A recent NY Times review has brought James Castle to mind again:
James Castle was the artist of silence, grayness and folded cardboard. Silence because he was born deaf and refused to read, write, speak, sign or finger spell. Grayness because of the velvety, overcast drawings he made all his life: extravagantly tonal images of landscapes, farmyards and interiors rendered in a mixture of soot and spit applied to found paper with sticks and rags. Their muted yet solid forms in some way embodied both Castle’s silent world and his loyalty to it.
And here’s an image from the NY Times slide show accompanying the article – of a wonderful, still farm structure that I’m reading internally as well, as psychic structure.
There are parallels in the life of James Castle with that of José dos Santos (the former lived 1899 – 1977, the latter 1904 – 1996). Both lived their entire lives on rural properties, completely isolated from the mainstream art world; neither could read nor write (although Castle’s “isolation” was much more extreme, since he was also deaf and mute). And in different countries of course, but I’m musing on how from these “isolated” positions such rich inner worlds were lived and materialised into artworks.
And how the world close to us always has available such ever-deeper layers of potential revelation, for those that can investigate, can know “the plenitude of the soul” (Bachelard).
