Wild Bells by Walter Inglis Anderson

A skeleton within a body, cells within a leaf, letters within a language, notes within a song, motifs within a work of art – these are building blocks that when combined can imbue the whole with meaning, emotion or beauty. Motifs are lines that form an alphabet for drawing used throughout the history of art. Nature is the ultimate resource for art and these lines are found in the horizon, the sun or the nautilus shell. They surround us, if we only pause to look.

It is the mission of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art to explore, to look inside and reveal the details in both Walter Anderson’s art and nature, and to present what we have discovered to you, our audience. It is also the mission of WAMA to look outside of its own walls at new art, to better understand the creative discovery that connects us back through time to our earliest ancestors.

The concept of seven basic motifs, as clarified by 20^th century Mexican artist Adolfo Best-Maugard, shaped the art of Walter Anderson. This influence lives in the works of the forty-seven Mississippi artists who contributed to the exhibition. Much can be gained in understanding Walter Anderson’s art by looking at their works and vice versa. All artists are searching to reveal a personal view of the world, whether as seen in nature or from their own inner landscapes. The Motifs of Time exhibition is a journey of discovery to be savored. I invite you to come along and remember the destination matters not.

Clayton Bass, Executive Director

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art acknowledges the following individuals, organizations and corporations for their generous support of exhibitions in 2002.

Richard & Rosemary Furr
Maria Mavar
ChemFirst Foundation
The Family of Walter Anderson
The Mississippi Arts
Commission, a state agency
Yellow Book U.S.A. 

Curator’s Statement 

The “Motifs of Time” are a series of marks or lines that form a basic alphabet for drawing. These lines have been used throughout the history of art and can be traced back to the earliest carved and painted designs known. They are not the only ones used, but they seem to be the most common. In fact, the seven lines referred to in this exhibition are actually derived from two shapes — the curved and the straight line. 

This particular set of lines is taken from the 1925 publication A Method for Creative Design by the Mexican artist, filmmaker and dandy, Adolfo Best Maugard. As secretary to the National Preparatory Schools of Mexico 1921 - 1924 and as an associate of Diego Rivera, his book gained wide acceptance and was influential in shaping art educational theory of the time. In it he recommends a method for teaching art where students begin with the lines first to give them an immediate feeling of accomplishment of their own ability. Thus art training begins with a concept (an idea) rather than a percept (an impression received by the mind through the senses). You master the abstract lines before you copy a realistic image that comes through your eyes. This was a drastic change from the traditional approach to art education, but was one that was appearing elsewhere as well.

In Europe, new publications dealt with the significance of the elements of line and color. Wassily Kandinsky had published Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1912 where he proclaimed that colors have deep-seated, psychic correlations, and in his Point and Line to Plane of 1926, he describes the color and sound of various line shapes. In 1914, Piet Mondrian had also emphasized the importance of abstract design in a credo which stated “Art. . . has no direct relation to reality. . . because reality is opposed to the spiritual. . . art should be above reality” (Seuphor, Piet Mondrian: Life and Work, p. 177). In the Pedagogical Notebooks of 1925, Paul Klee writes “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible. . . . The formal elements of graphic art are dot, line, plane, and space — the last three charged with energy of various kinds” (Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, pp. 182-185). The period of 1912-1926 was especially productive in art theory and analysis that paralleled the drastic changes in art styles and movements taking place in the western world.

Best-Maugard’s book was particularly intriguing because of his idea that all design in every culture is based on a set of seven symbols or lines — the spiral, the circle, the half-circle, the s-curve, the wavy line, the zigzag, and the straight line. He explores the psychological nature of these lines and their timeless quality throughout all history. The spiral as well all the rest are often carved in stone during the Neolithic period over 5000 years ago and are prominent from Newgrange in Ireland to the ancient megaliths on the island of Malta.

Best-Maugard includes photographs and drawings of motifs from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, up through Classical Greece and Rome, and on to the present. They are found on pottery, in wall painting, decorated book pages, on Pennsylvania Dutch barns and Romanian Egg decoration. They occur in Africa, China, and as tattoos in Borneo. They are Mexican and Malay, Apache and early American. Human beings have used them as long as pictures have been made, and they also form much of the basis for our alphabets. 

