Oral history interview with Wendell Castle, 1981 Aug. 13-1981 Dec. 12

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Wendell Castle, 1981 Aug. 13-1981 Dec. 12, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Wendell Castle
Conducted by Robert Brown
In Scottsville, New York
June 3, August 13 and 15, and December 12, 1981

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Wendell Castle on June 3, August 13 and 15, and December 12, 1981. The interview took place in Scottsville, NY, and was conducted by Robert Brown for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

[Reel 1, Side A.] [Side B blank.]

[Note: The transcription draft was made using 30-minute cassettes duplicated from the original reel-to-reel tapes. One of these tapes was wound incorrectly, resulting in an out-of-order interview. This final draft follows the order of the original interview.]

 

WENDELL CASTLE: As I say, I did have some talent. I did do more drawing than the average child. All little kids draw, but when you get up a little older, kids begin to draw a little less, and I drew but never had any help, any lessons or anything.

ROBERT BROWN: Was this in a small, quite a small town?

MR. CASTLE: A town of a couple thousand.

MR. BROWN: Couple thousand.

MR. CASTLE: Holten, Kansas.

MR. BROWN: Holten.

MR. CASTLE: But I moved in the sixth grade to a slightly larger town. They didn't have any art classes either, but they did have a shop class in the seventh grade. That's the closest thing I had to an art class. I had what I consider now to be a good shop class in the seventh grade--and I made some furniture in the seventh grade. I never made any again until I was 28.

MR. BROWN: But you took it at that time.

MR. CASTLE: I liked it.

MR. BROWN: As you look back, you liked it in the seventh grade?

MR. CASTLE: Oh, yeah, I liked it a lot and excelled in it, but no one, including the teacher, I think, ever gave any thought to anybody pursuing that as a career, beyond being an industrial arts teacher. That was the only direction that anyone ever mentioned to me that if you had an interest in making things out of wood the possible career options were industrial arts teacher or manual training teacher, I think they called it then. That didn't interest me.

MR. BROWN: What were your family's--they had goals for you? Were they a middle-class family?

MR. CASTLE: It was assumed that I would go to college. You know, my mother and father had both gone to college, and it was assumed that I would go to college. I don't think I ever knew what I wanted to be.

MR. BROWN: Did they have any art interest, as you look back? Your mother or your father?

MR. CASTLE: No. They didn't have any artistic ability. My grandmother on my father's side probably had some artistic ability. Never had a chance to do much with it. She did a lot of sort of I don't know what you would call it, when you make a picture by stitching--

MR. BROWN: Oh, yeah. Needlework or--

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, a type of it--but invented her own.

MR. BROWN: Things that she did--

MR. CASTLE: The things she did weren't from a kit. They were native, folk art kind of things, but she had some talent for that. But I can't think of anybody else in my family. So the thought of any art career, of course, never entered anybody's mind, including my own.

MR. BROWN: Were you encouraged in your studies and all, and were you a pretty good student?

MR. CASTLE: No, very average student. I didn't really get any good grades until I was in college, and even then not in the beginning. Late in college I had good grades. I just had very average grades.

MR. BROWN: But you had a good childhood. You liked it. Very happy childhood?

MR. CASTLE: No, I'd say it's sort of somewhere in the middle. I wouldn't say it was happy and I wouldn't say it was unhappy. Then my problem was that and probably still is that I'm really not going to put a whole lot of effort into something unless I'm absolutely sure I'm going to do real well at it. And I don't think I was ever sure of that, of anything, until I got into art. Because, I don't know, I'm just not a--I guess I'm not a hard worker in that sense. I think I've worked hard now, put in lots of hours, but until I was sure that I was going to be good at it, it just didn't seem like any effort was worth it.

MR. BROWN: When did you go to college?

MR. CASTLE: Right out of high school in 1951.

MR. BROWN: You went to the University of Kansas?

MR. CASTLE: No. I went to a school called Baker University. I think because of my lack of direction and commitment to any particular field, I was encouraged by--well, it's a church related school. It's a Methodist school, and some other people from my home town had gone to that school, and my parents thought that would be a nice place to go. I think that they thought it was safe there, so I was encouraged to go there. And not having any particular direction in mind, went there, not even knowing what I wanted to take.

I ended up in engineering. Of course, I don't know why. And probably had about all C's, not much motivation in going to school, although I liked college. I liked being in college.

MR. BROWN: You were pretty sociable?

MR. CASTLE: Well, I wasn't in the beginning, but I ended up in a fraternity, which was very helpful in making me sociable, which I probably wouldn't have been otherwise, and that's probably an advantage of going to a small school. It's more difficult for somebody to be an outsider because you get included a little more. So that was probably a lucky move there, being in a fraternity that did a lot of sociable things. In fact, that's probably the first time I got sort of roped into doing artistic things, because fraternities would have parties and somebody had to do the decoration or have a float, and I had a little bit of interest there, so I got pushed into that. [They laugh.] And did well at that. Won some prizes, I remember. Floats and decorations for the fraternity. And then I changed to business, which in your freshman year doesn't mean much of a change. This particular school everybody takes more or less the same thing. I think the only engineering subject I had at all was some math. And stayed at that school one semester the second year. The second semester this--no, I came back the second year, I had no major, and took an art course, and the art instructor--well, that was the first time I guess that I'd ever been the best in the class at something before I knew it. And he encouraged me to change schools and go to a school that had a good art program. And the University of Kansas has the biggest art program in Kansas. The Kansas City Art Institute in retrospect it would have been a better place to go, but nobody mentioned that and I wasn't too big about researching things. Plus it probably would have been too expensive. I couldn't have afforded it anyway. University of Kansas, being a Kansas resident, was cheap, cheaper than Baker. I mean, I went to a bigger and better school for less money. And it was close. So second semester of my sophomore year I changed schools and got into--well, really not an art program. Because my parents weren't very happy about that move at all.

MR. BROWN: Really? Did they think that you might go down the drain there?

MR. CASTLE: No, art being--

MR. BROWN: Oh, art.

MR. CASTLE: Well, two things. They weren't real happy about me going to the University of Kansas for two reasons, one they--there's two big schools in Kansas. There's Kansas State and there's Kansas University, and they're like rivals. And my parents both went to Kansas State, so they would have been quite happy if I'd gone to Kansas State; that would have been okay. But going to Kansas University was not so great. Plus taking art. So I ended up with kind of a compromise situation, to take industrial design, which was in the art school and an art program, but yet in my parents' eyes it led to employment, because you were kind of like an engineer or you were kind of like somebody who worked in industry, and that all kind of seemed okay.

MR. BROWN: In fact, how did you find the program?

MR. CASTLE: It was all right. I liked it. I mean, it had enough art in it and enough drawing that I liked it fine.

MR. BROWN: What was a program in industrial design? You mentioned drawing and all, but did they start out with--with what?

MR. CASTLE: Well, it was nine tenths an art program. You had to take one or two math courses and an engineering drawing course, and they made you take a few shop courses--engineering type shop courses, which of course I liked fine, too. So I liked all the program.

MR. BROWN: What was an engineering type shop course? What would you do in that?

MR. CASTLE: Well, they made you take a foundry shop, a sheet metal shop, and a wood shop. In fact, I'd be interested in seeing my grades now. As I remember, I did terrible in the wood part and did well in the others. I think that's because it was not the kind of program--it was like an industrial arts thing. There was nothing creative about it at all. You just kind of went in and did what project they told you to do. It was a one-hour course. It was like a waste of time really.

MR. BROWN: Wasn't enough time and you weren't--

MR. CASTLE: It wasn't set up for anybody to learn anything other than the names of the tools, and a few things. You didn't really learn anything.

MR. BROWN: But what in the industrial design program did you really take to?

MR. CASTLE: Well, in the end what I ended up taking to is the fact that the industrial design program had a shop. But that didn't happen in the beginning. In the beginning I took to the drawing courses. I loved all the drawing courses anything from nature drawing to mechanical drawing. All those--I excelled in the drawing courses. And I took all of my electives all through about the first--well, it made my college years--It made me take five years to get a degree because the first year was totally wasted. So it was like starting all over again. But I got credit for my English and history and a few things like that, so I ended up having to go to college five years, which meant I had extra time. There was no way I could do it in--well, I probably could have done it in four, but I didn't try. So I had a lot of extra time and I took all the drawing courses. And the art department there at that time I think it still is, I'm not sure was divided in two parts: what they considered the design department and what they considered the fine arts department. And for some strange reason sculpture was in the design department. [Laughs.] But industrial design that's industrial design, interior design, graphic design, illustration, ceramics, silversmithing those were the only two crafts--no, they had weaving. Three craft courses. They were all in the design department. Printmaking and painting were the fine arts department. But you could go back and forth, so I took all of my electives in the fine arts department. So I got figure drawing and watercolor and all those kind of things, so I had a lot of thata lot more than any of the other industrial design people.

MR. BROWN: Was much of it well taught as you look back?

MR. CASTLE: The drawing was well taught. Had I been more knowledgeable about what was going on in the field of art, I probably wouldn't have been happy with the drawing because it was old-fashioned, academic drawing. But it was exactly the right thing as far as I'm concerned.

MR. BROWN: Oh, you mean, you studied simple volumes or even work with plaster casts?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, you'd draw from--they had an antique drawing course, is what they called it. The room was filled with plaster casts of all the Greek statues, and you'd go in and draw. And that's a fabulous course. That all got tossed out. Very shortly after I finished, that was considered to be antique and that stuff was all thrown away.

MR. BROWN: Now I've heard a number of other artists exclaim that such courses were very good. Why do you think that antique drawing course was?

MR. CASTLE: I think those things are somewhat easier to draw than drawing from life. They pick up shadows and shape. You can see the shapes because of the way they'll pick up shadows. And you can go to it anytime you want to.

MR. BROWN: That's right. It's not moving.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, they're interesting things to draw: nice fabric folds and things, and the faces and are interesting faces, and the lighting's always real nice on them, you know, mostly plaster color. Other than that, I don't know why they'd be good to draw.

MR. BROWN: Originally, I guess they were thought to be exceptionally beautiful forms.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, well, I don't think that meant anything to me. I think it's just a good practice--I thought of drawing as practice learning how to draw.

MR. BROWN: And would you carry your drawing to a high state of finish?

MR. CASTLE: Not by the standards that people do today with taking drawing to a photo realism looknot that far. In fact, I was better at the shorter term drawings. I tended to ruin them if I spent--I could put it down and get the essence of the drawing rather quickly. And didn't excel so much if I had to take it to a photo look.

MR. BROWN: And the same applied in nature drawing or life drawing as well, where the subject was not as stationary?

MR. CASTLE: Well, no, we went to--they had a--now what was that one called? We'd go to the Natural Science Museum and draw all the stuffed birds, all that kind of stuff. And as far as I'm concerned that was a good course. And then there was--what was the other drawing called, where they do--the drawing course where they set up still life. We didn't get any sympathy or any credit for being creative. They wanted the drawing to look like it was supposed to, look like what you were drawing.

MR. BROWN: And that was okay with you. That was the--

MR. CASTLE: Well, at that time I didn't know.

MR. BROWN: --acceptable goal.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I liked it. And, yeah, I didn't know any different kind of drawing existed. So I was real happy with that. And particularly happy with it because I could do it.

MR. BROWN: This would've been the first time then that you were doing very well. You were excelling.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I mean suddenly I was getting A's in school.

MR. BROWN: Did you in your figure drawing have quick sketches, where you had to force yourself--

MR. CASTLE: Real quick, like thirty seconds, stuff like that.

