James Castle (1899-1977) was a prolific artist and entirely self-taught. He worked with a broad range of found materials and subject matter, making it difficult to align him with any one particular art movement.
Castle’s artwork is often grouped into 5 categories: Soot-and-Spit, Colorworks, Books, Text Works, and Constructions. Many of his works span more than one of these categories and introduce elements that are difficult to categorize at all.
Castle is probably best for his soot-and-spit drawings and was incredibly adept in this technique. He achieved a remarkable range in tones by carefully controlling the ratio of soot to saliva, and using specific application tools, ranging from hand-sharpened sticks to wads of fabric.
While many of these monochromatic works depict his home and daily views, others offer a glimpse into his imagination through abstracted and invented imagery. From these works a material autobiography emerges, capturing the very essence of the world and time in which Castle lived.
Interestingly, Castle worked with at least two distinct types of soot that would have been used to create different effects.
One type of soot was a very fine, slightly greasy power that was mixed with saliva to create a viscous ink. This ink could be applied either as a wash or with a sharpened stick, akin to a feather quill, to create precise lines. The other soot type was much courser and could not be mixed down with saliva effectively, making it a more appropriate material for dry application.
While saliva might seem like a strange material to work with, it actually is much more effective, and archival, than water in bonding the soot to whatever substrate Castle was working on.
The Castle family took part in gathering soot for Castle’s art, banging out the stovepipe whenever the home stove was cleaned and setting aside the gathered soot for use. These stockpiles of soot would be kept in large mason jars or coffee cans.
His sister Peggy was known to gather any materials she thought he could use into a small pile on the kitchen counter, which Castle collected daily. When the family modernized their heating system to a gas furnace, Castle’s brother-in-law Guy Wade began collecting soot from the Boise Veteran’s Hospital where he worked, to ensure Castle had access to his chosen medium.
As well as developing incredible mastery over his materials, Castle also taught himself advanced techniques, such as linear perspective. This drawing of the Eugene Street house is an excellent example of Castle's technical skill as an artist.
Castle frequently made double-sided drawings to show different views of the same subject. He used this technique to explore the rooms of his home, the landscapes around him, and the buildings on his family's property.
This artwork offers a unique glimpse into the interior of the Castle family home. The living room depicted is the same space as the gallery; suggestions of the original interior remain visible in the ceiling and walls today.
There is a square patch in the ceiling on the south side of the gallery which covers a stovepipe hole indicating the former location of a wood-burning stove. The two original doors shown in the drawing are still in place on the north wall.
This moody drawing depicts the Shed's interior. The Shed served as Castle's primary living space and studio for over 30 years. Compared to the contemporary photograph below, we can see the ways the Shed has, and hasn't, changed since Castle's time on site.
Although ice cream cartons were typically reserved for Castle's more colorful artworks, they proved to be a perfect substrate for his soot-and-spit drawings too. The Castle family must have been particularly fond of vanilla ice cream, as it is the most common flavor represented on the reverse side of these artworks.
With their square heads, boxy bodies, and blank faces, James Castle’s depictions of the human figure are as striking as they are mysterious.
This soot work, drawn on a piece of discarded mail, is of Castle's Cozy Cottage Trailer. Castle's sister and brother-in-law purchased the Trailer in 1963. As with the Shed, the Trailer stood just outside the family home, allowing Castle to remain close to his family while giving him a much-desired space of his own. He lived and worked in the Trailer for the last 15 years of his life.
Calendars likely influenced Castle's frequent use of grid structures. Rather than housing numbers, these grids contained an assortment of images and patterns.
The imagery in this grid is challenging to recognize because its orientation is perpendicular to the rest of the piece. By reimagining the orientation, you can discern two panels from a comic-style scene with figures speaking to each other in voice bubbles.
The back of this work reveals a doctor's bill from 1956 for Castle's brother-in-law, Guy Wade. The Route #3 address was the mailing address for this neighborhood through the 1940s. The street name Castle Drive was then used interchangeably with Route #3 until the late 1950's when the name change became permanent. Rural delivery service was a standard for this area up through the 1950s.
Although Castle did not communicate through speech or writing, he was clearly fascinated with how written language functioned. He represents text in a variety of complex ways which seems to evidence an understanding far greater than often assumed.
Most often drawn with soot, these works use text, and suggestions of text, to imply paragraphs, sentences, mailing addresses, captions, and names. It seems as if Castle also created a cast of “authors” to whom he attributed various works of text.
Shown above is a piece by one of these imaginary authors, Sed, whose name appears like a byline in a magazine under a paragraph of letter pairings. Sed also appears on the back of the work; its orientation changed to better align with the text “Spoon & Napkin Inside.”
It is possible that the two-letter pairings on the front of the work were influenced by the vowel charts Castle encountered during his time at the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind.
Bound in a Lucky Strike cigarette carton, the pages of this book are filled with a mesmerizing diamond pattern rendered in soot. Dynamic and playful, this spread shows some of the ways Castle used patterns to create figures, objects, and landscapes.
Castle's practice of bookmaking likely came from his time at the School for the Deaf and Blind. After the school, originally located in Boise, burned down, limited supplies required teachers and students to make their own books.
Throughout his life, Castle used his soot-and-spit technique to create direct transcriptions of print materials found in daily life. These recreations of cartoons, advertisements, labels, and even political pamphlets are evidence of his appreciation of form, composition, and contrast.
These political cartoons by illustrator John Fischetti were published in the Idaho Statesman in the early 1950s. They feature recognizable symbols such as the GOP's Elephant, the White House, and the Soviet Hammer and Sickle.
The “Spy-Paper” cartoon is from another newspaper illustrator, Reg Manning. Castle would have likely seen both Fischetti and Manning’s work regularly, if not daily, over the course of his life. Although Castle often transcribed the content of these cartoons, he never adopted these other artists’ styles as his own.
Castle regularly drew simplified lines and boxes to indicate text in familiar formatting styles. Titles and names are often represented as a series of blocks, while sentences and captions are indicated as light wavy lines or heavy straight strokes, respectively.
According to his family, Castle would rush to be the first to peruse the daily newspaper and collect the discarded print and reading materials of the other members of the household, so this presentation of text is not entirely surprising!
James Castle did not leave behind a diary. We do not have a written record of his thoughts and actions.
But what we do have, through his vast body of artwork, can tell us as much, if not more, about Castle’s life and innermost world if we choose to look closely.
This exhibition, exclusively on view at the James Castle House through July 29, features nearly 30 original artworks from the City of Boise’s collection. These works are part of a generous gift from the James Castle Collection and Archive and includes a never-before displayed artwork donated by James W. Gilles in 2021.