Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
ELECTRIC PENCIL PRESS
The Drawings of the Electric Pencil
Text by Lyle Rexer.
Around the year 1910, a patient at State Lunatic Asylum No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri, who referred to himself as The Electric Pencil, executed 280 drawings in ink, pencil, crayon and colored pencil. These beautiful drawings of animals, people and buildings were executed on both sides of 140 ledger pages, each bearing the name of the hospital in official type across the top, thus dramatizing the interface of the institutional and the creative. The Electric Pencil's drawings were sewn into a handmade album of fabric and leather, which shortly afterwards was lost--for a century. Now that album is presented publicly for the first time since its making, displaying for contemporary audiences the strange and poignant beauty of the drawings. His many portraits--head-and-shoulders or just heads--feature formal, sometimes dazed-looking men and women with elaborate hats or razor-parted hair who stare out of the page with wide, piercing eyes that suggest both a possible chilling regime of "mental health" treatment and the unblinking, unsettling gaze of those who haunt the margins of sanity and society. The handsomely designed hardbound format of The Drawings of the Electric Pencil features an art folio book block within that opens flat. An essay by Lyle Rexer places the work in the broader context of outsider art, in which The Electric Pencil emerges as an artist of singular brilliance.
Sketches by the Electric Pencil.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
THE Magazine
Iris McLister
The Drawings of the Electric Pencil by Lyle Rexer should pique the macabre fascination we have with mental institutions and their inhabitants. This poignant glimpse into the creative mind of an anonymous mental-hospital patient is as mysterious and spooky as any ghost story.
Preview by Eve M. Kahn of the New York Times is excerpted below:
"Four years ago Harris Diamant, a sculptor and art dealer in New York, bought an album cobbled together from early-1900s invoices for services rendered. The service provider was a mental hospital in Nevada, Mo. The lined pages are stamped 'Board of Patients Must Be Paid in Advance.' On about 140 sheets, an unidentified artist, probably a patient, drew eagles, saw blades, chairs, wide-eyed men and women, garden plans, circus menageries and railroad engines with headlights protruding on wires. One drawing has a misspelled title, 'ectlectrc pencil,' so Mr. Diamant hypothesizes that the artist called himself the 'Electric Pencil'. More than that he has not been able to determine, despite consultations with historians and a detective. The album had turned up in 1970 in a trash heap in Springfield, Mo. It was about to be broken up on eBay when Mr. Diamant bought it for an undisclosed sum. After futilely trying to persuade a museum or collector to keep it intact, Mr. Diamant will start selling the sheets for $12,000 each at the Outsider Art Fair … in New York. Mr. Diamant has published a book, The Drawings of the Electric Pencil, and is still puzzling over them. Why is a chef named 'Thoes. Gingr. Snaps' and a man in a bowler hat labeled 'Went Democratic?' The artist hand-numbered the pages, but did he or she want them kept in order? 'Perhaps there is a narrative,' Mr. Diamant said, 'but I can't read it.'"
On the occasion of the Outsider Art Fair, opening Friday, February 11, Eve M. Kahn reports on the extraordinary discovery of a compelling new figure in today's New York Times. Works by the artist, reproduced from The Drawings of the Electric Pencil, are featured below, along with Ms. Kahn's review. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 12.5 x 8.5 in. / 160 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $59.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $70 ISBN: 9780578068329 PUBLISHER: Electric Pencil Press AVAILABLE: 3/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: *not available
Published by Electric Pencil Press. Text by Lyle Rexer.
Around the year 1910, a patient at State Lunatic Asylum No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri, who referred to himself as The Electric Pencil, executed 280 drawings in ink, pencil, crayon and colored pencil. These beautiful drawings of animals, people and buildings were executed on both sides of 140 ledger pages, each bearing the name of the hospital in official type across the top, thus dramatizing the interface of the institutional and the creative. The Electric Pencil's drawings were sewn into a handmade album of fabric and leather, which shortly afterwards was lost--for a century. Now that album is presented publicly for the first time since its making, displaying for contemporary audiences the strange and poignant beauty of the drawings. His many portraits--head-and-shoulders or just heads--feature formal, sometimes dazed-looking men and women with elaborate hats or razor-parted hair who stare out of the page with wide, piercing eyes that suggest both a possible chilling regime of "mental health" treatment and the unblinking, unsettling gaze of those who haunt the margins of sanity and society. The handsomely designed hardbound format of The Drawings of the Electric Pencil features an art folio book block within that opens flat. An essay by Lyle Rexer places the work in the broader context of outsider art, in which The Electric Pencil emerges as an artist of singular brilliance.