MR. BROWN: You could get the essence and then--

MR. CASTLE: Yeah. I could do that real well. I've sort of lost it now. It's been--it has to do--it's a frame of mind, and I could get back in it I'm sure, but I've done figure drawing a little bit in recent times and I'm not as good at it as I was then. But I think it's just kind of getting your mind set around it and everybody else is doing it. Now I feel self-conscious because I'm usually doing it in a group of students and I feel like I'm the teacher. And I think it puts you in a different--you're not able to do it then.

MR. BROWN: I know what you mean. As you look back, all that drawing you took was a very good means of training that you later applied?

MR. CASTLE: I mean, that's what I think I got out of school, learning to draw. But learning to draw is learning to visualize; it's kind of the same thing. There's sort of--there was also the industrial design type of drawing we had, too, which was learning western perspective, and how to visualize things, and how to make flashy renderings.

MR. BROWN: So that others can see how they were supposed to work.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, so the two worked together. Like one is being able to draw what's in your head and make it look real, and the other thing is drawing what you see, being able to make it look real. And they're awful close to the same thing.

MR. BROWN: Well, most of what you had to do at Kansas was drawing what you see, wasn't it?

MR. CASTLE: In the courses, except for this three-dimensional--not 3-D, the perspective drawing course.

MR. BROWN: Where then you could use your imaginationI mean, within limits.

MR. CASTLE: Well, actually in the course we didn't even use our imagination then. What the course was supposed to teach you to do was to design your own washing machine or automobile or whatever, and those were of course drawings you made up.

MR. BROWN: So when--you finished your undergraduate program in '56 or so?

MR. CASTLE: Well, I had an interruption in the middle. At that time the Korean War was on, and I had gotten--when I went to college I'd gotten a four-year deferment. I only had a four-year deferment. And it was going to take me five years to finish college. So I decided that it'd be better to go into the army not after four years of college with one left, but after three. And what was happening at that time was that--more or less what happened as soon as you got--you kept getting drafted, but you could take your draft notice to the school registrar who would then write your draft board and saying you were a full-time student, and then you would be exempt from the draft for a certain length of time. Well, I got drafted once and I just didn't do that. I said I'm just let them draft me. So I let them draft me after three years of college. And so I was almost two years in the army.

MR. BROWN: Was that wasted time for you, as you look at it?

MR. CASTLE: Well, part of it. But I ended up with a year of that in Germany, so the year in Germany was not wasted.

MR. BROWN: Why is that?

MR. CASTLE: Well, I did a lot of drawing. I ended up getting--I was given a job as a messenger/clerk and sent to Germany as a messenger/clerk at a place where they had a job for two messenger/clerks, but had a hundred of them there, so you didn't do anything. And I happened to found out that the battalion artist every battalion had an artist there was leaving, and managed to get that job as battalion artist. So I spent almost a year in Germany as battalion artist, which was a real nice job. You see, nobody knew what a battalion artist was supposed to they didn't really need an artist so you'd make an illustration or two for the battalion newspaper, or you'd make signs for the mess hall, or decorate the officer's club for a party. And it wasn't any real artwork, but it was a good thing. And I ended up going around drawing a lot, just from landscape drawings and stuff. Plus it was just interesting to be in Germany.

MR. BROWN: But you were able to keep your sensitivity, your drawing going?

MR. CASTLE: The second year I got--yeah, the first year I don't think I got anything accomplished. It was a total waste of time, but the second year I got--you know, I'd get out for several hours of drawing a week, which isn't bad. It's better what than what I'm doing right now actually as far as going out and doing still life drawing. I get in several hours a week but not still life.

MR. BROWN: And you find that that's the sort of thing that disciplines you and helps you keep seeing?

MR. CASTLE: Um hmm, yeah.

MR. BROWN: And then when you came back to Kansas, was that about '56 or '7 you came back to the university?

MR. CASTLE: Um hmm, yeah.

MR. BROWN: And you just went and resumed your--

MR. CASTLE: I resumed my--

MR. BROWN: For two more years.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah.

MR. BROWN: Well, then did you leave the university after those two years?

MR. CASTLE: No, I didn't. Well, actually I did. I took a job when I graduated, as an industrial designer in Orlando, Florida, under very strange conditions. A fellow I'd gotten real friendly with in the armywho also came back and went to Kansas University, a really brilliant guy was interested in being involved in the space program, and there had been a lecturer on campus from a government project in Florida that was involved in space research that this guy had met, and became friendly with, and got offered a job. Because he graduated at the same time I did. And this guy, named Dr. T.C. Helby, was one of these German scientist types, and I was a bit suspicious of him, whether he was for real or not. He had a very--

[Knock on the door.] Yeah?

But anyway, I ended up--well, he was putting together a team, a research team, for a project that they had government money for, to do research on the feasibility of a moon--it was a moon base project. I'm not sure whether you call it feasibility, but anyway they were doing research.

MR. BROWN: In the real early stages.

MR. CASTLE: Well, no, they hadn't even gotten a mouse off the ground yet.

MR. BROWN: Yeah, that's right.

MR. CASTLE: This was pretty early. They were shooting up rockets but, you know, they weren't getting very high and most of them were going right into the ocean. And it wasn't anything I had that much interest in, but I really never figured out what I wanted to do when I graduated anyway, and so they offered me a job because they figured they could use a designer on this project. They had a budget, I guess, you know, just--he could have anybody he wanted to hire he could justify. Never really figured out why they wanted me to be on this thing, but I ended up doing nothing but illustrations really. I did illustration work.

MR. BROWN: This was about 1957, '58?

MR. CASTLE: No, this is fifty--this is '58. So I moved to Florida to Orlando to work on this thing, but I didn't stay very long because it just didn't make any sense to me, all this stuff. So--

MR. BROWN: So you went back?

MR. CASTLE: I didn't--well, actually by the time I graduated, I'd already decided I didn't really want to be an industrial designer. I had learned enough about it at that point to--well, I think what had happened--I should back up.

What had happened is another elective I had to take--you had to take a craft elective as an industrial designer, too, and I took silversmithing, and I really liked that enough that I even at one point considered being a silversmith, but then decided I didn't really want to be a silversmith. But I'd been introduced to the fact of designing, and making and selling had been introduced to me at that point.

MR. BROWN: And this was just a one-term course?

MR. CASTLE: Well, it was required one term, and I took an extra one. Like I said, because of having an extra year in school to meet some of my requirements--like my industrial design, I had to have four years of industrial design. There was no way I could accelerate those courses, even though I was ahead in English and some history and things. So I had extra time, and I even stayed some summers and went to--I took a lot of extra--I have enough college credits to have a doctor's degree. I got my doctor's degree honorarily [laughs], but I do have enough college credits for that; I took so many extra things.

MR. BROWN: Who taught silversmithing, do you recall?

MR. CASTLE: Carlisle Smith. Who is pretty good. That department turned out good people, several of which are well-known silversmiths today: Bob Ebendorf and [L.] Brent Kington, another one or two. They turned out some top silversmiths, who are all in the east now, but--

MR. BROWN: But you had something of a gift for that, did you?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I did very well at that. Also, another fellow who taught was a second man under Carlisle Smith named Monty Montgomery--I think his real name's George who was very helpful to me. He was a younger teacher, and he was involved in silversmithing. Really encouraged me in the silversmithing and encouraged me in my drawingthought I did interesting drawings. He was one of the faculty who was--even though I never had a course from him, he probably had as much influence on me as any instructor I had.

MR. BROWN: Was it the way he taught? Is that what did it?

MR. CASTLE: Well, I never had a class from him. He just was interested. He just had a lot of interest in what I was doing.

MR. BROWN: And he'd come around to you?

MR. CASTLE: Come around and offer a lot of encouragement.

MR. BROWN: What sort of things were you able to do in that short time? Flatware? Raised anything?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I raised--

MR. BROWN: What kind of style were they working in?

MR. CASTLE: Oh, what I did was not very creative, I'll have to say. Some people did pretty well. I think Montgomery's things were pretty good, now I look back. What I did was not all that great. But I didn't take enough that I was more concerned with technique, but got involved in, you know, soldering and fabrication, some forging, raising, casting. Did all those things. Made a lot of rings. God, I even had a little ring business going making fraternity rings.

But anyway, by the time I graduated I wasn't real hot on being an industrial designer, because I knew at that point what you did was go work in an office and end up drawing handles on a washing machine by the hundreds. And there was no reason that they would even make any of those handles. I just knew that was going to be frustrating.

MR. BROWN: Be very confining.

MR. CASTLE: That you weren't going to get to start out at the top. You weren't going to be designing automobiles or anything. You were going to be designing knobs on the front of stereos. So I just really never looked for a job in industrial design. This one that I got, got offered me. I wasn't really going to make any effort to find one. In fact, I'm not really sure what I intended to do at that point. I guess I intended just to hang around school a little longer. But anyway I didn't really like the job in Florida all that much, although it was a comfortable job and paid well.

MR. BROWN: You got a job where? At Florida, you say?

MR. CASTLE: What's that?

MR. BROWN: You got a job--which job was this?

MR. CASTLE: In Orlando, Florida.

MR. BROWN: Oh, the Florida job.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah.

MR. BROWN: Yeah.

MR. CASTLE: That's where I went after graduating, with my undergraduate degree.

MR. BROWN: Right.

MR. CASTLE: I got a B.F.A. undergraduate degree, and immediately after graduation went to Florida. But after three months there I thought that job was pretty silly. And since I wasn't particularly interested in space, it really just seemed to me that they were--all the stuff that they did didn't make any sense at all. And I still think maybe it didn't make any sense. [Laughs.] Because they were doing this research on--there was a psychologist on the team and, oh, a few other people, research people. They were trying to figure out, if you send somebody to a moonbase how long could they stay? How many people would be there? Could there be males and females? What would they do? What would the place look like? And all this other stuff.

MR. BROWN: It was too pie-in-the-sky for you.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah. Yeah, I was more interested in something that meant something, that was real. So I decided to just go back to school. [Laughs.]

MR. BROWN: What, and get, would you get a graduate degree?

MR. CASTLE: To get a--I had been offeredactually when I graduated a graduate assistantship, and somehow I still got it. It didn't get taken by somebody else. I don't know why it didn't. Which really meant I could go to school for free because I had the GI Bill too, so I actually ended up making a little money going to school, because they give me a half-time teaching job. And so I could teach, and I was going to teach drawing, which would turn out to be a real good thing because I really learned how to do perspective drawing and explain it. I taught perspective drawing to freshmen, and I also taught a basic design course, which was a kind of silly course. Learning what color goes with what other color and what shape. But there was a textbook that I was told to follow, so I didn't have to think the course out. Didn't really believe in that course. I believed in the drawing course.

MR. BROWN: Did you enjoy teaching?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I really liked that.

MR. BROWN: What is it about teaching that you liked?

MR. CASTLE: I don't know. It was a fair amount of work at the time, but I liked it better than anything else I guess, what the other options were. You didn't have to work very many hours a week, and it was rewarding, doing something that I found interesting.

MR. CASTLE: I don't know. This worked out pretty well. But I went back and started a master's degree in industrial design. I don't know why I did that.

MR. BROWN: Yeah, because you weren't too keen on it.

MR. CASTLE: But I guess that's where the graduate assistantship was, that's why. But after one semester I got it switched into sculpture. Because they were in the same department, I could keep teaching industrial design to people. Only industrial design people took that perspective drawing course, that's who took it. So I just kept teaching that, but I got switched into sculpture, which worked a lot better. Again, I didn't have anything particularly in mind that I wanted to do with it but.. ..

MR. BROWN: Did you know something about their program there in sculpture?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah.

MR. BROWN: You did know.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I had been in close contact with it, so I knew exactly what it was.

