“It’s just a steady stream of his life.”. close attention by the artist to his surroundings. From about the age of six or seven, according to his family, Castle spent much of his time drawing. He was the fifth of seven children in a farming family that supported his artistic passion. He spent five years at the Idaho State School for the Deaf and the Blind in Gooding; this was the extent of his formal education and took place at a time when teaching hearingimpaired children focused on lipreading and spoken language rather than the more accessible signing. Instead of expressing himself through traditional language, Castle sketched, collaged and stitched together fragments of cereal boxes, ice-cream packages, envelopes and other household detritus, into a codex of everyday life. He captured the wheelbarrows and ducks around the modest family house in a thenrural part of Boise, and was fascinated with the pattern of the wallpaper and the simple form of a coat or bedroom door. There is a quiet in Castle’s work that elevates the overlooked moments of a home. There is also a relentless imagination and innovativeness, for example, in how he transformed a flattened matchbox
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into a canvas, skewed perspectives to take in the full vista from a porch, or filled a stark outdoor landscape with mysterious totem-like structures. His figures, too, are unexpected; sketched, or folded from paper, they have boxy bodies, almost featureless faces and none of the realism of his domestic scenes. Adventurous with his media, Castle augmented the soot he often used with pops of colour from watercolours made from crepe paper, laundry bluing, and store-bought pastels and chalk. He was a fan of kaleidoscopes and carried bits of glass in his pocket in order to constantly change his way of looking. Because of the artist’s unconventional practices, the James Castle House opened in 2018 as an unconventional, historic artist’s home. “You can go to Cézanne’s house in Provence and everything is the way he left it: there's his paintbrush and his furniture, and you go back in time when you walk in there”, Crist says. “And that's not what this house is. They [the City of Boise] brought a new way of looking at artists’ homes and, I think, have created a much more sustainable model for how to think about an artist and what their home meant to them.”