James Castle. Does the name ring a bell? Maybe you've driven down Castle Street. Perhaps you are familiar with the James Castle House. You likely read about it in the paper a few years ago, as it was being preserved. But, it's also very possible that no bells are ringing and you have no idea what I'm talking about.

I get it. I will (sheepishly) admit that I didn’t know who James Castle was when I walked into the beautiful, yet unassuming house at 5015 Eugene Street, in the Collister neighborhood of West Boise. It looks like any other house in the neighborhood, but within the walls of the modest single-story house, a fascinating life was lived.

People around the world have been captivated and inspired by James Castle's work and life for decades. His art has been exhibited in The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, Georgia, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota, the Tayloe Piggott Gallery in Jackson, Wyoming, The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Japan, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain.

Probably the coolest place to see James Castle’s art and learn about his life is right here in Boise, Idaho – in the very place it was created.

The house and adjacent shed at 5015 Eugene Street are where James Castle lived, worked, and created; where his rise to fame began and his life eventually ended; where his art would live on, influencing and impressing people around the world, for decades after his death.

Who was James Castle?

James Castle was born on September 25, 1899 to Frank and Mary Castle, who both worked as postmasters for the tiny mountain community of Garden Valley, Idaho. James was the fifth of seven children and was born deaf.

James began drawing around the age of six years old. He was an entirely self-taught artist, with little to no exposure to mainstream art. He attended the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind in Gooding for about five years, but education was different back then and he never learned sign language. Though he remained deaf and mostly illiterate for his entire life, James was extremely aware of the world around him.

“In a lot of ways, art was his way of communicating and experiencing the world,” said Makenzi Dunstan, the Education and Outreach Coordinator for the City of Boise Arts & History Department.

When James was in his early 20s he moved with his family from Garden Valley to Star. They lived there until his father's death, then he moved with his mom to a five-acre property on the outskirts of Boise, where the James Castle House is today.

James spent the bulk of his life at the house in Boise. It's where he created much of his work, often hiding it in the walls or ceiling of the house. In his adult life, while living in the small house with his sister, brother-in-law, and their four children, he moved into the shed behind the house which was outfitted to be a studio where he could live and work.

Beyond family, friends, and neighbors, James did not share his art publicly until the 1950s. At the time, James' nephew was attending art school in Portland and brought some of his uncle's art to the school to show his professors. The interest in James Castle's work was immediate.

Throughout the 50s and early 60s James had a few group and solo art shows, including two at Boise Art Museum.

His first local art show was at the 1963 BAM exhibition. As the family story goes, he got to come in early and see his art hung on the walls. It was a very exciting moment for him, but he didn't like how it was arranged. So, he took everything down and rearranged it, putting it all back on the walls in the way that he intended it to be seen before any guests arrived at the exhibit.

James Castle died in 1977. After he passed, his family took a step back from sharing his work until the 1990s, when his art was featured in an art fair in New York. After that, his work took off and his name and legacy have become known around the globe.

James Castle’s art

As I mentioned before, James was a self-taught artist and a canny one at that. All of his work is done on found materials – the blank interior of an ice cream carton, a discarded envelope, an old matchbook. He worked with homemade tools, like a sharpened stick, and used a mix of soot and spit or laundry bluing for ink.

Despite the fact that he could not hear, speak, or read, his work has a common thread.

“He seemed to be curious about everything. Nothing was off the table; everything was worth drawing, investigating, returning to again and again,” explained Dunstan. “I think most artists really relate to that – they find things that they really want to zero in on or they get curious about something and have different movements. But there is a bit more mystery here, right? He didn't date any of his artwork, so we can't put it in any sort of a linear perspective. Did he make this on a Tuesday in 1932? And this one on a Wednesday in 1976? Who knows?”

“There's such a wide variety of his work that I think everyone kind of gets drawn to something different, which is pretty exciting,” said Dunstan.

James Castle’s art is usually broken into five categories:

Soot & Spit

Castle’s soot and spit works are all the grayscale works that you'll see around the house or in books about James Castle.

“This was his technique that he's best known for. He would mix soot from the family's wood-burning fireplace with his own saliva and use a sharpened stick or some other kind of pointy object to apply it to paper,” said Dunstan. “He could really create quite the range with this technique, from really soft kind of washes to almost like this darker charcoal. He had a very detailed ability.”

Books

Castle also made a bunch of little books throughout his life. I think these were my favorite.

“The bookmaking probably came from his time at the Gooding School. The school was originally located in Boise but had burned down before Castle became a student. So when it was moved to Gooding, the teachers and students had to make their own books and materials,” explained Dunstan. “It was something he liked to do and just kept that practice going… He would sometimes transcribe other work that he found.” Like the small book on display at the James Castle House, filled with different sketches of an advertisement for a scotch whiskey.

