(7s) Artists Wanted #2 - James Castle

James Castle is a guy who was in mental institutions who did drawings with charcoal and soot on scraps of paper without any artistic training whatsoever. His shit is small, and it's ill. Somehow, in recent years, he's became fairly well-known as a major American outsider artist, so I doubt even with wealth I could afford some of his pieces. James Castle isn't around to see it all, and I don't think he would've recognized his successes if was still around. I wonder if it's his family who benefits from that, or who? From what I remember reading, he had no offspring, so it would be extended family off side branches of the tree making their money off his mental institution meanderings.
I've always had an infatuation with the art of the mentally ill. In college, I had a friend who was paranoid schizophrenic who drew the most amazing drawings, and would do Jackson Pollock effect splatter paintings that somehow made sense to me, mostly because of the color combos he'd put together. It didn't seem as random as I would expect when looking at it. That type of art, based on mental instability, it scratches at something below our surface. At times, I wish I was more fucked up myself, to chop down all the bullshit, the email accounts and watching DVDs and riding around to get back and forth from a work, so I could concentrate on that instability below the surface, that sweet lovely soul-satisfying hidden instability.