MR. BROWN: What was it like at that time, their sculpture--

MR. CASTLE: It had one very unusual aspect. The University of Kansas sculpture department was the first college in this country that had a foundry--bronze-casting foundry and that aspect interested me, so I got involved in bronze casting. A fellow named Eldon Teft was the sculpture teacher, with another sculptor there named "Poco" Frazier, Bernard Poco Frazier, who was sculptor-in-residence. He didn't actually teach any courses. They were both left over from the WPA sculpture days.

MR. BROWN: They just kind of stayed on, or what?

MR. CASTLE: Well, no, I mean that's their style. That's where they sort of left off--where their creative activity got them. Eldon Taft had worked with Loredo. No, I'm sorry, it was the other way around. Poco Frazier had worked with Loredo Taft in Chicago. So he was into climbing up on the side of big granite buildings and carving a covered wagon and horses pulling it, and all that kind of stuff. Amazing in the terms of the technical, enormous size of some of his pieces. He was quite an amazing guy. He didn't make very interesting shapes, but he could manage to do quite amazing things. Eldon Taft's specialty was portrait work and casting in bronze. I think that's probably why the foundry got built, so he could cast his portraits, because he'd do portraits of all the benefactors of the university and that sort of stuff.

MR. BROWN: Were they fairly good?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, they had a nice quality. He would do--I don't know what style you'd call that, where you ball clay up in tiny balls, stick it on, and do all the modeling by addition. So you're never cutting back in form. You don't know any name for that way of working?

MR. BROWN: [Shakes head no.]

MR. CASTLE: He was good at that.

MR. BROWN: It sort of worked a little like Jacob Epstein's things.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, so that everybody had a bad complexion. But he could catch the look of people real well. But he was open-minded enough that you could do whatever you wanted to in the classes. And they had fairly good equipment.

MR. BROWN: In fact, what sort of things did you do?

MR. CASTLE: A little of everything.

MR. BROWN: You were very inventive, or did you do portraits, or reliefs?

MR. CASTLE: Everything. I did portraits, and I guess from his lead I got a few commissions even. Did fairly well in portraits. Not that style. I could never get into the style that he--I liked to push the clay around with a clay tool. I didn't like that additive method, but I could do realistic portraits and did some of those for commission.

Worked with wood in an additive way then as--actually Poco Frazier was the guy who introduced me to bent laminations. He was doing some work in bent laminations, and he knew I was doing some work in wood. Suggested that at one point. I'd been working just with logs, taking a chainsaw and cutting them up and putting them together in different ways.

[Audio break.]

MR. BROWN: So you--

MR. CASTLE: I didn't do anything that could be considered very significant, but I did a fair amount of volume. I loved to work and I worked hard and did a lot, and I got some local awards in shows and things. But what I was doing was going all over the place with different kinds of forms. I was doing some abstract work, some realistic figure work, and some real abstract figure work that hardly looked like a figure at all. Carving wood, casting bronze, and welding steel. Didn't do any stone carving.

MR. BROWN: You were really given a free hand, then, to learn technique and style.

MR. CASTLE: You could really--yeah, you really weren't--in the graduate program it was totally unstructured. They didn't give you any assignments or ask for any deadlines just gave you a review now and then. And because I was working hard and turning out a lot stuff, I got good reviews.

MR. BROWN: Where did your awareness of, say, contemporary sculpture come from? Looking at the art magazines?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, well, I had access to Art in America, Art News, and whatever there was at the time. I forget now the magazines. So, you know, people always see who'd been big in the fifties: William Chadwick, Reg Butler, Henry Moore--English sculptors. American sculptors like David Smith, [Theodore] Roszack, [Jacques] Lipschitz--I don't know, all the work that was happening in the '50s, I was aware of that kind of work.

MR. BROWN: And you'd give it a try or something like that?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I sort of gave it a try, all these various things. [Laughs.]

MR. BROWN: How long were you in the sculpture program?

MR. CASTLE: It was a two year program.

MR. BROWN: Did you exhibit at this time?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: You mentioned this Kansas Designer Craftsman Show. Was this something you would have been involved with?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, that was actually not sculpture, though. That was a crafts show. But at the same time I was beginning to get interested in furniture at this same period and made a few pieces. Even though I left the industrial design department and went to the sculpture department, because of being a faculty I got to have the key so I could use the industrial design shop, which is a nicer shop if you wanted to make any furniture in.

MR. BROWN: What do you think prompted you to make furniture?

MR. CASTLE: I really don't know exactly. In sculpture I had made a piece--I was piecing together odd shapes of wood, an abstract kind of form that had a horizontal piece that you could sit on.

[Audio break.]

MR. CASTLE: I got a fair amount of mileage out of that piece. I entered it in a few shows. It was one of these hybrid pieces, which was neither furniture nor sculpture. But that was like in--this was like 1961 when those hybrid things didn't exist like they do now. They're all over the place.

MR. BROWN: Oh, yeah. Was this from a laminated wood?

MR. CASTLE: No, it was pieced together. Joinery. And in some ways it was closer to what I'm interested in right now. It had ivory inlays on it, which is exactly what I'm just about to do again. I haven't done it since.

MR. BROWN: A sense of the luxury and the different textures, probably?

MR. CASTLE: Well, I think it came about through a practical--since the horizontal bar I spoke of is too high to put your feet on the floor, I incorporated a foot rest in it, and it had like crutches to put your arms in. Well, like, I inlaid the footrest with ivory. That gave it--that thing echoes; is it going? [referring to the tape recorder.] So it [the footrest] wouldn't wear. And then I guess I had the ivory. I put it a few other places, decoratively, on the piece. It was walnut and ivory. It was a nice combination. But it had some presence, the piece, and it was a--I remember I think the first show, it was in the--the Nelson Art Gallery in Kansas City has a jurored show every year. I got that piece in that show.

MR. BROWN: As sculpture?

MR. CASTLE: As sculpture. Yeah, they didn't have a craft section. And then a year later the piece was in a show in New York as furniture at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. And I'm getting ahead of myself in time then, but that piece got a fair amount of notice then, so I got a lot of--that's the kind of first piece that had any importance, in leading in a direction. But it didn't--I guess I didn't take the lead the way I should have at that point. What it suggested to me at the time was that perhaps furniture was interesting. So then, of course, I went to the library and looked up furniture books to see what other people were doing in furniture. And of course most of the books you looked at this was '61 were actually books from the late '50s, and any book that said what's the latest thing going on in furniture, it was Scandinavian furniture. That was the thing that was going on in furniture with a few other things of American contract furniture like Herman Miller and Knoll [Associates] were doing.

MR. BROWN: Mm-hmm.

MR. CASTLE: Some people were doing some good work for them, so I got slightly interested in Scandinavian furniture, and my work digressed really then, because I actually made a few pieces that were highly derivative of Scandinavian furniture. That direction was dropped very shortly.

MR. BROWN: Why do you suppose you did it?

MR. CASTLE: I don't know. I suddenly--I think I tend to react whenever something going--and I don't know why I didn't take--well, I guess the sculpture direction, that was pretty far out. Perhaps I wasn't quite capable of realizing the ramifications of that one yet. It was like nobody was doing that, and I wasn't able to read into that piece those possibilities. What I read into it was out of wood you can make some kind of interesting things that are furniture, and I thought the Scandinavian furniture, some of it like Finn Juhl and Hans [Venyur] was quite sculptural and quite beautiful, and that perhaps that kind of vocabulary could lead to some interesting forms. And so I made a few pieces that way, that were made not knowing much about cabinet making, but trying to make--I tried my best to make them more or less right, and they weren't bad. But that direction was a dead end, and I realized that very quickly that they were doing it and had been doing it for years and really were better at it and way ahead of what I could do.

So then after about three or four of those I got back to where the Scribe Stool--that's what I called that--

MR. BROWN: That walnut/ivory piece.

MR. CASTLE: --that walnut/ivory piece. Got back to those kind of forms and made a coffee table and another chair, that was more like a chair, that carried on those kind of forms. They were forms--best be described as unrelated to structure kind of forms, with rather than leg going from the table down to the floor in the most direct manner, these took very indirect ways of getting there. And not--and that I worked with the rest of the time in Kansas. There weren't too many more pieces like that. Probably in Kansas there were--it was only at most 10 pieces of furniturethree of which, as I remember now, had this interesting direction where they were probably more sculptural than functional.

MR. BROWN: Did you exhibit those?

MR. CASTLE: In the Kansas Designer Craftsman's Show, I exhibited a number of these pieces, including the Scandinavian ones, even.

MR. BROWN: What kind of reactions were you getting to these pieces?

MR. CASTLE: Fairly good, actually. I don't know why. I ended up even selling some of them. Of course, they were pretty cheap. I can't remember what they were, but--

MR. BROWN: But you were pretty excited about maybe continuing, particularly in a more sculpturesque direction?

MR. CASTLE: I was interested in continuing furniture in the sculpturesque direction, but I had a terrible problem, which is still a problem I suppose for some people. But I felt that that was like an inferior artistic activity. And that bothered me quite a bit.

MR. BROWN: Making furniture.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, even though I had sort of done in a sense better at that than I had at the--in terms of a meaningful direction into something that was really unique and not--those pieces weren't derivative of anything. And any of the sculpture work I had done you could say was derivative of this or that person. But in spite of that, I really felt like I really wanted to be a sculptor, and I think it was more because in the hierarchy of art forms, that was a higher art form. I can't think of any other reason why, because I think I must have been able to analyze my work at that point and realize that in furniture I had--maybe I wasn't able to realize that.

I had also at this same time met the first actual woodworker-sculptor or whatever you want to call him. I met Wharton Esherick at this point. Some time--I can't remember--some time during graduate school about--I'd say--I said I was in graduate--I was there three years in grad school, not two. It was a two-year program, but because of teaching I was there three years. I was there '59, '60, and '61; three years in the graduate program. I think it was in '59--yeah, in the spring of '59, yeah, that I met Wharton Esherick. Not really met him, but I was at his place. I don't think he was too happy to see me, but a roommate of mine and I, a fellow named Cooper Woodring, who was an industrial designer, had gone to New York during spring vacation. Some of his relatives lived all up and down the coast several places in Connecticut and in Massachusetts and Delaware. We went a bunch of places. And I had remembered I think I was the one that was interested in the artists, not him, that [Alexander] Calder lived in Roxbury, Connecticut, and from looking at the map where we were going to go, we were going to go right back by Roxbury, Connecticut. And I don't think I had the guts to drop in on an artist, but this very friend of mine, even he was more of an industrial designer, he had more guts than I did. He [inaudible] and said, "Let's go see him," and we did. And he was very friendly and invited us in for a glass of wine, and showed us all around his studio, and we spent quite a long time there.

And then I wanted to see Wharton Esherick. I knew about him, because I had found out about him through a book called Shaping America's Products by Don Wallance [New York: Reinhold, 1956], that I had read--the graduate program had a reading seminar. You had to read one book a week and make a report, kind of a verbal report. And I had read about both George Nakashima and Wharton Esherick, but we were going to be in Philadelphia and Esherick didn't live far from Philadelphia, so again, stupidly, not knowing what the protocol is on these, dropped in on somebody without announcing ourselves, and he was not happy to see anybody. And we did not get a tour, but we saw a little.

MR. BROWN: It was a pretty exciting feeling?

MR. CASTLE: Pretty exciting. What I saw was really exciting.

MR. BROWN: Why?

MR. CASTLE: Well, I'd never seen, up until that point and I knew about people making sculpture and making a living by it, but I'd never heard of anybody or knew of anybody who made furniture of a very unusual nature and actually made a living at it, and it was their life. And he'd made an environment for himself that was a sculpture, even. And he practically lived in a sculpture. And that was all new to me. And that impressed me a lot, even though I'd had very little contact with him other than--we got in the door and we got to see a few things, but we weren't really--

MR. BROWN: It was very impressive.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, it was very brief, but impressive.

