Art+Psyche

James Castle
Barnyard scene/Garden Valley
Soot and saliva on paper, 25 x 32 cm

Not sure if there’s something about a three year cycle (see my previous post on Billy Benn) but I also last posted on James Castle about three years ago (“artist of silence, grayness and folded cardboard”).

Now I’m experiencing a similar re-run of appreciation of Castle’s work as I recently did for Billy Benn’s. So here are two more pieces of Castle’s work, made with soot and spit, from the Greg Kucera Gallery.

The gallery site has some interesting notes from a Village Voice article: Home Alone – Visual art review from the exhibition at The Drawing Room, New York by Jerry Saltz:

Castle was especially good at establishing complex stratas of space. In one drawing of a farmhouse, he positions himself just beyond the building, so that the porch is very close-up, then there’s the yard, some trees, a stable, then another house, hills, then sky. By the time your eye reaches the back of the drawing, you’ve traveled an enormous metaphysical distance.

In the indoor drawings, he might focus on a door seen from the side, just a molding, two plates on a cupboard, or the ceiling as seen from the floor. His pictures of beds and bedrooms can stand beside van Gogh’s without losing much. One features an open door through which we catch a tantalizing glimpse of an old-fashioned wood-burning stove in the kitchen and a shaft of sunlight through a window. Everything is quiet, private, and almost unknowable. Back inside the bedroom, the eye relishes a messy dresser top and Castle’s own pictures hung crookedly on wallpapered walls. In another work, he moves about three feet to the left and redraws the scene, this time conjuring a more contained space. Finally, he goes around the side of the bed and draws it again.

James Castle
Landscape with house
Soot and saliva on found paper, 14 x 20 cm

The notes describe a meditative life of rich internal spaces, exquisitely depicted. Castle was deaf and evidently uninterested in signing. One wonders if such spaces served the purpose of maintaining inner health. Winnicott spoke of the potential space between mother and baby, the learning ground by which the authentic self is nurtured. And an augmentation and deepening of space has been for me a powerful aspect to contemplative practice. Further, ideas of building internal space continually arise in the therapeutic work with those in recovery from addictions (drug and alcohol, shopping, eating, subtle cravings). The space between therapist and client is another powerful potential space.

To appreciate Castle’s works, to hold on to and relax into his spaces, is the same work (from Winnicott’s point of view, it’s true play) – a deepening of our sense of what it is live richly in the world, in this sacred moment; to be able to hold on to ourselves. This is Winnicott’s “going on being” (his words for this skill the child learns in its true playing).

Winnicott’s true Self understands space; the individual with a developed sense of the authentic (for them) is able to withstand, by authentically inhabiting internal space. It’s the false Self that collapses internal space; the addictive personality, for example, finds no space between themselves and the desired object. The good news is that with psychotherapeutic work the space develops, the individual is relieved to experience it, to experience internal stratas that are inhabitable, making the moment bearable. Such spaces are akin to those that Castle depicts.

Tagged as: Donald Winnicott, James Castle, Landscape, Outsiders

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