Against type and tradition, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA) current idea of a “summer blockbuster” ranks among its quietest and more introspective shows in memory, presenting the supremely subtle, fascinating work and life of highly personal artist James Castle as its main summer affair. In the large McCormick Gallery, formerly home to the colorful and big-personality vibrancy of conceptual sculptor Joan Tanner’s Out of Joint exhibition, lights and sensibilities have been turned down to a whisper — a compelling and disarmingly wise whisper.
Never mind the age-old adage “look at the art, not the artist” where Castle is concerned; the very distinctive and nuanced circumstances of his life are critical to understanding the power and essence of his art. The Private Universe of James Castle: Drawings from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and James Castle Collection and Archive succeeds in pulling us into the artist’s self-invented world.
Castle (1899–1977) was born deaf in rural Idaho, before his nurturing family moved to Boise. He was illiterate in the traditional sense but studied imagery in comic books, newspapers, and magazines — as well as images by Old Masters — to inform his self-taught illustrative sensibilities, honing his own private artistic world as an expressive outlet. Material-wise, he mostly used soot from wood-burning stoves mixed with his saliva, often drawn on found paper scraps with Q-tips and sticks to create drawings mostly from his early memories of farm life and interior spaces of his youth.