MR. BROWN: So that's where you were at about the time you left, you graduated from--

MR. CASTLE: Well, this was a year or so before graduation. Somebody's--these things take a while to soak in, for me. I don't respond to these things, like, quickly. But anyway that was my first contact with somebody who did something that was very unusual and unique, had their own form, made this furniture, and sold it, and lived by what he made.

MR. BROWN: So you were in a quandary by the time you were leaving graduate school? You still had this, a little bit of this hierarchical--

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I still had a problem with thinking I really ought to be a sculptor, and it really wasn't until several years later that I resolved that. I mean, I spent a year in New York City after leaving Kansas with really dealing with that problem.

MR. BROWN: Working?

MR. CASTLE: No. In 19--I guess it was '61, after graduating with my master's. Actually, I didn't graduate yet. I finished all the coursework. I had not written my thesis. But anyway, I had finished all the coursework. I got married at the end of that school year to a gal who was an opera singer who had a job with the City Center Opera Company in New York, so she made the living.

MR. BROWN: So you'd met her in Kansas.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, and so I had moved to New York City and I didn't have a job. I got a studio and worked in the studio. She made enough money to live on, barely. It was not a great existence. But I spent a year in New York City working on my own with a lot of time to go to galleries and see a lot of things.

MR. BROWN: But you didn't have a lot of equipment or anything?

MR. CASTLE: No, I had enough that I could work though. I had a little bit.

MR. BROWN: To do some carving and modeling?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah. I had a few power tools, a small joiner, drill press, a little band saw, some hand tools. I had a welding outfit. I still couldn't decide what I wanted to do, but wood was sort of forced on me at that point, because I was a little better equipped there than I was with anything else. Bronze casting, of course--that was out of the question. Welding didn't--I didn't get anything out of welding, so that was not--so I was sort of left with nothing to do but work with wood, and it was sort of half furniture, half sculpture at that point. And the furniture I got some encouragement from Paul Smith at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts then.

MR. BROWN: Who had already shown your piece, your earlier piece.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah. Yeah, because I went there, and they knew who I was, because I'd been in the show, which was nice, and--not that they could do much for me. But America House [Gallery, New York] existed then, and that, I was offered the option of, possibility of, showing some in the America House, so I sort of had a sales outlet for my furniture in New York, but I wasn't really prepared to make furniture quite yet, but I did make a few pieces. But not much good work happened that year at all. And I can't think of a single thing that was really very good.

MR. BROWN: It was probably a very formative year though.

MR. CASTLE: Well, I learned what was happening in New York City. Got to spend lots of time in the museums and really see a lot of shows.

MR. BROWN: But things were gelling in you, probably, that you weren't even aware of.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I was drawing, and generating ideas, but I wasn't really--couldn't get it together at all. And I could see that there was just no way that I was going to be able to make a living at this, either with the sculpture or the furniture. Neither one was--about the best chance I had for selling any sculpture was if you put a lampshade on it and called it a lamp. You know, I just wasn't getting anything going with it. And in--it was probably in like March or April, after having been there almost nine months, that I decided, well, I only had one alternative. I've got to get a job. And the only kind of job that would make any sense would be a teaching job, so I could still do some work. So I hadn't any more than gone to the public library and gotten a list of all the schools that taught art in the East--I'd already decided that's where the art scene was--I wanted to stay in the East, and had drafted a letter, but not sent any letters, when I got a letter offering me a job from RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology]; well, offering me an interview for a job, I should say, teaching furniture, which I really didn't know anything about at all. But it turned out that at that time the Museum of Contemporary Crafts and the School for American Craftsmen were quite closely knit, and America House, too, were quite closely tied together. So of course the first place that the School for American Craftsmen dean, the first person they consulted, was the director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts [Paul Smith]. Well, luckily, I had been making some contact there, and as it turned out, that they had--I never got--I don't know the full story--I'm not sure anybody will ever have it on record, but Tage Frid and Michael Harms [?] had been let go for what reason I really don't know. The reason I was given was that they really wanted some new life in the department. They wanted to--they thought the furniture was too sort of Danish looking and that they wanted something new to happen, and they had determinedit's a two-man department that one of those people ought to be a sculptor. Well, I fit the bill perfectly because I'm probably the only sculptor they could come up with who'd been making furniture. And Bill Keyser they hired at the same time, so it didn't really seem to matter that I really didn't know how to do woodworking because he did. So it seemed they thought that was a good arrangement, and it turned out to be a pretty good arrangement. So I got that job.

MR. BROWN: And you came out for an interview then, of course.

MR. CASTLE: I flew up for an interview and got offered the job at an enormous salary of like $6,500, which for me was just like a fortune.

MR. BROWN: Yeah. But the school appealled to you?

MR. CASTLE: No, I didn't like the school at all. I couldn't even believe that they'd call that a "college."

MR. BROWN: Why, the quarters were fairly primitive?

MR. CASTLE: Well, coming from the University of Kansas, which is a beautiful school--it looks like--you know, if you looked in the encyclopedia under "college," you know, the picture would look like a college. RIT didn't look like a college. And the library was like a warehouse with a few books in it. It really wasn't my idea. But the situation within the School for American Craftsman, though, was good. I mean, I was impressed with the dean and the other departments and the facilities.

MR. BROWN: The dean was Harold Brennan.

MR. CASTLE: Harold Brennan. I liked him and I liked Frans Wildenhain, what was happening there. Silversmithing seemed to be doing something. Wood, it all looked like Danish furniture. But the facilities impressed me. They had all this equipment, beautiful, they had all these nice workbenches and tools, and they offered me a private space to work in. So in spite of not being very impressed with RIT, because it didn't seem like my idea of a college, within the scope of American Craftsman, though, that was very impressive. I liked that. And that's exactly what it was, too, that RIT at that time was not like a college that I was used to.

MR. BROWN: It was more like, what, a technical school or--it was heavily a commuter place?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I guess so. It just really didn't have a campus. Although I got to like it. After spending some time there I really--I got to like it a lot. But in the beginning it just didn't--you know, having a library in an old warehouse building and this and that you know, it didn't seem--it wasn't very classy.

MR. BROWN: So what really told you was what Brennan said he wanted here.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, they were looking for exactly what I was. I didn't have to pretend to be anything I wasn't. And the chance to work--they really encouraged the faculty to work on their own work. Offered me a studio space of own to work in. You know, it was just like, you know, a real good deal, and I really was not very impressed with Rochester, but I thought, Well, can't beat this for a year or two, so--

MR. BROWN: Did you bring the opera singer out there?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah. Well, that worked out all right for her, too, because the Eastman School of Music offered her a graduate assistantship, so she worked on her Master's and taught at the Eastman School of Music. And actually for three years it worked fine for her, but then in three years she didn't want to be in Rochester anymore after she got her Master's. And I think I did more working than spending time at home anyway. I really got into making furniture. So it just didn't work out careerwise for us to get along at all. And so she went to New York and I stayed and I'm still here.

MR. BROWN: You got into your work so much--that first year, what would you--did you--

MR. CASTLE: Well, it was like being like a kid turned loose in a candy store. Because here you had the--you know, in New York even just finding a board to work with was a big deal, and all of a sudden there was just an enormous warehouse of boards there, and all you do is write down what you take. And all these tools, you know, free--what I considered then to be top quality tools. Now, when you get into tools there's top quality and there's better quality, but, you know, a quite adequate shop.

And a teaching schedule that wasn't bad: three days a week. Three consecutive days, that left me the nice bulk of time to work and I got into working. I worked every night, and my work really just fell together then really very quickly. After floundering about the first--well, I still had the sculpture problem. I still--decided I was--I'd agreed to come teach within the furniture department, but I didn't agree to make any furniture. And I really didn't--it was not my intention at that time to be very interested in making furniture. But I felt I had to make a contribution because I--there was a lot that I could do with the students in terms of form and all, and that's what they wanted me to do, so I felt I could handle the job. And I really came in and started making sculpture.

MR. CASTLE: --like I could just turn it out at incredible speed because I had good facilities to work with and all.

MR. BROWN: This wood sculpture?

MR. CASTLE: Wood sculpture. Then I concentrated on wood. I forgot everything else. I wasn't going to do any--

MR. BROWN: This was carving for the most part? Were you already, were you getting into--

MR. CASTLE: Well, laminating and carving.

MR. BROWN: Oh, laminating you only began here? This is where you began laminating?

MR. CASTLE: No, I had done it in Kansas.

MR. BROWN: You had.

MR. CASTLE: But rather crudely because of not having any good tools. But I did stack laminating in Kansas. But not being able to plane the boards very well, not having a planer, the result was pretty crude. And now with the good tools I could get a good slick result.

MR. BROWN: What was it that attracted you to lamination as opposed to carving?

MR. CASTLE: Not wanting to deal with solid logs that are going to crack and split unpredictably on you, plus the fact you can't find one the shape you want.

MR. BROWN: In lamination you can engineer the stresses and instability?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, you can more or less get the log any shape you want it.

MR. BROWN: You make the log, in effect.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, because you make it. And if you do it properly it's not going to crack on you. It'll stay together. Plus you have choice of all kinds of wood and grain direction, and you have a lot of control. But I worked mostly figurative the first year.

MR. BROWN: You mean figurative sculpture?

MR. CASTLE: Figurative sculpture. There's still one piece in existence in somebody's home here. I'd sold a big Icarus figure, which had some--I guess the strongest influence at that time would be Leonard Baskin's work. Kind of fat figures. But they were laminated in a very different way, pieced together.

MR. BROWN: During that first year did you show? Beyond say a faculty show or something?

MR. CASTLE: Actually, I didn't have any success showing any of that work at all. Except--well, I should take that back. I didn't have any success with juried shows. The local--well, the best gallery in Rochester at the time was the Schumann Gallery, and Jackie Schumann did express interest in that work. She's about the only one. Because when I entered a local show here, in Buffalo and Syracuse--they all had juried shows: the Everson [Museum of Art] in Syracuse, the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, and the Albright-Knox [Art Gallery] in Buffalo had juried shows. And I'd get rejected got rejected from all of those.

[Reel 1, side B, is blank.]

[Reel 2, side A.]

MR. BROWN: Second interview with Wendell Castle, on August 13, 1981, Robert Brown interviewing.

MR. CASTLE: Well, I was saying this is a standard statement that I've written and given to lots of people, and I used it for, oh, seven or eight years maybe in various forms.

MR. BROWN: Well, listen, let's go into that.

[Audio break.]

MR. CASTLE: --in this last paragraph here how I got started. And that's how I got started. [Laughs.]

MR. BROWN: Yeah, you were--we did go over that a little bit, how--

MR. CASTLE: And that's actually where I started in teaching then, too. I started where I was.

MR. BROWN: Which was really in sculpture.

MR. CASTLE: --and where I thought at the time I could make a valuable contribution to the field, because Harold Brennan at the School for American Craftsmen, at the time I was hired, had felt that the Danish sort of look and tradition that was happening in the woodworking at the School for American Craftsmen wasn't going to lead where he thought it should go. It seemed to be stagnant to him. And that he thought that somebody who had a sculptural background would be good in that field, and I got chosen for that job.

MR. BROWN: How did you happen to get the job? Didn't you--you had a piece shown in New York, didn't you?

MR. CASTLE: Right.

MR. BROWN: Did Brennan see it there?

MR. CASTLE: Right, I was in a show. I believe it was called Young Americans, and I had a piece in that show that got quite a lot of publicity, and I had been in contact with Paul Smith and--oh, what's his name? Dick--I can't think of his name. The guy who was director before Paul Smith, David--.

MR. BROWN: Oh, Campbell.

MR. CASTLE: Campbell. Been in contact with them and shown them my work and tried to promote myself.

MR. BROWN: But at this point there wasn't too much work, was there?

MR. CASTLE: No, there wasn't very much, but--

MR. BROWN: This was about '61 or so?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm, '61.

MR. BROWN: What they saw they were enthusiastic about, were they?

MR. CASTLE: Umm, yes and no.

MR. BROWN: What was Campbell like, by the way? Did you get to talk with him?

MR. CASTLE: Oh, yeah, met him lots of times.

MR. BROWN: Because he was a--

MR. CASTLE: Paul Smith was the assistant at that time. Campbell was the director and Paul was the assistant director and so--there was some other show that I was in, and one that I wanted to be in and I didn't get in. I can't remember the names now, but anyway, I heard of shows coming up, and one I brought pictures of my work in, and it was not real well received, but I think they both found it interesting because it wasn't what was being done. It did fall outside the vocabulary that was being used by everybody else. And the Young Americans show was jurored by somebody else, and I did get in that and the press liked my piece a lot.

MR. BROWN: What was the piece?

MR. CASTLE: Scribe Stool, which was sort of a not terribly useful, slightly usable piece of furniture, more sculptural than furniture. But--

MR. BROWN: Something like we see here or this poster?

MR. CASTLE: No, actually very thin members, quite different. But anyway when Harold Brennan--since the School for American Craftsmen was directly connected with the museum at that point, part of the American Crafts Council, in speaking with Campbell and Paul Smith and perhaps Mrs. [Aileen Osborne] Webb, too. Mrs. Webb had also bought one of my earlier pieces herself, and had put some of the others in America House, so between the three of them I think when he had the idea in his head that he would like somebody with a sculptural approach, I was the one doing that whether they liked it or not really. Mrs. Webb I think did. She'd actually bought one.

MR. BROWN: What was Campbell like? Was he an enthusiast or was he rather reserved?

MR. CASTLE: Well, he wasn't an enthusiast. He didn't bubble over or get excited. I'd say he's reserved. Very pleasant. I remember he was very warm and open. I could see him when I would go in. He was accessible. I don't remember too much about him.

MR. BROWN: And you were living in New York, weren't you, for about a year?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm, I was living there at that time.

MR. BROWN: You were making pieces there, as much as you could.

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm, a few. I didn't have much of a shop.

MR. BROWN: Yeah.

MR. CASTLE: But I think maybe I got that recommendation maybe partly by default because I was the only person that met that bill.

MR. BROWN: For Brennan.

MR. CASTLE: For Brennan. I was a sculptor making furniture.

MR. BROWN: Did he ever talk with you about what did he think the shortcomings of conventional, contemporary furniture design were?

MR. CASTLE: Well, that not enough design went into the program at RIT. They were just--there really wasn't--they really weren't designing furniture. They were just sort of making variations on existing themes, and design might mean making an arm longer or shorter and or changing the position on a handle. And I'd gone through an industrial design program, so design didn't mean that to me. I really meant thinking the thing through from scratch. So I had a pretty fair background in addition to the sculptural idea. I did have a good foundation in doing design work in a sort of logical way, you know, to develop it through drawing, engineering drawing, and had some little bit of engineering background.

MR. BROWN: Not in any detail, but in industrial design perhaps you're given a problem, a general function that something must accomplish. Do you have to start from scratch?

MR. CASTLE: Well, industrial--well, it could be any of those. Industrial design programs vary a lot, and at the time, in the program I was in, didn't really have a specialty. We tended to do appliances for some reason. It could be washing machines, or mix master, or electric shaver, those kind of things. And you really didn't get into exactly how the mechanics worked, except that it had to be reasonable that it could possibly work. You more or less designed the look of the piece. But sometimes the look could take rather drastic changes from the normal. That was certainly considered to be one of the options that you were to investigate. You know, the motor had always gone in a traditional place; it may not have to be there.

MR. BROWN: Was your department at Kansas unusual in that respect at that time?

MR. CASTLE: No.

MR. BROWN: Allowing you a lot of latitude?

MR. CASTLE: I don't that it was that unusual. I think it was a fairly good department, but I don't know that it was exceptional. It didn't have that reputation anyway. I think places like Cranbrook [Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI] and Pratt [Institute, New York] and a few other places had the reputation as being top-notch industrial design departments.

MR. BROWN: So this background gave you the habit of not excluding any form from your thinking?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, so I'd gotten some background in that, through that industrial design, that you don't have to assume that things, just because they looked that way in the past, that they have to continue to look that way. That they could change and they could change drastically without sacrificing the function.

MR. BROWN: But you did have to think of the function as well as the industrial design.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, you had to have a--although we didn't, as I said, design the mechanics of the piece, we'd end up making models, but they weren't working models. There had to be reasonable--there had to be some space left where the mechanics would go in some reasonable fashion, because you were asked that question, how was it going to work, and you had to have some answers.

MR. BROWN: Of course when you then went into sculpture, which you didcan you refresh me for just the last part of the time you were Kansas?

MR. CASTLE: Um hmm, yeah, the last two years I was there was in sculpture, and I dropped the industrial design.

MR. BROWN: And you did welding as well as carving, what was it?

MR. CASTLE: And bronze cast--and modeling.

MR. BROWN: Okay, but there, function played little part.

MR. CASTLE: There wasn't any consideration for function.

MR. BROWN: Simply the limits of the material and the fabrication.

MR. CASTLE: It was just developing form. So I had a portfolio that included industrial design work, portrait sculpture work, and furniture plus even painting and drawing.

MR. BROWN: What about--you wanted to go back and further describe some of those people who were teachers in Kansas, and also some of the fellow students. You'd mentioned earlier, I guess in drawing or painting, Raymond Eastwood. Did you want to say anything more about the--

MR. CASTLE: Well, I'm drawing some blanks on the names. There was Bob Sudlow.

MR. BROWN: What did he teach?

MR. CASTLE: Painting and watercolor and some drawing courses. I know there was a fellow named Bob Green, too, but I don't think I ever had him as a teacher. I knew him.

MR. BROWN: You've mentioned, I think--who was the teacher in sculpture?

MR. CASTLE: Taft. Eldon Taft. He was my actual teacher. There was also another sculptor in residence who was around, Bernard Frazier, Bernard Poco Frazier.

MR. BROWN: Poco?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm, a nickname. Forgot how he got the nickname.

MR. BROWN: And he did friezes and various things around the campus, didn't he?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm. He did, and there's quite a bit of his work around.

MR. BROWN: But most people--both of those left you sort of on your own, did they?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, they didn't really offer much in the way of trying to be a leader in leading you into a vocabulary of form, or into much of anything really. They pretty much left you on your own. You didn't--they really weren't like teachers in a way. You had to ask them a question.

MR. BROWN: Then they'd come out.

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm. But mostly the questions were of a technical nature. Taft was a rather good modeler, and had I been more interested in that I might have, you know, probably had a lot to learn from him. But I really wasn't that interested, particularly, in the way he worked. It seemed the time would be too slow.

MR. BROWN: You were a quick learner of techniques--

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: --and methods and all. You were galloping through those, weren't you, pretty well?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, I could almost learn those just by watching somebody else.

MR. BROWN: Then you found you'd made a piece of furniture, or did you deliberately set out to do that? I think you treated it as a piece of sculpture, didn't you?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, originally that--that Scribe Stool was made in Kansas that was shown in New York. And another piece similar. There are actually two of those.

MR. BROWN: Did you show, I think you said you did, in the Kansas Designer Craftsman Show while you were still out there?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]

MR. BROWN: And you exhibited those pieces?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm. I don't think either one of those were exhibited in the Kansas Designer Craftsman Show. I'm not sure. I was in the Kansas Designer Craftsman Show a couple or three times.

MR. BROWN: Was that a pretty important show out there?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: It was in, where? In Kansas City?

MR. CASTLE: No, it was at KU [Kansas University], the Kansas Designer Craftsman Show. There's also a show at the Nelson Art Gallery.

MR. BROWN: Mm-hmm.

MR. CASTLE: What do they call it? Can't even think of the name of it. A juried show every year. And I entered that several years, but I think I only got in it once out of the times that I entered. And that was the Scribe Stool. I did get that in. That was shown in Kansas City.

MR. BROWN: But before you left did you have some pretty good criticism, from the Kansas area, of your work?

MR. CASTLE: I don't think criticism's the right word. [Laughs.] I think they could have been more critical, but encouragement. I think I got a lot of encouragement from Taft and from Frazier and fellow students.

MR. BROWN: You wanted to mention a few of those fellow students, I think. A fellow named Krebs.

MR. CASTLE: Rockne Krebs, who was a few years behind me, so he and I weren't like good friends, but he was in the school at the same time I was. Someone who was at the same level at the same time is Tal Streeter. He does quite well with his work, teaches in the SUNY [State University of New York] system at Purchase. And we were close to being at the same time. I think he might have been one year ahead of me.

MR. BROWN: Do those fellows and you stand out from the, among the more prominent students?

MR. CASTLE: Well, Rockne Krebs didn't, because he was still like a junior when I left, so he hadn't done anything extraordinary. Streeter did unusually well. He's the first person I had seen that had a consistent body of work. Everybody else, including myself, was all over the place, you know, would weld, then maybe cast something in bronze, and then carve something in wood, and maybe even do a figure and then an abstract. Kind of all over the place. Everybody did that except for Streeter.

MR. BROWN: Instead, what was he--

MR. CASTLE: He had one vocabulary he used. He was working with pipes, welding pipes together. And that's all he did. It seemed a little silly at the time, but later I understood that he had a little better grasp on what people wanted to see in New York than any of the rest of us. I'm not sure how he got that insight.

MR. BROWN: Did you think also he was a little more mature?

MR. CASTLE: I suppose he was.

MR. BROWN: He wasn't simply mature in the marketing sense, but in terms of his own creativity.

MR. CASTLE: Because no one in Kansas had ever suggested that there was any particular integrity or anything that would be thought of as being more advanced by having a body of work that was more or less the same. But as soon as he got to New York, found out that's what people in New York wanted to see.

MR. BROWN: What a predictable body?

MR. CASTLE: They really found it very confusing to look at somebody's portfolio and see a portrait head and then see say an abstract wall relief, say a bronze, and then a wood carving, and then a piece of furniture. That was just--they thought that nobody had, that I didn't have any sort of consistency in my work at all.

MR. BROWN: And you brought all that.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah.

MR. BROWN: I mean, when you arrived.

MR. CASTLE: And in Kansas no one had suggested there that any other way was anything other than normal, since most everybody was doing more or less that same thing not the furniture part, but the vocabulary would be all over the place except for Streeter's.

[Audio break.]

MR. BROWN: Well, when you're talking about this vocabulary, I mean people were all over the place with the exception of Tal Streeter. But possibly that was a teaching device? They wanted you to experience as many things as possible? That was the time of life to do it?

MR. CASTLE: Well, probably they thought of it that way, but I think there were totally out of touch with what was going on in New York City, what a gallery would like to see. I just don't think they had a clue that neither one of the instructors had ever been to a New York gallery with his work to try to promote it. And evidently none of the recent graduates had been either, to bring back the word.

MR. BROWN: Do you think that--was art education connected at all with this?

MR. CASTLE: No, art education was a separate department.

MR. BROWN: Because it smacks a bit of that, where--

MR. CASTLE: Yeah.

MR. BROWN: --they're prodded through every media.

MR. CASTLE: No, it wasn't that. I think it was just like an older approach that was really left over from the thirties, and that perhaps this New York way of looking at things was something newer than that.

MR. BROWN: You said to me earlier that you felt in some ways it might have been a good thing that you were at Kansas sort at the end of that older academic era.

MR. CASTLE: Oh, yeah, I'm glad I was, for the drawing part, before the academic system had sort of fallen apart, when you still took antique drawing and nature drawing and--I don't think they ever dropped figure drawing, but they dropped a lot of those drawing courses later, the ones that seemed pretty antique, particularly antique drawing where we drew from plaster casts, and it was called "antique drawing." And nature drawing and composition drawing and watercolor and those kind of courses got dropped in favor of courses that had a creative emphasis.

MR. BROWN: What was the value in these imitative drawing courses?

MR. CASTLE: Skill. Developing skill. Developing your eyes to see, and be able to tell whether your drawing on your paper was really the same as what you were looking at. Which really boils down to developing that kind of a skill.

MR. BROWN: Pretty important. Well, then about '61 or so, Harold Brennan, who was then dean here at the School for American Craftsmen, saw your work at the Crafts Council, at the America House.

MR. CASTLE: Both places.

MR. BROWN: In New York. And what? Would he have you up here to talk with him?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, at that time--I've never really known, heard the complete correct story, but I believe that Tage Frid was let go. Why, I really never exactly figured out. Doesn't seem like "because you got tired of Danish modern" was quite a good enough reason. And Michael Harms, who was the other teacher at the time, resigned in sympathy, because he didn't like the idea of letting Tage Frid go.

MR. BROWN: Well, Frid was a very prominent woodworker.

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm, yeah. And he had a big legacy going all around here with graduates running businesses and everything else. So it's hard to say exactly what happened. I really don't know whether there was some personality problems between Brennan and Frid. I don't know.

MR. BROWN: But at any rate were you brought up here by Brennan to interview?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm. But the story I was told is they just felt like they wanted a change in the department and they really wanted to get some more inventive, creative kinds of things going there and that Frid's background in Danish furniture produced a certain look, which they had thought had been there long enough. That was the story I got. And maybe it is the true story, but it seems like to me that firing him's a rather strong way to do that.

MR. BROWN: Why not simply bring in someone like yourself in addition?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: Keep him?

MR. CASTLE: I don't know. But anyway, they didn't seem there--Harold Brennan, who had the total authority to--this time it was before faculty got consulted on these matters, I think. I think that Harold Brennan had a hundred percent say in this position. And there were two positions open, the whole, the entire woodshop because Michael Harms had resigned, too.

MR. BROWN: And what did Michael Harms--what was his--

MR. CASTLE: His is an English background. Now why--looking back on it from what I know about English woodworking now which I knew nothing about then, and now I do know a little aboutwhy he didn't exert a stronger influence, I don't know, except that maybe Tage Frid's influence, him being there first, and being strong--I don't know. But anyway his influence didn't appear to show up in finished pieces particularly.

MR. BROWN: Wherein would the English influence have lain if he had?

MR. CASTLE: Well, from what I know of English influence now, and I have an English cabinetmaker downstairs--I'm not sure what Michael Harms's background is though, so maybe he's not a true English cabinetmaker. But that they're really incredibly good. The English cabinetmaking tradition is very strong, and really the proper way to making things. Very, very interested in high-quality workmanship, use of high-quality materials, down to spacing of dovetails, sort of. An English spacing of dovetails even is different from Danish. Different ways of putting things together than the Danish. And in the hierarchy of cabinetmaking, I'd put English considerably above Danish cabinetmaking. I mean, I'd put French and then English cabinetmaking, which reached its height in the 18th century, but continued on, and in some places it's still alive today even at a very high level. I didn't know anything about that in 1962. I wouldn't have had a clue about any of this.

MR. BROWN: But you might speculate that at that time the Danish was in vogue.

MR. CASTLE: Well, the Danish influence--

MR. BROWN: That had the reputation for some reason.

MR. CASTLE: Well, the Danish in the furniture industry, there was a strong influence. There were Danish furniture being sold all over the place. So Tage Frid was riding on a real high then because that was just the thing everybody wanted.

MR. BROWN: It was their design, their look, wasn't it?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm. And of course he grew up with that. And so--

MR. BROWN: Were you brought up here by Brennan to look around first and interview?

MR. CASTLE: I was brought up for an interview. Flew up, met the other members of the faculty. In fact, I remember Franz the best.

MR. BROWN: Franz Wildenhain, yeah.

MR. CASTLE: Because, in spite of his age, I really thought he was a student, because he was dressed like a student and working. He was in the shop working. [Laughs.] And after being introduced to him, I went and I said, you know, who was he? You know, because they didn't introduce him as a faculty, just said something like, "I'd like you to meet Franz Wildenhain. And he said, "Oh, he's the teacher." [Laughs.] I just assumed he was an older student. He had jeans, tennis shoes on. I remember him very clearly. I mean, he actually did look quite young. He aged an awful lot in the last ten years. He looked pretty young until ten years ago. He really didn't look his age. And I met--

MR. BROWN: You were shown the shop?

MR. CASTLE: You know, Hans Christianson was there; I met him. And Don Bernowski, and the other jewelry teacher, he was only there one year. He's left now. Can't even remember his name. He was a resident teaching jewelry there. They've gone through a lot of jewelry teachers. They have real problems in the jewelry department.

MR. BROWN: Are they too easily nabbed by industry?

MR. CASTLE: No. Too easily problems come up with Hans Christensen.

MR. BROWN: Oh, I see; there's conflict.

MR. CASTLE: There always seems to be conflicts in that department. I think they've solved it now, but for quite a few years--

MR. BROWN: Was Christensen the head of goldsmithing and jewelry?

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, he's had the senior position. And the other person ended up with a problem each time.

MR. BROWN: But when you were there being interviewed, was everyone rather friendly?

MR. CASTLE: Oh, yeah.

MR. BROWN: --and curious about you?

MR. CASTLE: I don't know about curious, but everybody was very friendly. I liked everyone that I met, and I liked the woodshop. Well, I liked the School for American Craftsmen a lot. Hated RIT. I thought it was the poorest excuse for a college I could imagine.

MR. BROWN: What was it like then? It wasn't--

MR. CASTLE: Well, it didn't look like a college. You know, coming from the Midwest, I was used to Midwest schools, you know. I'd been to University of Nebraska, and University of Colorado, University of Missouri, and, you know, to those kind of schools. That was my idea of a school.

MR. BROWN: And what did RIT look like?

MR. CASTLE: Didn't look like a school. Looked like just downtown industrial buildings. But the School for American Craftsmen had a very nice feeling.

MR. BROWN: That was in the stables, wasn't it? Or older buildings?

MR. CASTLE: Well, a mansion, connected to a stable in the back, and some other additions to it. Had a real nice--it was old and a bit rundown, but it had an awfully nice feeling about it.

MR. BROWN: Of course that school had been there only about 10 or 12 years when you came up. So the woodworking shop looked good?

MR. CASTLE: Well, at the time it's the best equipped shop I'd ever seen, you know, it was like a utopian situation.

MR. BROWN: And I wanted to get to that because you hadn't spent that much time making furniture or being around woodworking shops.

MR. CASTLE: No.

MR. BROWN: And did you discuss this with Brennan?

MR. CASTLE: Well, I didn't--I don't think I played up my weaknesses, but I didn't try to pretend I knew what I didn't know either. You know, he knew I had no formal training in woodworking; I'd picked it up on my own. I don't think that he was able to or didn't try to look at my work in a critical way and really see how poorly it was made. Not poorly from a craftsman's standpoint, but poorly from a standpoint of proper construction.

MR. BROWN: What do you mean by that? Do you mean just instability?

MR. CASTLE: Well, there's really a proper way to put things together in order to defeat the hydroscopic nature of wood, is what woodworking is really all about. That I of course knew nothing about. And I had worked in a vocabulary that actually got around some of those problems fairly well in a roundabout way.

MR. BROWN: You're talking about the physical properties of wood.

MR. CASTLE: I'd really denied the physical properties of wood in many things.

MR. BROWN: You did say that your craft was good.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, technically, you know, if I'd put something together, it fit. You know, if I made a curve it was a smooth curve.

MR. BROWN: But the future of the piece was--

MR. CASTLE: Yes.

MR. BROWN: --you weren't able to master yet. I mean, the future--

MR. CASTLE: That's right, the future would be--although those early pieces have survived amazingly well, considering there was no regard whatsoever for the proper way to put wood together. But I never got any criticism from Brennan about that and--

MR. BROWN: He didn't bring in some woodworker to ask you technical questions to make sure he was getting someone who could--

MR. CASTLE: No. See, the woodworking faculty really had no--I was introduced to them. Mike Harms and Tage Frid were very pleasant to me.

MR. BROWN: Oh, they were there.

MR. CASTLE: They were there. The school year wasn't over yet. See, I came up during the year that they had not finished. And they were very pleasant, but they had no say in my hiring whatsoever. So they of course asked no pointed questions. They only asked questions of a rather informal nature, just sort of being friendly. And I thought they were both unusually friendly, given the awkward circumstances. And Bill Keyser was hired at the same time. I couldn't say which one of us was hired first. I really don't know. It was awful close to the same time. Either he had just been there for an interview, or whether he'd just been hired, I'm not sure.

MR. BROWN: Now what was Keyser's background?

MR. CASTLE: He graduated from RIT.

MR. BROWN: But in woodworking?

MR. CASTLE: In woodworking.

MR. BROWN: Oh.

MR. CASTLE: The year before. He'd been out of school one year.

MR. BROWN: Oh. Maybe Brennan should have thought there was a guy that was trained under Frid and--

MR. CASTLE: Yeah. So I think that Brennan had the technical part covered.

MR. BROWN: Right, with Keyser.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, he could continue what he felt was high quality workmanship and the proper way to do things. I think he thought it was covered. And that my position was to bring in some new designs.

MR. BROWN: Did he talk to you about what he had in mind for you?

MR. CASTLE: Not of any great detail, no. He never outlined that, although that's the impression I got left with. And I think I took that a bit too seriously, but--

MR. BROWN: What, that you had an open mandate?

MR. CASTLE: That I could really go out and try to get designs out of the students.

MR. BROWN: Now you really had done very little if any teaching, had you?

MR. CASTLE: No, I had taught for two years in Kansas as a graduate assistant half time.

MR. BROWN: In design.

MR. CASTLE: Taught a design course and a drawing course for two years.

MR. BROWN: Okay. So what was your attitude toward teaching when you came up? You were hired then for the fall of '61 or '62 here?

MR. CASTLE: '62. I came in the summer because they didn't--[telephone rings]. I'll bet they're out there loading wood still. They won't hear--

[Audio break.]

MR. BROWN: When you first got here, how did you think you were going to teach?

MR. CASTLE: I'm sure I came in--I was very different than anybody else in the school at that time, because I'd come from--well, I didn't feel at all comfortable with the casual approach that happened at the time. For example, I mentioned about Franz. You couldn't tell which one was the teacher. You know, I'd always come from a school where the teacher was dressed up, and with a formal position, and there was, you know, not sir, but certainly never first-name basis with your teacher. It was "Mr." so and so and "Miss," and you could always walk in the classroom and spot the teacher. In Kansas I never knew of a situation where you couldn't, and all the sudden here was a situation where you couldn't tell the teacher from the classroom, because they had on the same old grubby clothes. And I felt awkward about the--well, right off in the first class there were students older than I was, and there wasn't any--there really never was--I mean, I felt funny about that situation, and so I started dressing for class, which I think really bothered everybody. But when it bothered everybody, it made me more determined to do it. Like I'd wear a tie to class, but I wore things that it wouldn't hurt, so I went right ahead and worked, and I didn't try to stay away from the sawdust or anything, but I always wore a tie a shirt and a tieand a sportcoat, which I'd take off, of course. [Laughs.] It was real odd. Nobody else ever did that. Except Harold Brennan always had a tie on, but nobody else ever did. But I sort of felt like I had to set myself apart.

MR. BROWN: Were you pretty confident when you began teaching?

MR. CASTLE: No, I don't think I was confident at all.

