Artist Shout Out: Walter Inglis Anderson

Walter Inglis Anderson was an American painter, writer, naturalist and bicycle enthusiast.

Artist Bio:

Walter Inglis Anderson was born in 1903 in New Orleans to George Walter Anderson, a grain merchant, and Annette McConnell Anderson, an artist. His mother’s love of art, music, and literature strongly influenced Walter (called “Bob” by his friends and family) and his two brothers, Peter and Mac. Anderson was educated at a private boarding school, then attended the Parsons Institute of Design in New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where his drawings earned him a scholarship for study abroad. He traveled throughout Europe and was particularly impressed with the cave art he saw at Les Eyzies in France. His wide-ranging interests included extensive reading of poetry, history, natural science and art history. He pursued man’s search for meaning in books of folklore, mythology, philosophy, and epics of voyage and discovery.

Anderson returned to Ocean Springs and married a Radcliffe graduate, Agnes (Sissy) Grinstead, started a family, and went to work creating molds and decorating earthenware at Shearwater Pottery, founded by his brother Peter. Anderson felt that an artist should create affordable work that brought pleasure to others, and in return, the artist should be able to pursue his artistic passions. In the 1930s, he worked on regional Works Progress Administration mural projects and began to view his role in art as a muralist.

It was in the late 1930s that Anderson first succumbed to mental illness. He was diagnosed with severe depression and spent three years in and out of hospitals. Following his hospitalizations, Anderson joined his wife and small children at her father’s antebellum home in Gautier, Mississippi. The pastoral tranquillity of the “Oldfields” plantation provided an ideal setting for recuperation. During this period, he rendered thousands of disciplined and compelling works of art which reflected his training, intellect, and extraordinary grasp of the history of art.

In 1947, with the understanding of his family, Anderson left his wife and children and embarked on a private and very solitary existence. He lived alone in a cottage on the Shearwater compound, and increased his visits to Horn Island, one of a group of barrier islands along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He would row the 12 miles in a small skiff, carrying minimal necessities and his art supplies. Anderson spent long periods of time on this uninhabited island over the last 18 years of his life. There he lived primitively, working in the open and sleeping under his boat, sometimes for weeks at a time.

He endured extreme weather conditions, from blistering summers to hurricane winds and freezing winters. He painted and drew a multitude of species of island vegetation, animals, birds, and insects, penetrating the wild thickets on hands and knees and lying in lagoons in his search to record his beloved island paradise. Anderson’s obsession to “realize” his subjects through his art, to be one with the natural world instead of an intruder, created works that are intense and evocative.

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.)

Among Anderson’s most vivid writings are logbooks recording his travels by bicycle to New York (1942), New Orleans (1943), Texas (1945), China (1949), Costa Rica (1951) and Florida (1960); an account of his life among the pelican colonies of North Key, in the Chandeleurs; and about 90 journals of his trips to Horn Island, off the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, in which he combines close observation of the natural world with reflection on art and nature. Another noteworthy log describes a walking tour to a colony of sand hill cranes north of Gautier, Mississippi in January 1944.

Walter Anderson died at the age of 62 in a New Orleans hospital of lung cancer. Much of the work survived only by chance; it was discovered in drifts, like autumn leaves, throughout his cottage after his death. Those found treasures present the viewer today with a fascinating opportunity to share Anderson’s vision.

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina damaged or destroyed much of Walter Anderson’s work which was housed in the concrete vault on the Anderson’s property in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. A group of professors and students from Mississippi State University (and others) volunteered their time and facilities to help save and preserve Anderson’s work.

See four more works by Anderson at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Form and Fantasy: The Block Prints of Walter Anderson features full-color and black-and-white reproductions of over 250 of the artist’s prints.

Bio taken from the Walter Anderson Museum of Art and Wikipedia.

“Hummingbirds”

“Blue Crabs” – 1960

“Frogs, Bugs Flowers” – 1960

“Thistle”

RIP: Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly with his painting “1994 Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor),” at the Menil Collection in Houston in 2005.

According to Randy Kennedy of the NY Times:

Cy Twombly, whose spare, childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 83.

His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work. Mr. Twombly had battled cancer for several years.

In a career that slyly subverted Abstract Expressionism, toyed briefly with Minimalism, seemed barely to acknowledge Pop art and anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a divisive artist almost from the start. The curator Kirk Varnedoe, on the occasion of a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that his work was “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.”

The critic Robert Hughes called him “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.”

Mr. Twombly’s decision to settle permanently in southern Italy in 1957 as the art world shifted decisively in the other direction, from Europe to New York, was only the most symbolic of his idiosyncrasies. He avoided publicity throughout his life and mostly ignored his critics, who questioned constantly whether his work deserved a place at the forefront of 20th century abstraction, though he lived long enough to see it arrive there. It didn’t help that his paintings, because of their surface complexity and whirlwinds of tiny detail — scratches, erasures, drips, penciled fragments of Italian and classical verse amid scrawled phalluses and buttocks — lost much of their power in reproduction…

Read the full article here

Check out a slideshow essay about Twombly’s work here

See more of Twombly’s work here (paintings) and here (sculpture)

“Solon I” – 1952

“Untitled” – 1954

“Untitled” – 1970

“Ferragosto I” – 1961

“Ides of March” – 1962

“School of Athens” – 1962

“Hero and Leander (To Christopher Marlowe)” – 1985

“Lepanto” – 2001

See more of Twombly’s work here (paintings) and here (sculpture)

New Music Video: Tidelands “Holy Grail”

Tidelands asked illustrator Ami Kutata to create a video for their new single “Holy Grail”. Four months later, Kutata had completed the video, based on more than 1,000 pages of her watercolor work.

Kutata isn’t fluent in English, so Mie Araki, one half of Tidelands, translated the lyrics to “Holy Grail” for her. This created slightly different meanings which combined with Kutata’s own storyline to make for something entirely new altogether.

“She was really attached to the line in the song, ‘Over-dignified is just another way to compensate for what you’ve lost’, which became her main inspiration for the story and the images of a traveler, the queen and the dwarf town,” says Araki.

“Holy Grail” is the first single from Tidelands upcoming self-released debut If…, out July 26.

Artist Shout Out: I Wayan Sudarsana Yansen (abstract)

I Wayan Sudarsana Yansen is a contemporary Indonesian artist who’s abstract paintings celebrate colour, life, energy and spirit in an organic way. Bursting, flowing, decomposing and re-emerging the forms appear in a constant state of transition. The visual language he creates on the canvas is both beautiful and mysterious with each piece he weaving a small story about the natural course of things. (source)

Yansen lives and works in Ungasan, Bali, Indonesia.

See more of Yansen’s work here

*all works are oil on canvas

Street Art: Zéh Palito

“l’équilibre”

“New York.Broadway”

“_______________________AMOR”

“Tree of Life 2097″

See more of Palito’s work on Flickr