January 29 - April 5, 2009
Walter Inglis Anderson painted thousands of jewel-like watercolors of his beloved Mississippi Gulf Coast, but the work from the last fifteen years of his life is far and away the most expressionistic and spiritual of his lifetime.
Ecstasy – The Mystical Landscapes of Walter Anderson, an exhibition of more than fifty watercolors from this period, was organized in late 2007 by the Museum, with Dr. Brent Funderburk acting as Guest Curator. A traveling exhibition, it was first shown at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee and then at the Vero Beach Museum of Fine Art in Florida. Ecstasy’s return to WAMA marks the first time that many of these paintings have been shown on the Gulf Coast.
The paintings included in Ecstasy capture vividly Anderson’s love for nature, as well as the intensity with which he painted his vision. Anderson, well-versed in art history, chose to work outside contemporary art world conventions. This self-imposed artistic isolation allowed him to develop a style that expressed his intense love for nature. By so closely observing the world around him, he came to be able to express through his work the belief that art and nature are one.
The pieces in this show have been divided into four sections, each of which mirrors a different phase of Anderson’s late work. These works were painted mostly during the artist’s often weeks-long ventures to his favorite and nearest faraway place - Horn Island. His trips there formed the cadence for the last eighteen years of his life, becoming the springboard from which Anderson created his most visceral, direct responses to nature, which have the power to awe and astound us even today.
The artist has been content to be the discoverer…to find that art and nature are one.
It is time that he realized that it is he who makes them one by the act of art.
Walter Anderson,
The Horn Island Logs
