Born in the callow, pastoral terrain of remote Garden Valley, Idaho, James Charles Castle (1899-1977) was a “self-taught” artist, (ascertained by contemporary medical specialists as autistic), who created pastiche illustrations from paper salvaged from mail, comic strip images, drawings, assemblage and books. Labeled and often ridiculed as mute, he was thought to be profoundly deaf and dumb, and he refused to be taught to communicate in any of the customary channels of signing.
Life of James Castle
Castle’s most impassioned means of expression was in drawing the domestic interior scenes, rustic architecture and bucolic topography of the agrarian frontier community he knew as his home. He spent decades creating art in an icehouse and desolate chicken shed, making hundreds of what his family came to call "Dreamhouses,” - intricate collage constructions of found string, milk containers, colored papers, and scraps of plain or printed cardboard. Castle interpreted birds and people with the same relevance as doors, books or items of clothing.
Except for a difficult six-month term ending with his expulsion from the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind in 1910, Castle spent his entire life within the confines of his family home and family operated general store and post office. While his folks encouraged his artistic endeavors, Castle was usually sequestered from the outside world – when he wasn’t isolated he was often taunted mercilessly by other children and relatives who would destroy drawings.
Tom Trusky Discovers James Castle
Tom Trusky is the most logical explanation as to why Castle’s artwork has not only prevailed after his death, but how come it has transcended and endured the boundaries of the Idaho artist/bookmaker’s profoundly confined inner world. (Indeed, certain contemporary art historians now believe that Castle's works prefigure many of the major schools of twentieth century art, as he had a mastery of perspective drawing and figural construction.)
Trusky, Director of the Hemingway Western Studies Center and professor of English at Boise State University, wrote an authoritative biography of Castle in 2004. He has authored numerous articles on James Castle and curated Castle exhibitions in Canada, England, and the United States. Not surprisingly, his interest in Castle is as unquenchable as his enthusiasm is boundless.
Trusky moved to Boise in 1970. He says that he’d first learned of Castle’s artwork sometime shortly thereafter from acquaintances vaguely familiar with the inexplicable artistic idiosyncrasies of the self-taught Idahoan; at that time Castle had the pervasive reputation of a strange, imbecilic man whose curious material was impossible to categorize.
“Incorrectly declared retarded, even insane, James Castle seems to have been fascinated with forms throughout his life and was obsessed with making art from an early age,” says Trusky.
“He copied alphabets, numbers, and symbols, and he used a personal glyph, and created his own brand to mark copyright or authorship in his books. No doubt, James was not mentally deficient or uneducable. Nor was he 'dumb' in the sense of being mute, for he could vocalize. The terms cast upon him over the years don’t apply.”
James was an unsociable child, but the Castle family did not comprehend that he could not hear. Gradually his deafness became apparent, as did his vociferous stubbornness.From materials arriving at the Garden Valley post office that his mother and father worked, James visually educated himself by taking advantage of the considerable access he’d been given to a variety of graphic art and ‘found' or fashioned art supplies, and created thousands of images.
Art of James Castle
From packing boxes, Castle figurally recreated his environment by glueing and bounding numerous books with pages of postcards and colored stamps. Cartoon and comic strip images also appear in his booklets and drawings, as do advertisements taken from periodicals and catalogues. Other reprocessed and commonly scrounged materials included newspapers, magazines, liturgical calendars, gardening and agriculture leaflets, Sears and Roebuck catalogues, letters, bills, and bulk mail circulars.
Other scenes in Castle's work are casually redrawn depictions of framed family photographs and, most notably, photographs and photo album pages belonging to James' sister, Nellie. “When we examine and consider images in James' books,” says Trusky. “It’s frequently a series of little, framed portraits lacking only a cancellation mark, it is easy to envisage the young boy recreating a world of postal stamps, influenced also by Catholic calendars with their grids of numbered days and illustrated holy days.”
“Heavily influenced by bulk mail and printed materials, James made drawing after drawing on postal forms to create entire books. Never has the United States Postal System so aided and abetted an artist's development.”
Most Garden Valley inhabitants, says Trusky, saw James as an inert wanderer or a subject for their vicious cruelties, but few knew that as he traversed the steep mountain valley “he was embarking on pioneering art expeditions.”
Castle's art expeditions comprised "applying stove soot combined with his own saliva on the tips of sharpened and whittled twigs," said Trusky. "He devised a unique alternative for graphite or ink to produce his subtly shaded and powerfully linear drawings. From hand-mashed scraps of colored tissue papers, Castle mixed colored paper pulp to produce mysterious works with softly focused forms. Unflaggingly, he sewed small books, approximating a butterfly stitch, using cigarette packs or canned good labels for covers."
“James assiduously inked real and altered alphabets,” continues Trusky, “These alphabets look letterpressed – so finely are they executed. Similarly, he produced book-length collections with numbers and symbols. Here’s a man considered illiterate making books, strange, huh? But, we have examples, hundreds of them, of James trying to communicate his isolation to others.”
James Castle Self Taught Artist
Heedfully and laboriously, Castle practiced creating the illusion of perspective in a drawing and experimented with point of view. On one side of the grey cardboard box that had held Diamond brand matches, he would draw the sandy road leading down through Garden Valley. With the cardboard turned over, James would recreate the opposite view with his sticks and homemade inks.
As with many other “outsider” or self-taught artists who live beyond the boundaries of an ordinary or accepted life, Castle’s difficult circumstances can be “overemphasized to the extent that they overshadow the extraordinary accomplishments of his life’s work,” said Trusky.
“I’m convinced,” says Trusky, “and I’ve since had members of the medical community analyze James’ life and agree, that he was the classic case of a gifted autistic. For example, he continued to use soot and sticks, I believe, because like many autistics, he became secure with these materials and he valued the repetition and familiarity and comfort they brought to him. He’d been misdiagnosed. The fact that he was more than likely autistic doesn’t explain away his genius, but it adds to our understanding and appreciation of the artist.”
Today James Castle's work has many contemporary admirers and 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 and the Art Institute of Chicago. The most voluminous display of Castle’s work, totaling more than 100 pieces, can be found at the Boise Art Museum.
Brian D'Ambrosio - Brian D'Ambrosio is the author of more than 500 published articles and seven books, including From Haikus to Hatmaking: A Year in the Life ...
