James Castle is one of the most unlikely and enigmatic American artists of the twentieth century. Castle was born in 1899 to Frank and Mary Castle in the sparsely-populated mountain community of Garden Valley, Idaho. His parents served as postmasters in Garden Valley from 1901 to 1923, working out of the living room of the family home. James, the fifth of seven surviving children, was deaf from birth. He began drawing at about age six and, from age ten to fifteen, attended the School for the Deaf and the Blind in the Idaho town of Gooding, 150 miles away. The Castle family moved to Star, Idaho, in 1923 and purchased the Star Grinding Mill. Castle never became proficient in reading, writing, or a conventional means of communication. Because of this he was largely excused from the farm’s chores and allowed to spend his time freely. From an early age Castle displayed a great love for drawing, whiling away the hours on pencil representations of his immediate surroundings.
Though Castle lived most of his life in remote rural areas of Idaho, he had access to a much broader world through printed materials. He came of age during the heyday of newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals, all of which were overflowing with rich graphics, photographs, and text that provided inspiration for his art. Printed English texts inundated the family home and Castle studied them at length. His artworks drew almost equally on the physical landscape of his life and the text-based materials that prompted conversation for others, but remained, for him, impenetrable.
Castle made ink by mixing soot scraped from the wood-burning stove with his saliva. His tools were made from sharpened sticks, apricot pits, swabs of cotton, and broken pen nibs. He typically worked at a modest wooden desk, hunched over, inches from the drawing at hand, working quickly and assuredly. Castle meticulously sewed together pieces of cardboard and other recycled materials to create boxes to house his drawings for safekeeping.
Without instruction, Castle taught himself how to create perspective in his drawings. It appears he learned through endless practice, repetition and experimentation, and was largely unaware of the outside art world. Many of Castle’s soot drawings focus on the built environment, such as barn interiors. Castle also regularly collected shards of colored glass and later dipped them in water to survey his surroundings, taking in the blurred, colorful landscape. Other drawings reveal Castle’s careful consideration of color using homemade paints and washes. His color works tend to be more abstract or dreamlike than his soot drawings, prompting some art historians to draw parallels between these works and the rise of Abstract Expressionism in postwar American Art. Perhaps most challenging from our perspective are Castle’s depictions of people that, with their square heads and blank faces, are striking for their combination of his realist and abstract styles.
Castle’s art was known only to his family and friends until 1951 when his nephew shared some of his uncle’s drawings with faculty at his college in Oregon. The interest was immediate. Soon Castle’s art was displayed in galleries in Portland and in Idaho. Sales of Castle’s works allowed his family to buy James the Cozy Cottage trailer in 1963 That same year his art was exhibited at the Boise Art Museum, the highest honor Castle received for his work during his lifetime. Public interest in his art has grown exponentially in the last twenty-five years, including with recent, major exhibitions in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Madrid. Castle died in 1977. His former home near Boise, Idaho is now a cultural center devoted to his work and includes an artist-in-residence venue.