The motif designs

Line in both science and art can be understood as the path of a point moving in space, the track of a motion. We often attach psychological meanings to line and especially to the seven motifs. If a straight line is vertical, it is positive and ready for action; a horizontal one is passive and we associate it with rest or even death because the body is horizontal in those states. A diagonal suggests movement, energy, or unbalance — the legs are diagonal when walking. Some meanings are symbolic and attached to long cultural interpretation, and others are pictorial — they simply look like something in nature.

The zigzag is usually associated with danger and we indicate lightening as a diagonal zigzag. In a horizontal position, however, it might mean mountains (an active and dangerous event area at one time), and we know the Egyptians used it as a hieroglyph for water. In our alphabet, it is the M, W, N, Z, A and V.

The other motif lines are curved. The wavy line is usually associated with gentle movement — undulating water or hills on the horizon. Best-Maugard also refers to the shape of curly hair. The S-curve is a segment of a wavy line that is distinctive alone. The 18^th century English painter William Hogarth proclaimed this line to be the “line of beauty.” We see it as serpentine, often as a graceful gesture of shalom or elegant decoration, and obviously, it is the letter S.

Best-Maugard identifies the archetypal design to be that of the swirling spiral from which all the others can be derived. The spiral, he says, contains basic insights into the laws of universal order and the very nature of growth and life itself. (This observation predates the photographs of spiral galaxies, and the double helix of DNA.)

The half circle is found in the rainbow, or turned to the side, it becomes the crescent moon. In writing, it is our C, and we use it for our lower case n and m. The circle is one of the most enduring marks of all. It represents the sun, eternity, or ripples in still water into which a pebble has been dropped. Circles are carved in stone from the most ancient times and it is our letter O.

Walter Anderson’s use of motifs

Several books by these art theorists found their way into the library and study of Walter Anderson during the 1930s. We find Anderson often refering to the seven motifs of Best-Maugard using them as a warm-up similar to a calligrapher’s strokes of the alphabet. He interpreted the motifs in different ways sometimes writing out an emotion or action beside the line:

Curved line running thirst
Zigzag walking fear
Half circles sitting fatigue
Circles hunger
Vertical lines standing boredom
S curves bending love
Spirals saluting acquisitiveness

A group of Anderson drawings with motif references can be seen displayed as a group in the exhibition. The drawings quickly move beyond the lines into flowers, animals, and landscapes. The Community Center refers to them in the designs around the windows, in the doors, and they are subtly embedded in the paintings of the earth, the sea, and the mythological cosmos.

Besides the Best-Maugard book, the Anderson family owned The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry by Jay Hambidge and two volumes of photographs by the German photographer, Karl Blossfeldt. The Blossfeldt books, Urformen der Kunst and Wundergarten der Nature, contain black and white close-up photographs of plants and date from the 1920s. Blossfeldt explains the close connection between man-made forms and the forms seen in nature and concludes that man traces all original design back to the plant world. That world is full of spirals, curved and straight lines. He notes that nature tends to repeat itself whereas man’s creations - the arts - are unique and changeable. Yet paradoxically, nature is in constant flux whereas the arts distill the image/event and become timeless.

The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry by Jay Hambidge describes the types of measurement used in man’s designs, and in designs found in nature. He explores the types of symmetry used by the Egyptians and Greeks and places them into two groups he calls static and dynamic. The first is based on a repetitive module and is more Greek; the second (as in Egyptian temples) on a sequence of change, which can be seen in living things and charted mathematically. This system is based on the Fibonacci, or summation, series of numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 etc.) which represents a ratio and therefore a geometrical progression. Not only does it explain the distribution of leaves on a stem and the design of seeds in the head of a sunflower; the resulting logarithmic spiral becomes the key to dynamic symmetry — the rectangle of whirling squares. The Golden Section of the Greeks, which was also used by many Renaissance artists, is one of the derivations of this dynamic symmetry. 

Walter Anderson sketched the Hambidge angles and rectangles as “plan schemes” or as checks on proportions of his work. Perhaps his use of the rectangular typing paper for most of his small watercolors is adapted from Hambidge. The designs of the Rose and the Sun on the east side of the Community Center also appear to derive from these studies. 

Motifs in art

An artist may use line as the single most expressive element of the painting, or it may exist only by implication or innuendo. A line may be thin, wirelike and delicate, giving a sense of fragility; or it may alternate quickly from thick to thin, the strokes jagged, and the outline broken to express vigorous action and angry agitation. A gentle undulating but firm line might define a contour that is restful and sensuous suggesting mass and volume, or a line can express a controlling presence in a hard edge, a profile, or a boundary. 

