Shed Corner (Pink Window)
Shed Corner (Pink Window)
- Creator: Keiran Brennan Hinton
- Date: 2018
- Location: Boise City Hall, 1st Floor, Arts & History, Work Room, Unit E, Shelf/Drawer 1, Slot/Box 2
- Types: paintings (visual works), oil paintings (visual works)
- Materials: oil paint (pigmented coating), canvas
- Collection: James Castle House Artist in Residence Works
An array of bright colors depicts a dilapidated home interior. Torn wallpaper reveals an underlayment of wood-clad walls and ceiling. Sunlight streams through a single window with a pink painted frame. The light illuminates the room and the teal wallpaper sailboat pattern. The frame of a doorway is slightly visible on the right. The first time I entered James Castle’s shed, where he lived and worked for three decades, I felt a silence thick like water. His presence is palpable and tangible, a few feet away but always just out of reach. Flipping through catalogues of his work I try and reconstruct the shed as it once was. The current interior of the shed is covered with sailboat wallpaper, all pointing left - a fleet sailing to the same destination, beyond the window, out the door. Coincidentally, on the reverse of a drawing found inside the walls of the Castle house is a similar ship, facing into the distance, departing land and sailing to a place past the horizon. Sitting in the space, the shed becomes a one-person ship, a vessel of investigation and a vehicle of discovery. Below deck I paint the absence that is left in his wake, 41 years later, across time. This body of work, made onsite at the James Castle House, is a combination of observational painting woven with moments of my memory and imagination. I record the touch, texture and layers of my experience as an offer and an invitation to indulge in looking without interruption. Vacant of figures, the spaces become occupied by the viewer, filling the place I previously stood, in the footprints of Castle before me.
