered hat with a plume and points a tiny index finger toward a bouquet of what looks like Indian Paintbrushes. She sits in what appears to be her bedroom, with her elbow leaning on her bedside table and a Victorian highboy on the wall behind her. Above the carefully drawn and penciled-in green and golden frame is the word “ECTLECTRC.” On either side of the word are a quill pen and a sharpened pencil, with the word “PENCIL” carefully written on a straight line running up to the corner of the page. Thus, the “Ectlectrc Pencil” was named.

That we will never know the identity of the artist, or what drove him to draw the things around him, things remembered, and things no doubt shown in Sears catalogs and newspaper photographs, or what joy the artist experienced in recording these images makes them all the more valuable, like a photo album found in the attic of a newly purchased house. As does the fact that the reader is left wondering how many more drawings the Electric Pencil produced over his (or her) time in the State Lunatic Asylum No. #3.

Indeed, we are left to wonder why the Pencil was in the Asylum in the first place. Likely the work of an inmate who was calmed by working with colored pencils, we remember the fact that, in the early part of the 20th century, people were sent to asylums like these for many reasons: for mental illness, yes, but also for being found difficult, a troublemaker, or for simple homelessness. Or perhaps, in the Electric Pencil’s case, for finding himself with a lack of words at a particularly important moment when standing before a judge.

Those who appreciate Outsider Art—that which is produced by those who are not trained formally, or who are self-taught artists—will find much to admire here. The Drawings of the Electric Pencil represents a mother lode of drawings, perhaps the output of an entire lifetime. This is an important work, to be greatly admired.

As commentator Lyle Rexer puts it:

“We could call it the mystery of style. A sense of style, of what look right, is always authorized by an artist’s social setting, but it is animated by a personal sense of the beautiful, and this the Electric Pencil pursues in every line. He takes further some of the visual approaches of early nineteenth century popular art, making all his people’s features, especially their hands and feet, more delicate, refined and fluid. His affinity for design is evident everywhere, and it is hard to imagine an artist who enjoyed the visual experience of social costume (whether in fact or representation) more, unless it were John Singer Sargent.”

Book available only at: http://www.electricpencil.com