James Castle

About the artist

1899-1977, lived and worked in Idaho

Born in 1899 in rural Garden Valley, Idaho—only nine years after that frontier territory was admitted to the Union—James Castle mined the local landscape of his family’s homesteads and mapped his deeply private domestic world to produce a remarkable body of drawings, collages, and constructions. The singularity of Castle’s communicative impulse and prolific creative practice can be traced to his experiential focus. Profoundly deaf since birth, he never learned how to sign, read, or write in a conventional manner, but instead communicated through the eloquent vehicle of his art. Over the course of a life lived on his family’s three successive farms, he amassed thousands of works on and in paper—his parents’ role as postmasters likely providing much of this ephemera—appropriating fugitive scraps of printed matter and packaging materials for use as surfaces, collage elements, and source material to draw from memory. The bulk of Castle’s work can be classified as drawings, rendered in his preferred medium (chosen over orthodox materials) of stove-soot in saliva—and sometimes a mysterious “color of an unknown origin,” probably pigment extracted from paper-pulp—applied with a sharpened stick as stylus. Known initially for his expressionistic representational landscapes and interior—sensitively drawn, usually monochromatically, from observed rural life and fantasy—Castle has come to be recognized in recent years for the full breadth of his work, which encompasses an important (though perhaps less accessible) body of abstract drawings, color meditations, loosely representational constructions, collages, and text drawings. Working exclusively with humble available materials and always in an intimate scale, Castle epitomizes the bricoleur’s method, particularly in his complex reconfigurations, dissections, and inventions of typeface in his text appropriation drawings and collages. He garnered some local acclaim during his lifetime (including 1963 and 1976 exhibitions at the Boise Gallery of Art) but only achieved international recognition decades after his death in 1977. James Castle's work is now included in major museum collections throughout the U.S., including the American Folk Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; the Boise Art Museum; and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

—Brendan Greaves 

Above: Portrait of James Castle, 1974, © H. Clare Wiser

Bibliography

Artwork

James Castle  Untitled (Morton Salt Girl), n.d.  found paper, color of unknown origin  7 1/2 x 6 inches Collection of Susan Chereskin Photo courtesy J Crist Gallery, Boise

James Castle  Untitled (Barn interior), n.d.  found paper, soot  8 x 9 1/4 inches  Courtesy J Crist Gallery, Boise

James Castle  Untitled, n.d.  found paper, soot  12 x 16 1/2 inches  Courtesy J Crist Gallery, Boise

James Castle  Untitled (Madeline), n.d.  found paper, string, color of unknown origin, soot  8 1/2 x 3 5/8 inches  Collection of Susan Chereskin Photo courtesy J Crist Gallery, Boise

James Castle  Untitled (Shed Interior with Drawings, Constructions, Books, and Objects), n.d.  soot and spit on found paper Sheet (irregular): 8 1/2 x 10 1/8 inches Collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Ann and John Ollman in memory of Maurice and Kathryn Hammond, 1998 Photo by Lynn Rosenthal and Andrea Simon

James Castle  Untitled (Duck), n.d.  found paper, string, soot  20 x 14 1/4"  Courtesy J Crist Gallery, Boise

James Castle  Untitled (Sugar and Creamer), n.d. found paper, string, crayon  Private collection  Photo by Dallas Brennan