ILLEGAL GALLERY PRESENTS: OUTSIDER ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: JAMES CASTLE “Born in 1899 in rural G

ILLEGAL GALLERY PRESENTS: OUTSIDER ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: JAMES CASTLE “Born in 1899 in rural Garden Valley, Idaho—only nine years after that frontier territory was admitted to the Union—James Castle mined the local landscape of his family’s homesteads and mapped his deeply private domestic world to produce a remarkable body of drawings, collages, and constructions. Deaf since birth, he never learned to sign, read, or write in a conventional manner, but instead communicated through his art. Over the course of a life lived on his family’s three successive farms, he amassed thousands of works on and in paper—his parents’ role as postmasters likely providing many of his supplies, as he used scraps of printed matter and packaging materials for use as surfaces, collage elements, and source material. The bulk of Castle’s work can be classified as drawings, rendered in his preferred medium of stove-soot and saliva applied with a sharpened stick as stylus. Known initially for his expressionistic representational landscapes and interiors, Castle has come to be recognized in recent years for the full breadth of his work, which encompasses an important body of abstract drawings, color meditations, loosely representational constructions, collages, and text drawings. Working exclusively with humble materials and always in an intimate scale, Castle created complex reconfigurations, dissections, and inventions of typeface in his text appropriation drawings and collages. He garnered some local acclaim during his lifetime (including 1963 and 1976 exhibitions at the Boise Gallery of Art) but only achieved international recognition decades after his death in 1977. In 2011, the Museo Reina Sofia held the first international retrospective of Castle’s work.” Source: http://foundationstart.org/artists/james-castle/ -- source link

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