“Castle would take materials, typically food packaging, and get it damp then rough up the waxy surface. A lot of times he would use ice cream cartons as his chosen substrate. The family really loved vanilla ice cream, as that is often what’s on the other side of his work,” laughed Dunstan. “Castle would then take a variety of highly pigmented papers, sometimes crayons, sometimes colored pencils, sometimes unusual household products like laundry bluing, and use that actually press that color into the paper. They have this really soft, dreamy quality to them.”

“Now Castle did not learn how to read or write, as far as we understand, in any kind of clear or literate sense. But he was really, really interested in how written communication functions," said Dunstan. "It shows up in a lot of familiar ways throughout his work. There's these kind of squiggly lines and then under the picture, there's kind of a shorter, squiggly or straight line. These seem to indicate sentences and captions. He always seems to use blocked letters to indicate titles."

"I wonder sometimes if it would have been frustrating to not comprehend what's on the page," said Dunstan. "But he seemed to take, you know, what he saw and kind of remix it in these really unique ways."

He seemed to be interested in letterform anatomy, and would take letters, like on a cereal box, and cut them up and then put them back together. "He seemed to be just investigating the letter form,” explained Dunstan.

“I always think about, you know, there are four languages that use letter forms that I'm not familiar with – like Japanese or Russian Cyrillic languages – but I can just admire the shape, even though I have no idea how to say or pronounce it," said Dunstan. "So we wonder a little bit if maybe that was part of his investigation, just really enjoying the structure of a letter rather than, you know, it being any sort of signifier of meaning or understanding of its context."

James also loved calendars. "He collected them. It almost seems like the imagery was really interesting to him," said Dunstan. "He fills the boxes with numbers or letters or teeny tiny pictures – some of which become kind of this larger image. And you can see he returned to the same kind of structure again and again."

Constructed Pieces

James Castle also created three-dimensional structures.

“He would stitch together layers of found paper and kind of investigated human forms. Doors – there's a lot of doors and also bowls and other things.”

“And again, this is all self taught. So he would be pulling from his imagination and what he saw in the newspaper and what's happening around him to then make something new,” said Dunstan. “There's definitely heavy influence of kind of printing material culture, not unlike other artists that would be his contemporaries like Andy Warhol.”

The James Castle House

Today, The James Castle House is a gallery, a historic site and museum, and an artist in residence location. The main part of the house is where some Castle's work is on display.

Adjacent to the gallery space is a new addition, which serves as a work and living space for rotating artists doing residencies at the James Castle House.

Behind the house is James' shed, which is currently hidden beneath a protective structure while it undergoes preservation. Though a lot of the shed remains in tact, it's 100 years old and kind of falling apart and is not yet open to the public for viewing.

I thought about James Castle a lot after leaving the house.

I wondered what would life be like without all the noise, especially in this day in age. I wondered what his life was like, being on a constant quest to understand. I wondered if he was aware of that.

I thought about the line between making sense of the day-to-day and creating just because you love it, and how the dance between the two never ends, only changes.

I have continued to be struck by how he returned to the seemingly mundane. He drew the Challenge Butter label multiple times, and while the image remained unchanged, he did not. He drew calendars over and over, yet they were stripped of their universal meaning simply because each calendar was seen with a new lens, with imagination and curiosity.

As I wrote this newsletter I realized that, to me, the most intriguing part of James Castle is the return – to understanding, to curiosity, to what he knew and loved. He was very engaged with his family. He was always, always creating. And he constantly went to work trying to understand and communicate with the world around him.

We are not so different from James because of this one simple fact: we all on a constant quest to understand the world around us.

It shows up in different ways. I write, read, run, and escape to places with no service. Others read the news and watch movies. Maybe you go for walks or go to museums. Maybe you have kids, and learning and curiosity is on full display at your house. No matter how it shows up, in everything we do, there is the opportunity to learn. To try and understand. To be curious. To see things with a new lens, from a different angle. And that in itself, is the essence of life. None of us know everything. Nothing is set in stone. Nothing is permanent. We can always be curious. We can always leave space in our life to know more, to learn more, to understand. It's the return to seeing the world with fresh eyes, an open mind, a listening heart. That's where life will dazzle you. That's where the adventure happens.

That's what a visit to the James Castle brought me. What will it reveal to you?

The James Castle House is free and open to the public on Thursday-Saturday, 11am-6pm. A tour begins at 1pm each of these days. It's closed xmas eve and day, and new year's day.

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa