"I took a long walk yesterday afternoon to the east and drew trees—I like the wandering ones, not absolute freaks but not just the ordinary healthy ones, either. There are some wonderfully strange ones on Horn island—years of storm and years of sudden growth, one side retarded and the other growing like a vine—" - Walter Inglis Anderson, from his Horn Island Logs
Walter Inglis Anderson loved wild nature, and his art and words reflect the solace and freedom he found there. In particular, he painted thousands of watercolors during his frequent stays on Horn Island, a barrier island twelve miles off the Mississippi Coast. He would row out to Horn Island and camp, sometimes for weeks at a time, under his upturned boat. His work is full of strong color, swirls and curls, which reflect his preoccupation with the energies and currents of the natural life force. He painted trees, animals, birds and insects, often by lying on his hands and knees in wild thickets. He said his goal was to be one with the natural world instead of an intruder, created works that are intense and evocative.
Most of Anderson’s paintings were done in the last eighteen years of his life, which, after a number of stays in mental hospitals for a mental illness described variously as schizophrenia and severe depression, he began to live a solitary existence in a cottage on his in-law’s estate on the Mississippi gulf coast.
Anderson studied art at both the Parson's Institute and at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and was widely read and widely traveled. He traveled throughout Europe and his art was particularly affected by the cave art he saw at Les Eyzies in France. His extensive reading of poetry, history, natural science and art history encompassed books of folklore, mythology, philosophy, and epics of voyage and discovery.
Walter Anderson died of lung cancer at the age of 62. After his death, thousands of his paintings, done on typewriter paper, were discovered scattered throughout his cottage. He had little interest in preserving his art, and thousands more are known to have been discarded.
The VHS movie of his life, The Islander, offers an interesting portrayal of Anderson’s life and work.
The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson. This book edited by Redding S. Sugg, Jr. describes, mostly in Anderson’s own words, his fascination with the natural life on Horn Island, and his own deep need to spend time there alone. In the beginning he sees himself as an observer. As the log progresses, he sees himself more and more as a part of the life there, which indeed he was. The book also contains many drawings and paintings.
The Islander is a quietly inspiring little film based on the time that artist Walter Anderson spent on Horn Island, a small barrier island nine miles off the coast of Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. Over a period of seventeen years, Anderson rowed across a fickle twelve miles to this beloved island, where he painted and lived close to nature. As described in Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson, edited by Redding S. Sugg, Jr., previous to this period of his life, Anderson “developed severe mental illness and, realizing that he was threat to himself and others, asked to be hospitalized." After three unscucessful attempts to follow a traditional course of treatment, Anderson gave up on institutions and secluded himself in a cottage near his wife and children.. With the support of his wife, he began the most productive period of his life, living and painting on Horn Island for short and long periods of time..
Yesterday after lunch, I walked east along the inside beach to the gap and around on the outside to the bullrush pool. I did a circuit of it drawing flies. I heard a little green heron complaining and saw white guano beneath the pine branch. Then I looked up in to a dead line beyond, and saw a young heron climb up using, feet, wings, and the point of its bill. Then it reached a branch and stood—and stretched and stretched, silhouetted against an enormous white cloud. It seemed that with very little it would climb the cloud and take the kingdom of heaven by force—God knows it needs taking.
I drew it in ecstasy. It was a concentrated image that nothing could take from me. If it was not poetry it was the image for by Yeats from which poetry is made. I am a painter so this morning I did two watercolors of it before I got out of bed. This does not mean that I am going to be content with that one image for the rest of my life. It will generate power in me for a while, then I need another. One image succeeds another with surprising regularity on Horn Island. Whether they could be shared is another matter— people need different things. - Walter Anderson, July 1959, from his Horn Island Logs, edited by Redding S. Sugg, Jr.
When Rod first introduced me to this film seven years ago, I was reluctant to watch a film about a diagnosed schizophrenic painting and living alone. What did this man’s life have to do with me? But, as with Robert Perkins film, Into the Great Solitude, I discovered a quality in his journey – interior and exterior – that spoke to an ancient longing of my own to be deeply and harmoniously related to wild nature. The contrast between a richly introspective, reclusive and quiet existence against a deliberate open vulnerability to wild nature and the natural elements beckons me. To see such beauty come from this contrast inspires me. Anderson captures images of nature around him as if they are food for a starving man. He paints on typewriter paper, not concerned with passing his images on, but with sustaining the ecstasy he feels while witnessing the beauty around him. Redding's analysis in the introduction of The Horn Island Logs goes further to explain:
The Horn Island drawings, paintings, and logs of Walter Inglis Anderson are evidenced of a union between a human genius and a genius loci. As fruits of a complex but loving relationship between a human being and nature, they witness to the possibility of reconciliation between the race and the earth. Walter Anderson beleived that nature has within itself order, which, however requires a human witness—indeed a human lover—it it will be "realized," a term which he employed as an active vern. Nature will respond by presenting, to the eye sufficiently objective to desrve them, "materializations" and "images" fully apprehensible only as ecstatic exprience but shareable, perhaphs, in art and chronicle although these be but elements and by-products of such experience."
I experienced an ecstatic relationship to nature as a young person — high on rock cliff walls, deep in the tannic and ice cold water of a mountain river, exposed on an frozen mountain ridge — but it became buried in my late 20’s and early 30’s by an overly long to-do list, dictated to me by the modern culture. It was through a long canoe trip with Rod six years ago that I suddenly re-experienced this kind of relationship. The ecstasy of reunion.
The power of both The Islander and Into the Great Solitude is in their ability to inspire us to follow the deeper chord, to accept and rejoice in what Anderson call’s nature’s “providence.” Both Perkins and Anderson inspire without dictating. Neither leaves behind a trail of shoulds or should nots. As Anderson writes in his log, “People need different things.” This is why their work means a more to me than Thoreau’s, whose work is peppered with criticism and dogma. When Thoreau surrenders his critical mind to his exultant heart, his writing shines and inspires. His writing seems to a serve a different purpose, one of relating the struggle between the modern man in us and the wild creature longing for reunion.