MR. BROWN: So maybe that's why you--

MR. CASTLE: But that was probably part of it. But I kept that up. I never stopped that. For eight years I never changed that position.

MR. BROWN: What do you suppose kept you from dressing--

MR. CASTLE: But gradually everyone else changed. By the end of the eight years, at least half the faculty was wearing coats and ties. [Laughs.]

MR. BROWN: Oh, really?

MR. CASTLE: But I enjoyed it. I mean, it meant something to me. You know, I'd worked in my shop in grubby clothes and on a teaching day, I sort of felt like I was in a position, made me feel like I was in a senior position. I could put on a clean shirt and a tie and went off to teachwhich made a different day than a day when I was in the shop.

MR. BROWN: What did you teach those first years?

MR. CASTLE: Well, the part that I, of course, felt competent with was design teaching design, teaching people to draw. Started, initiated a drawing coursewhich nobody had really been doing any drawing before which was not very successful because it was hard to keep people at it and make them do it.

MR. BROWN: Oh, really?

MR. CASTLE: Well, you know--

MR. BROWN: You mean they were inclined to run back to the bench--

MR. CASTLE: Run back to the shop. Couldn't make it serious enough. But the situation did improve. People did get better at drawing.

MR. BROWN: Was this drawing such as you'd had at Kansas?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: Drawing from objects, from nature?

MR. CASTLE: I mean, the nature of drawing before I came would be like a little sort of a plan and elevation on the back of an envelope, and "Here's what I'm gonna make," and then you'd develop it into an engineering drawing as much as necessary. And one idea--and if you got one idea for a chair, that's it, you go make it. And the approach that I had learned to work with and I still feel that I haven't changed my opinion on this a bitthat you develop a whole lot of ideas and then make a selection from those. And you don't make, you don't pick your first one and run with itwhich everybody had done until that point.

MR. BROWN: You think that before you came, so far as you could tell, it was more of an artisan's workshop?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: They had one workable form for each type of furniture.

MR. CASTLE: Well, they'd worked in the standard Danish vocabulary, which was published all over the place, so you had easy access to--and plus you'd go into the furniture stores and look. They worked in that vocabulary.

MR. BROWN: And that's thewell, you copy.

MR. CASTLE: There's a few exceptions. There were a few people in the program that did something different than that. They got--

MR. BROWN: What about Keyser? Had he?

MR. CASTLE: Not very much different, no. His was bad. I can only--

MR. BROWN: He was mainly a technician.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, he had no art background. He's developed some art background since. He had no art background at that time. But I can remember one student well, I didn't know him as a student Tom Muir Wilson, who later switched to being a photographer. But he had gone through the woodworking program, but he'd come from some other school and had some design background. His furniture was not Danish. You know, there were a few students that came in from other places with disciplines. But if you started right there, you got nothing but Danish. They only got these little in--you know, a little surge of something else now and then that a student would bring from other background.

MR. BROWN: Were you able to get them to stop fabricating furniture for a bit and begin drawing? You said they kept wanting to run back to the workbench.

MR. CASTLE: Yes, but that worked. You know, gradually people saw the virtue in putting down designs. I think that got through to people.

MR. BROWN: Did they strike you as pretty gifted students, potentially they could design? Or some of them just limited?

MR. CASTLE: Actually the first group was fairly gifted, that we had. I think it was an awkward time for them, because they were in the middle of this program changing and some were a bit confused by it. But there were some pretty gifted ones right there at the first.

MR. BROWN: Was it a four-year program at that point?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: And you were to do what? The design side mainly, or how was it divided between you and Keyser?

MR. CASTLE: Well, that was sort of an informal divisionthat I was more or less involved with design although we taught at different times, so we both had to teach everything. I never did any demonstrations of a technical natureand I wasn't capable. So when it came to show them how to use the saw or whatever he showed all that. But then I would get caught up in it some, too, because somebody missed it or something and--like you observed a minute ago, I did catch on fast. I mean, by the middle of the first year, I mean, I had a pretty good idea what was going on with technical things.

MR. BROWN: Was there a curriculum that you had to follow? Did Brennan set one down more or less?

MR. CASTLE: There was more or less one. It was awfully loose and I don't know who set it down. It was very loose.

MR. BROWN: But you begin with drawing and basic fabrication of things?

MR. CASTLE: We didn't actually make great changes in the curriculum. We only made great changes in the way they approached that curriculum. They still made more or less the same projects, put a great deal heavier emphasis on the design, which had been--it had been put on before. They said they were putting it on, but of course it was a different kind of design. It was not true design starting from zero. It was, like I explained--

MR. BROWN: Leading to that one mode. But in your first year would they just do, get into turning or anything of that sort?

MR. CASTLE: Oh, yeah. They got into the machine work rather quickly. Certain things that had been established there weren't changed. For example, there was a tool locker with a full complement of tools that was checked out to the student at the beginning of the year, and those were their hand tools to work with. And you went through a brief period in the beginning with working with the hand tools, and then got onto machines rather quickly. Within a month or so you were working with the machines and you were gradually introduced to the, you know--the more dangerous machines were the last you'd get introduced to. And by some time in the first year, I don't even remember when, you were using everything, and the projects just got more and more complex. And students turned out pretty decent furniture.

But I think what happened is that I took the design part much too seriously and was really looking for really inventive things, you know? I took this whole thing so seriously that I thought and I really haven't changed my opinion but that furniture really was an art form, and that furniture could be just as important as sculpture. And this is where I think I was confused. I really have not straightened out until recently, and I hope I've straightened that out now. It's not confusing whether furniture is sculpture or not. And I always said I didn't have it confused and I said furniture, that--what I've always said, and I still say, is that furniture is not sculpture, but it can be the same thing as sculpture. But my personal approach was to make my pieces look very much like sculpture. And I did an awful lot of work, and my studio was in the first year right in the school. I was provided with a studio within the first--well, right after the first year my work was progressing pretty well and I got my own studio, but it was only a block away. So the students had awfully close contact with my work, and I think I presented far too strong an image about what it is I was looking for by seeing my work.

MR. BROWN: You began to see some imitation?

MR. CASTLE: And then the imitation--it didn't happen instantly, not so much the first year. But by the second year there began to be imitation, because I was approaching it at that time with the idea that furniture should take on new form, and you shouldn't just--that redesigning furniture didn't just mean moving a leg over or making it longer or shorter. It means looking at the function of the piece and completely redesigning it from scratch. And the approach I was taking was to try to make it sculptural, and sculptural to me meant then that it looked like what sculpture of the time looked like, and what contemporary sculpture might look likeor could look like or looked like some people made it look like.

MR. BROWN: Which sculptures, for example, of that time might you have--

MR. CASTLE: Well, I think there's some Henry Moore, [Jean] Arp. I don't know, a few other people, but--

MR. BROWN: In your technique were you into lamination by then, laminating them?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm, yeah. And it seemed to me that, having learned a little bit about the nature of putting wood together, not a lot--that the traditional ways were rather limiting in your vocabulary, and if you really wanted to develop your vocabulary and expand it that you needed some other ways of working with wood and lamination was another way.

MR. BROWN: What recommended it, would you say?

MR. CASTLE: Nothing recommended it. I mean, I recommended it.

MR. BROWN: No, no, I mean, why did you stick with it? Did it seem extremely flexible?

MR. CASTLE: Oh, I enjoyed it. It was extremely flexible. I mean, the form possibilities were--and since I was interested in sculpture, carving became a very important. So I became more or less a carver. I'd laminate up a form and carve it.

MR. BROWN: What is there in lamination that allows that? I mean, this may be in a sort of, it's obvious, but maybe you could say. What is there about that physical form of laminated layers that allows all this?

MR. CASTLE: Well, as opposed to a solid wood piece, which is the other alternative, you really can't dry a solid wood piece of any size. It's going to crack on you in drying, plus you're limited by how big a piece you can get. You really don't get pieces of certain shapes or certain kinds of wood or whatever. So by laminating, you can laminate any size you want and you've defeated this drying problem because the wood's already been dried and cut up in little thin pieces. It's easy to dry. Put it back together, it's dry, and put back together pretty thoughtfully. You have to be careful about how you put it back together. It's pretty good as far as staying together goes.

MR. BROWN: You can vary the grains?

MR. CASTLE: Well, you don't--try to keep them all the same is what you do.

MR. BROWN: Can you vary the thickness of the lamin, the laminae or whatever they're called?

MR. CASTLE: No. You really need to keep them all the same, and the thinner the better. And, you know, I learned a lot about it over the years and got pretty good at it.

MR. BROWN: And the hardness of the wood. You could choose different wood?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm, yeah.

MR. BROWN: I mean within, say, a given stack of layers you could vary the hardness?

MR. CASTLE: But I was just developing this technique. It developed quickly, because once I had access to the machines--I had already been exploring it before I came to RIT, but rather crudely because I didn't have access. It's a high technology technique. You need machinery.

MR. BROWN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was going to ask if there are realms of engineering in prototypes and so forth which you might have seen, where lamination figures, doesn't it, in nautical and aeronautical--

MR. CASTLE: But by high technology I just mean the machine.

MR. BROWN: Yeah, sophisticated, and you had that at the school.

MR. CASTLE: And you had it. Takes a lot of work out of it, makes it easy, and insures its staying together. So I was very excited because my work could suddenly progress very quickly you know, having these tools available and having plenty of clamps and stuff so, you know, I was excited about it, and I think that my excitement about it certainly showed, and I was certainly glad to talk to everybody who'd listen. But the work came out looking like mine.

MR. BROWN: The work of your students?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: What did you do about that?

MR. CASTLE: Which really wasn't what I wanted. What I wanted them to do was to be adventuresome, and to design from zero, and to try to create new forms. I didn't really want it looking like mine, and it didjust every single time, with fairly few exceptions. And there was--this sort of--oh, when you have critiques, for example--now like I keep saying I took my position too seriously. I should not have played on this point so much, that I thought design was so important, it was more important than the technical part. That if a piece was wonderfully made, if it was ugly, what was the point? You know, and if it looked just like one you'd get at Sears, the fact that it was solid wood and had proper joinery, it still didn't mean anything, you know. What meant something was making a work of art, and something that had an important form, and that was the point I kept pounding on. So when it would come critique time, I would be very concerned about those points. And Keyser held the other end of the thing, and he'd say, "Well, you've got to have sound construction, you've got to put the thing together right." And it was a pretty good relationship, and it worked pretty well, so there was some balance. Some people made some things that were a little more traditional, well-made, proper construction, and some went a little further out. A fair balance for a couple of years there, and I kept beating the same point and he kept beating the same point.

MR. BROWN: You would do this at the critiques.

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: These were performed in front of the students then?

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROWN: Did you all--one did not try to beat the other down?

MR. CASTLE: No, but we'd both make our points.

MR. BROWN: Keyser.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, we'd--but Keyser became bored with his point of view, because he became more interested in sculpture as things progressed. He got interested in sculpture. So that point of view gradually just sort of--he just didn't feel like going after it anymore, I guess you'd say, and so there was only this one. And there's that--so the situation began to change then, and it--actually at the time it didn't bother me. I mean, I didn't really give it much thought. I didn't realize what was happening. It just seemed like that maybe design was becoming more important. You know, I thought it was a good sign. I didn't really realize that it was sort of happening at the expense of something. But what I continued to see happening was work that looked like mine.

MR. BROWN: That was what was taking place then, as they began less, continued less regard for the technical side for the design, it was your design.

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm, and I had--my vocabulary had expanded to take in some things that were not just laminated but construction, too. I had some forms that were constructed forms. But in all cases the students seemed to follow my vocabulary, and even then I wasn't so bothered. I thought, "Well, while you're in school, the work may look like this. As soon as the student gets out and gets on his own, he'll get his own thing going." But then when enough years went by and the students actually got out and on their own and I saw several years out of school, what I thought was a better student still doing exactly the same thing, I began to think things were going wrong and that something was wrong with this approach.

