Ted Castle Place Mat

Date:	1982
Medium:	Watercolor on paper
Size inches:	14 x 17
Size cm:	35.6 x 43.2
Signature:	Signed, dated and titled lower right
Location:	New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut

New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Gift of the Estate of George Deem, 2013. Accession Number 2013.54.128

 Ted Castle, 1938 - 2006, novelist and art critic. Written between 1963 and 1966, Ted Castle's novel Anticipation (is) devoted to the interior of his psyche, especially as refracted through portraits of friends. George Deem figures in the novel as one of those friends, and a George Deem painting is reproduced.

This is a time of hopeless remembrance  
(Chapter heading printed in script)

George Deem in his painting and James Waring in his dances, can balance the concerns that try us without falling into categories. Mr. Waring fills the space with momentary banalities always nicely executed by a few excellent performers. He includes all the best movements of the mind often brilliantly disguised in many colors. He associates with George Brecht who, like Gideon and Ozenfant but purposelessly, accumulates oddities of the near past to reconstruct a time that never was but is. Mr. Deem’s paintings allude repetitively to classifications of beauty but they are hardly a collection of the past. In his examination of memory he may sometimes fill the space with the patterns of writing or the many faces of a friend but he actually says nothing. (p. 103).

Romeo Alpha/Alpha Romeo (Chapter heading)
Here, I shall console myself with a word of thanks to those artists I admire who are more or less my own age. In most cases they are not the ones to whom I owe most; but there is a special delight in recognizing oneself in the works of other people one may not know, but might.
In no intentional order, then, I have: Bernardo Bertolucci for his lovely film about stupidity called Primo della Rivoluzione; Rosalyn Drexler for her play Home Movies in which she reclaims the fact that ‘we all have weak eyes’; Fernando Arabal for recalling my attention to the remarkable charm of solitude; George Deem, with whom I sometimes drink, for the perfection of his paintings; Fred Herko, who is dead, (or Rudolph Nureyev) for his vivid romantic mood; Jean-Luc Godard for his films Vivre Sa Vie and La Femme Mariée which show all  the right attitudes in a coherent manner; R. B. Kitaj for his unpopular juxtaposition of literature and painting; Joyce Carol Oates, a childhood friend, for her novel With Shuddering Fall which demonstrates the masculine principle; Charles Webb, a college friend, for his novel The Graduate which demonstrates the impossibility of writing a good novel; Jon Silkin for insisting on the poetry of process, however imperfect it may be; Edward Dorn for the reinvention of artistic criticism; John Arden for the translation of poetry into action; Lee Oswald for his honesty. (p. 331-32).

On page 257, I have reproduced a photographic print of the painting February 1964 by George Deem. It was made at about that time in oils on canvas at the size 30x40”. It was the first of his series of calendars. At present it is owned by the artist’s agent The Allan Stone Gallery of New York, through whose permission it is reproduced. Incorporated in the painting is the artist’s reproduction of a landscape made in 1875 by George Inness (1825-1894) which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (p.339)
--Frederick Ted Castle, Anticipation, a novel, McPherson & Company 1984
Inscribed by the author: “For George Deem / always inspiring / With love / signature / May 2 84”
Publisher’s note on dust jacket states that the book was completed in 1966.