"Eugene Andolsek (1921–2008) was an American artistic draughtsman. ...born in Adrian, West Virginia, USA. His mother's homemade quilts and crochet pieces became principal influences for his drawings. In 1953 Andolsek became a stenographer for the Rock Island Railroad. He spent almost every evening for the next 50 years drawing intricately patterned pieces, using basic drawing instruments and graph paper, as a means of diverting his thoughts from worrying about work. He was soon creating abstract compositions of remarkable geometric and chromatic complexity and produced several thousand kaleidoscopic designs. After being made redundant, Andolsek developed an irreversible eye disorder and became almost blind, provoking him to consider suicide...."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Andolsek "... A former railroad employee, he lives in a senior citizens' home in Crabtree, Pa., and stopped painting two years ago because of failing eyesight. He has never shown before. He doesn't even consider his sumptuously patterned, labor-intensive colored-ink drawings to be art, and seems to disapprove of anyone who does. The thing is, the work is really good, rich and solid, but also trippy and full of little elegancies, which makes it look very now. But why, if Mr. Andolsek wasn't thinking art, or audience, did he do what he did for so long, drawing thousands of pictures over 50 years? Because he wanted to, and because he had to, which in his case are more or less the same thing. The act of drawing and painting, he has said, helped to ease a debilitating anxiety that had dogged him all his life. Once he started a drawing, the anxiety lifted. Relief arrived as a state of entrancement. One minute he'd be sitting at his kitchen table with sheets of graph paper and a pen filled with ink. The next, he'd be aware that hours had passed, and he'd done a drawing. What was the mechanism ... http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/arts/design/the-desire-to-draw-sometimes-a-compulsion.html undefined

More on Google