James Edward Deeds, Jr American, 1908-1987
A near lifelong ward of the state of Missouri, James Edward Deeds, Jr. was a colorful mental patient at Nevada, Missouri’s State Hospital, No. 3. He was committed in 1936 by his family, diagnosed with schizophrenia. His drawings were executed in graphite and crayon on the official ledger paper of the institution, where he remained for nearly four decades.
Two hundred eighty-three gem-like drawings are delicately executed and share a meticulous, stylized draftsmanship that imposes order on an otherwise confusing and uncertain world. Deeds depicts men and women with thin, compressed lips and wide, staring eyes, dressed in old-fashioned clothes and elaborate hats; lions, deer, and Civil War battle horses; trees with twisted branches, sharply sloping hillsides; toy boats, trains, and motorcars, intricately detailed buildings, and hospital gates with the sculpture of a magnificent eagle on top.
The works are innocent, often fanciful, and notably devoid of the suffering, violence, or the anger one might associate with an artist presumably under psychological or emotional stress. One glaring exception is the unmistakable recurrence of the initials, “ECT,” a probable acronym and thinly veiled reference to the controversial shock treatment known as electroconvulsive therapy. In one of Deeds’ drawings, in large block print, is the word "ECTLECTRC"; lettered in a tiny banner off to the right, "PENCIL." In 2007, New York-based sculptor and art dealer Harris Diamant, who at the time was trying to trace the artist’s identity, purchased the extant drawings and nicknamed Deeds "The Electric Pencil."
It is reasonable to assume that drawing was a therapeutic form of escape for Deeds. He carefully sewed each sheet into a crude, lovingly made binding that, today, shows the wear of having been clutched unceasingly as a sort of palliative or even a talisman.
Due to worsening arthritis, Deeds stopped drawing by the mid-1960s and presented the album to his mother. That touched off a series of missteps that almost led to the album’s destruction but for the remarkable sensitivity of a fourteen-year-old boy who plucked it from a junk heap and safeguarded it for the next 36 years.
In 1973, at the age of sixty-five, the artist was released to a nursing facility in Christian County, Missouri, and died at that institution fourteen years later. Today, the pages of Deeds’ talisman album have been carefully separated, conserved, and spread across the world with beauty and poignancy intact.