And it just wasn't working, but I didn't really know quite what to do. I couldn't put my finger--like I can look back now, I think I can put my finger on a number of things that went wrong. It's just like that point I just made about Kaiser backing off the technical part, which was one of the earlier things that went wrong. But I think the biggest thing, the biggest problem that I am responsible for, was assuming that artist/craftsman was the one and only way to approach it that you needed to be a master of making pieces. And I never really did tolerate shoddy workmanship. I just wasn't so concerned about--I was more concerned about the design. And someone who excelled at technical things and had no art ability, I thought really didn't belong in the program. This is an art program; we're in an art school and that the activity really is a designer/craftsman activity, and that--I kept assuming that this one person was capable of both these things, and sort of forcing people into thinking the same thing that you had to design and that you were sort of incomplete craftsmen if you weren't able to design the things you made. And I think that's probably the biggest fallacy, and that continues right today. There's no change in that policy over there. What that produces is some people who really didn't really have any real ability to design, but yet really had a good feeling for working with wood, are forced into being designers, forced into thinking they're designers and the stuff they make is just terrible. [Telephone rings.]

[Audio break.]

MR. BROWN: But while you were at the school you never quite solved that dilemma?

MR. CASTLE: No, I didn't really, didn't solve it at all. I just really felt there was a big problem. And mainly because I sort of assumed what worked for meI was being pretty successful would work for anybody elsethat I took an artist's approach. I made things and sold them and just sort of made the assumption that that was a good workable way to do things, that I designed them and made them and sold them through shops and galleries, and got in some shows gotten some commissions and--

MR. BROWN: But what tipped you off that something was wrong among your students or former students, particularly was that their stuff was not growing in design, it was remaining sort of pretty much your own?

MR. CASTLE: Well, I saw so much derivative work. And that at the time I thought to myself, "Well, I'm just presenting too much of an image to follow, and that I maybe can just--you know, I'll be better off if I wasn't teaching it." And didn't really think I had to do anything about it that just not teaching woodworking would be enough. Not to present this--you know, I keep presenting an idea here "I do it, and you do it and you'll be successful too"if I stop presenting that picture, that maybe the whole thing would straighten itself out. I mean, looking back at it now I see the problem was much, you know a lot more problems. That's only part of the problem. I mean, because my ideas have changed in the ten years since then, so I see many other problems. I mean, I see lots of real basic problems with the whole education. One thing it seems inconceivable to me now that someone can go through four years of school and not really learn anything about furniture I mean, in a historical way. Do not really have a furniture history course. They all had an art history course, and they were shown a Sheridan table and a Hepplewhite, but not a real history of furniture where you really learned about it.

MR. BROWN: What good would that do the furniture designer?

MR. CASTLE: Well, at the time I thought it wouldn't do any good. I wasn't concerned. I was concerned--I would have rather seen a course at the time in 20th-century sculpture. I thought that would have done more good. But now looking back at it I think that that would have caused more confusion. A few really talented people might have come through with some real good work, but the majority are going to get lost with that approach.

MR. BROWN: What would they gain from the historical?

MR. CASTLE: Well, a sound basis of the understanding of how furniture has developed for the last two thousand years, and there's a fairly logical development which I didn't even know about at the time myself. Mostly, I didn't think old furniture looked very interesting. It was only later when I've looked a little closer and with more educated eyes that I have found old furniture to be interesting, and to in many cases be extraordinaryand baffling beyond belief, and all kinds of other things that I didn't know anything about at the time and wasn't even concerned with.

MR. BROWN: But you couldn't very well at that time have conveyed any of that.

MR. CASTLE: No, I didn't have any knowledge of that either.

MR. BROWN: You wouldn't have had slides and books to show them. You would have--

MR. CASTLE: No, I wasn't concerned with it. I was concerned with sculpture and art.

MR. BROWN: And you feel that was too much for the majority of your students to handle.

MR. CASTLE: Yes. A few I think could handle that approach, but the majority couldn't handle that approach, because they're missing what furniture's about. And furniture is about furniture, and sculpture's about sculpture, and mixing the two together can cause a great deal of confusion. [Telephone rings.] Boy, this is ridiculous, everybody's--

[Audio break.]

MR. CASTLE: I'm becoming more and more aware of the fact that there's a real kind of funny ground here, when furniture may be disguising itself as art or sculpture, or sculpture disguising itself as furniture, which is the same thing. And when you're in this middle ground between the two--which is a whole thing I started, this whole business, and I kept claiming mine was art, but usable as furniture. And I was fighting a battle with museums and things, in a sense, to have it accepted as sculpture. And there was some headway in that enough to make me encouraged that was on the right path. I've decided since then that that is a battle you could never win, because it really isn't the same as sculpture. There's a different kind of--I think--not that there's any hierarchy, that furniture is not a lower art form than sculpture, but it's different. It's not sculpture and to be an art activity it needn't look at all like sculpture, I've decided. It can look exactly like furniture.

MR. BROWN: What do you mean by--maybe we'd better try to pin it down, because that's probably what you should have done in the '60s with your students. What do you mean by being exactly like furniture?

MR. CASTLE: Well, I felt in the '60s that the only way to have art furniture is furniture that took on new form. If it looked just like furniture, then that really wasn't accomplishing anything.

MR. BROWN: Mm-hmm. Just be repetition or a slight variations of what had already been done.

MR. CASTLE: Mm-hmm. And I sort of categorically just denied that whole approach, in favor of the sculptural approachwhen the form of the furniture took on what would generally be described as looking more like sculpture than furniture. Oh, not that it was unrecognizable as furniture. You still would recognize a chair as a chair or a table as a table. And thinking that there's a--keep doing this and showing it, and it's going to be accepted as a form of sculpture, and thought of equally by museum curators and so on, and be shown in galleries just like painting or sculpture. And like I said there was enough encouragement in the '60s that it was being accepted to make me think this was a right, that I was on the right track, and I was a leader, in that mine was getting accepted first. But that really never got total acceptance. Still, there would be a lot of major museums who would really not put furniture in the sculpture room. They would put it in the furniture room. I mean, the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York], for example. They have a piece of mine, and it's shown with 20th-century decorative art. Some institutions, like the Whitney [Museum of Art, New York], wouldn't show any, because they don't--they're not going to show any furniture.

MR. BROWN: Yeah.

MR. CASTLE: And mine's furniture. I mean I've had this--I know Tom Armstrong and had a discussion with him. He's pretty open. He likes my work. He's bought it personally. But says his curators won't you know, don't think of it that way there. Sculpture is sculpture by the definitions that Artforum and those kind of people would--

MR. BROWN: Sit or write at a piece of sculpture?

MR. CASTLE: It's not art then, if you can use it. And his staff all thinks that way and he's--

MR. BROWN: At the time you must have thought that was pretty ludicrous.

MR. CASTLE: You know, I thought they'd come around. Some directors and some curators did come around to accepting crafts, and that's fine, not that they shouldn't. But I think they're presenting the--the crafts are presenting themselves a problem when they're disguising themselves as art and sort of denying the function, denying what it really is, and pretending to be something else.

MR. BROWN: Do you feel you ever went that far?

MR. CASTLE: I never thought of it that way, but I think that some people thought of it that way, and it's certainly possible to think of it that way. You could look at a lot of my pieces and say, "Well, it's pretending to be sculpture. It's really a chair, but it's disguising itself as a piece of sculpture."

MR. BROWN: But it could still be a chair and still function as a chair.

MR. CASTLE: Well, I thought so.

MR. BROWN: It's perhaps simply coincidentally like some sculpture.

MR. CASTLE: Well, I thought that was the way. But I guess my first clue--well, I avoided the problem of teaching furniture because I left that teaching job.

MR. BROWN: What in 1970 or so?

MR. CASTLE: 1970. And I sort of thought I didn't really--I just concerned my own work, and my own work went right on. It didn't change any. And I had just--I just wasn't concerned with the teaching of furniture anymore. I taught sculpture. I thought that sort of let me off the hook. But what I ended up getting was--some sculpture students who knew I made furniture kept wanting to make furniture. So I ended up still having the problem to a lesser degree.

I guess my first sort of introduction to a different way of looking at this thing was two trips to England, and through John Makepeace's work. The first time I went, about five years ago, I was very confused with what was going on there. He had a staff of people who were just extraordinary craftsmenbetter than any I'd ever seen. They were making furniture, putting it together better than anything I'd ever seen. Take them forever to do it. Putting just an extraordinary amount of time into making something, and picking the materials so carefully, picking just the right boards. Which seemed to me a totally uneconomical and impractical approach. I really couldn't understand how you could put this much time into those aspects of the work. His designs weren't bad. They fell somewhere in the middle between tradition and being sculpture, although they weren't anywhere near as sculptural as mine, but they weren't traditional either.

MR. BROWN: Now what do you mean by sculptural? I meant to ask you much earlier.

MR. CASTLE: Well, not looking like furniture. Appearing to be from some certain views and not realizing its functional, thinking of it as actually a piece of sculpture.

MR. BROWN: An object, a three-dimensional object.

MR. CASTLE: A three-dimensional object, and not a piece of furniture. I mean, none of them looked like that. And I think occasionally my work did look like that. Occasionally my work, say from certain angles or for certain views or not being in use, you wouldn't realize what it is.

MR. BROWN: So you first reaction, however, to make Makepeace's, seeing his work, was you were amazed--

MR. CASTLE: Well, I liked it.

MR. BROWN: You liked it, but it was in the end--

MR. CASTLE: But I thought it was absolutely impractical, and he got high prices for it. And I went back again visited him two years laterand he was of course doing the same thing doing it better even. And some of the projects underway were so extraordinary in terms of the amount of work that went into them. .. a chair he was making of macasar ebony, which is like the most expensive wood you can get, and stringing a seat in nickel wire, was--I was there for two weeks visiting, and the guy, one craftsman, would spend--you know, didn't even finish the seat in two weeks. But then I also began to do a fair amount of reading, by this time, about furniture and began to learn about the English tradition for working, which I had not realized before. Began to understand what's happening with the Cotswald tradition. I didn't know anything about that at that time, and that Grimson and Barnsley had gone off into the Cotswalds and started making furniture by hand of extraordinarily high quality.

MR. BROWN: These were design-trained people who'd gone off into the Cotswalds.

MR. CASTLE: Yeah, they had some design training, but had money, so they didn't have to worry about supporting themselves, and were making furniture of extraordinary quality. And Edward Barnsley is still alive today. He's too old to work I think, but his shop's still not--you look at it as rather old-fashioned now, but there's a certain quality about it that's just extraordinary, and I began to realize that there's art and workmanship. And that the art isn't all in the appearance of the piece. There's a great deal of art just in the workmanship.

MR. BROWN: By art you don't mean merely skill. You mean aesthetics?

MR. CASTLE: Well, yeah.

MR. BROWN: Design important.

MR. CASTLE: It's hard for to people to seemuch harder to see than the form of a piece. Even--you know, I also began to do a fair amount of reading about the history of furniture, and that all started because I got interested in these trompe l'oeil carvings. And in order to make those effective, I found out that I couldn't possibly use my own furniture. That negated the whole thing. It didn't work. That's like putting a sculpture on a sculpture. You had to use a traditional form to put the trompe l'oeil carving on. So in order to find some of those, I began going through the history books and reading about them, and we began making them and looked at them with a whole new way of looking at them once you'd made one. Once you'd done a ball and claw foot, you looked at it differently, and you really understood the differences between all the different balls and claw footsthat there were just vast differences in qualities of ball and claw foot. And how different they could be, how much art there could be just in that, in the sensitivity with which that's done. And the sensitivity with whic