Drawing is one of the roots of art. It's a way of seeing and thinking, a way of seeing yourself think. The nerve endings of the hand listen to the musings of the imagination, which marvels at the movements of the hand. The artist's face is often very near the drawing. In ways it's very primitive, very primary, a kind of universal language.
Drawing makes old thought new and new thought accessible.
To James Castle, the deaf, mute, reputedly mentally handicapped and illiterate artist, who died in 1977 at the age of 77, drawing was all there was. Castle, who never learned to sign or speak, and who never ventured more than 150 miles from his birthplace in southwestern Idaho, made thousands of meticulously illustrated books and as many drawings. Other times, he might add a little color, sew string into the paper, cut an object out of cardboard, or draw from two perspective points simultaneously, as in an almost mystical rendition of a staircase. A town landscape is pictured in muted color, then he moves a little farther back and does it in black and white. Another work, reminiscent of the early American modernist Oscar Bluemner, features a herringbone-patterned house, a tree of stripes and a cloud of Xs.