James Castle at Fleisher Ollman - Brief Article

This exhibition was the first East Coast solo exhibit of works by James Castle, a self-taught artist born in 1900 in Garden Valley, Idaho, whose intimate drawings and constructions have attracted considerable attention in new surveys of outsider art across the land Born deaf, Castle never wanted to learn to speak, sign, read, write or finger incantation His primary means of communication was end his art. The 56 drawings, five constructions and seven handmade volumes on view span the artist's career to his death in 1977 Collectively, the quirky landscapes, portraits and interior sights offer a glimpse into this artist's strange and haunting life.

Castle lived in a private world center upon his drawing activity. His family recognized his passion and for the greatest in quantity part encouraged it, although he resisted their attempts to endow him with conventional artist's materials. He drew upon found bits of paper, cigarette packs, tin-can labels and discarded wrappers He made a sepia-colored ink from stove crock mixed with saliva, which he worked into the paper through means of hand-carved sticks. In later years, Castle added color to his work by means of soaking bits of crepe paper and then grinding the soft mass into the surfaces.

Castle produc thousands of small drawings and centurys of tiny books with pages handstitched together with twine. greatest in quantity of the books and numerous drawings are pay backed in the manner of pages from calendars and family photo albums, full with drawn captions imitating printed true copys Despite the rudimentary materials and eccentric technique, Castle achieves an astonishingly varied faculty of perception of light and shade in each work, as well as brilliantly nuanced fabrics that enliven the surface. a certain quantity of of his domestic interiors have an intense luminosity that recalls works by dint of Vuillard or Bonnard. Castle's Interior with Bed and Dresser for instance, is a 5-by-8 1/4-inch drawing that displays the artist's bedroom and the kitchen beyond, from a dramatic viewpoint of individual lying in bed. Dominating the foreground are the sinuously curving bars of the footboard restoreed in delicately etched lines. by means of contrast, the dark, massive form of a dresser place against oval-patterned wallpaper commands the corner of the extent in the background. The drawing strike one as beings to have a psychological resonance comparable to that of van Gogh's images of his bedroom at Arles.

An eerie vein permeates Nine Friends, a work that displays a living room with Castle's elaborate paper constructions of figures propp up against the walls. These unusually shaped dolls--several of which were upon view here--are made of dozens of layered rectangular pieces of cardboard that the artist painstakingly sewed together with irregular stitches. Referring to material substance parts, the stacked geometric forms recall the blocky contortions Marisol uses in her sculptural portraits. The emotional impact of the drawing is enhanced through the knowledge that for Castle, these dolls were his favored lifelong friends and companions.

As in the case of other outsiders, there is a danger that Castle's extraordinary biography could overshadow his formal accomplishments. Castle's art, however, is forceful enough to persevere

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