With free access to US Post Office forms that abounded at home, he developed a taste for “found ground” and press into service such disparate drawing supports as ruled homework pages, sheet music, family letters, matchboxes, bulk mail circulars, State of Idaho income tax forms, business reply envelopes, and cigarette packages. James Castle died in Boise in 1977.ĭrawing was a major means of expression of Castle, whose passion for making art was manifest from early childhood. His lived with his parents until their deaths in the 1940s, and spent the remainder of his life with his niece Peggy and her family. At the age of twelve, he spent one year at the State School for the Deaf and Blind in Gooding, Idaho, but was so desperately unhappy there that the Castles brought him home and gave up on any further formal education. Good-natured, but unable to speak or read, “Dummy,” as some of the town’s children tauntingly dubbed him, was so often the object of cruel pranks that his family kept him out of public school for his own protection. As a child, Castle was large for his age, although he grew to be only five feet tall as an adult. His parents operated the local post office and general store, their home functioning as “a rustic social center.” His mother was a midwife who traveled by horseback to her clients. It was not until the artist reached his fifties, in fact, when someone taught him to draw the words “James Castle” on his art work, that he was actually able to sign his name.Ĭastle grew up in an isolated community about thirty miles north of Boise. According to family members, the Castles developed “Homesign,” a rudimentary system of hand gestures to convey basic concepts. Unlike Nellie, who could read, write and fingersign, James, intelligent but other-directed, firmly rejected all such conventional modes of communication. His older sister, Nellie was also deaf, although she has lost her hearing after a childhood illness. The fifth of eight children of Mary Nora Scanlon Castle and Francis James Castle, James arrived two months premature, and was born profoundly deaf. James Castle was born in the small mountain town of Garden Valley, Idaho. As an artist who had no access to training, Castle did not reinvent the wheel, but rather created an alternative means of transportation. Castle’s work exemplifies the triumph of human ingenuity, compelling us to ponder the origins of art-the moment when intelligent but unlettered individuals first created a visual language that attempted to reflect and give order to their world. A case in point is the self-taught American artist James Castle (1899-1977), little known east of the Rockies, whose large oeuvre of drawings and constructions directly addresses artistic invention, in both senses of the term. While all good artists are inventive as they struggle to solve the aesthetic problems posed by each new work of art, every once in a while one encounters an artist who is both ingenious and original. Like dyslexic readers who cleverly circumnavigate the roadblocks imposed by their condition, self-taught artists are obliged to become inventors, devising their own materials and techniques to give form to the images they envision.
Ideally, it is a value-neutral phrase, bespeaking a lack of traditional training. When used in tandem with “artist,” the term “self-taught” can imply many things.