The works in this exhibition approach motif lines by many avenues. Some photographs capture the spiral or the S-curve as the controlling contour of the image, some three-dimensional works incise the motifs as part of the decorative design. The paintings range from presentation of the spiral as a rectangular image, to the implication of line as the contour of objects we see everyday. But the lines are always present if the viewer looks attentively, and may imply worlds of meaning beyond. 

Patricia Pinson, Curator

The Works of Walter Anderson and These Mississippi Artists 

Jere Allen
Fauna/Flora, oil on linen, Oxford
Van Bankston
#3089, acrylic on canvas, Carrollton
Vidal Blankenstein
Tree House, acrylic on board, Jackson
Lyle Bonge
Untitled, photography, Biloxi
Robert A. Brooks
Untitled, photo collage, Biloxi
Marion Brown
Spiral Stairs, 1996 photography, Yazoo City
Carl Buchanan
Ocean Vessel, clay, Laurel
Claudia Cartee
Resolution porcelain, clay, Seminary
Anna Chupa
Speechless, inkjet print on luster paper, Starkville
Mary Ott Davidson
Spiraling Modulation, red and white oak, Saucier
Tom Douglas
Guided Vessel, polychromed wood, Amory
Billy Dugger
Shadowplay, photography, Moss Point
Terry Blake Edwards
Coastally Correct, mixed media, Pass Christian
Claire Evangelista
The Fall Of Icarus, bronze and stainless steel, Ocean Springs
Lucy Gaines
Lilies For Walter, oil on canvas, Tupelo
Sandra Halat
Ladies of Lapland series: Ladies with Brain Noises,
mixed media print, Ocean Springs
Ann Hanger
Ludisia Orchid With Tulip Abstraction, watercolor, Starkville
Mary Hardy
Primordial Light, acrylic, Ocean Springs
Gail Hendrickson
Men Of Motifs, mild steel and enamel paint, Gulfport
Frank Janca
Still Life with Delphiniums and Hydrangea, oil on canvas, Biloxi
Talle Johnson
Container, thrown, altered, and handbuilt stoneware, Bay St. Louis
Steven Kirkpatrick
Nature's Jewel, photography, Madison
David Lambert
Ten, acrylic on wood, Jackson
Tina Lutz
Gate Travels, mixed media on canvas, Tupelo
John Marshall
Manon's Toy, steel and wood, Meridian
P. Sanders McNeal
Secrets In The Chest, oil on panel, Jackson
Greg Moran
An Island From Far, forged steel, wood, damascus steel, Gulfport
Bill Myers
Marking Time, mixed media sculpture, Ocean Springs
Thomas Nawrocki
Zig Zap 2a, color collograph print, Columbus
Bill Nelson
Circle Dance, oil on canvas, Moss Point
Brian Nettles
Tea Pot, clay, Pass Christian
Dina O'Sullivan
Altar, clay, Ocean Springs
Patt Odom
The Sound Of Music, mixed media, Ocean Springs
Elizabeth Pajerski
Barcelona, acrylic on canvas, Vicksburg
Joseph Pearson
African Rhythms, oil on canvas, Waveland
Susie Ranager
Observation, mixed media, Ocean Springs
Joey Rice
Life Lines, cast paper, Ocean Springs
Robert Ring
The Sea Enemy Head/See The Anemone Bed
limestone and ceramic aquarium divers, Fulton
Ted Rose
Reflections of Natchez Stanton Hall, graphite, acrylic, and varnish, Long Beach
Amy Sorensen
Adaptation, oil and collage on canvas, Jackson
Harry Souchon
Totem Pole Motif, clay, Bay St. Louis
Charlotte Smith
Tendril, basketry, Madison
Matt Steadman
Jar With Waves, stoneware, Gautier
Christopher Inglis Stebly
In the High Dunes, oil on canvas, Ocean Springs
Kappy Page Stephens
Motif Jar, stoneware, Biloxi
Cecile Higdon Stephens
Wings Over The Sea acrylic, multimedia on linen, Moss Point
Elizabeth Veglia
Midnight Council, stained glass mosaic, Bay St. Louis

Tuesday, May 28, 10:00, GalleryWalk with Mississippi artist Ted Rose
Free for members and guests; museum admission for nonmembers