Walter Inglis Anderson - Horn Island

Horn Island

The Oldfields period came to an end in 1945, when he left his family and moved back to a cottage at Shearwater. From then until his death in 1965 he lived a reclusive life, working as a decorator at the Pottery and making frequent excursions, in a rowboat sometimes rigged with a sail, from Ocean Springs to Horn Island, Mississippi where he lived in primitive conditions and portrayed the life around him - birds, sea creatures, animals, trees, landscapes - in radiant watercolors and in a series of logbooks. He also ventured abroad to Costa Rica and China, and made numerous bicycle trips, on some of which he traveled for thousands of miles. "The wheels are turning again", he once wrote. "A bicycle seems to leave no room for other evils, or goods for that matter. It is an inclusive and exclusive wheel.”

One of his greatest works from this period is a series of murals in the Ocean Springs Community House. Along one wall, he painted the landing in Ocean Springs of the 17th-century French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville. Along the opposite wall he painted what he called the “Seven Climates,” in the sense of “a belt of the earth’s surface contained between two given parallels of latitude.” The Gulf Coast—Ocean Springs in particular - is seen as a microcosm of these climates, each of which Anderson associates with a corresponding celestial body and with a season of the year: Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon, beginning with Mercury and ending with Uranus. Anderson must also have been aware of the doctrine that the seven planetary spheres, with their different tones, produce a celestial music. Another, smaller mural, painted around the same time but discovered only after his death on the wooden walls of a padlocked room in his cottage at Shearwater, is inspired by Psalm 104. It is a radiant hymn to light and to the beauty of one day on the Coast, beginning on the east wall with sunrise and continuing around the room through noon, sunset and night. Both murals may be seen at the 'Walter Anderson Museum of Art.

Omitted from mainstream histories of American painting, Anderson’s work has not received sufficient critical attention, perhaps because he chose to live in a small Southern town, patiently acquiring what he called “definite knowledge” of local forms. Fiercely independent in spirit, indifferent to his own “career,” Anderson did nothing to cultivate fame or critical attention and sometimes seemed to flee them. When the Brooklyn Museum invited him to an exhibition of his linoleum block prints in 1948, he chose instead to travel to China, where he hoped to gaze upon unknown landscapes and examine Tibetan murals (the China trip ended, deep inland, when his passport and other belongings were stolen and Anderson returned, partly on foot, to his point of departure in Hong Kong.) Anderson’s painting– a search for the spiritual and transcendent in the forms of the natural world – thrived on his love of limits, and the overwhelming majority of his best watercolors, undated and unsigned, were done on 8.5 x 11 typing paper with little thought for posterity. Rarely did he sign and date them. For him, painting was simply a way of turning art and nature into “a single thing,” helping the natural world “realize” itself through the artist’s intervention “Order is here,” he wrote of Horn Island, “but it needs realizing,” and to him “realization”—a term which he seems to have borrowed from Cézanne, one of his favorite painters, and adapted to his own use—meant discovering and giving memorable form to unities missed by the casual observer.

For Anderson, “realization” was more than a psychological process in the creator; it was a phase of nature itself, by means of which the natural world –and mankind– achieve a perfection they could not reach on their own. Nature, he wrote, was “only too glad to have assistance in establishing order.” In many respects, Anderson's solitary trips to the Horn Island wilderness or his still lifes rendering loving homage to "the beauty of fruit, flowers, vegetables" may best be apprehended as a mystical search for unity and transcendence, akin, say, to the "dark night of the soul" of John of the Cross or the Taoist tradition. The artist’s personality, his god-like powers of invention and imitation disappear before (as Otto Fischer once wrote) “the Taoist-inspired endeavor to interpret art as the revelation of Being through a human medium to render visible the Life Force of Nature.” Not merely the "Little Room" mural, but Anderson's entire work is a psalm of thanksgiving. It is the duty of an artist, he wrote, to render thanks for "the voluptuous return" of nature, the "gift of an austere mother to her children". Anderson's attitude contrasts sharply with prevailing late-20th and early 21st-century notions of the natural world as man's "environment," a purely material world to be manipulated or managed through technology and subjected to human control.