The Birds of
Walter Anderson

September 19, 2002 -
January 15, 2003

Black Skimmer

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art wishes to acknowledge the ongoing creative collaboration with the Family of Walter Anderson to create the exhibition, Soaring Spirits. Also, it is with great excitement and appreciation that the Museum is able to republish the book Walter Anderson’s Birds, through a partnership with the Family of Walter Anderson and University Press of Mississippi. Perhaps the most favorite of all Anderson books, Birds will now be available for years to come.

A special thanks is due to Mary Pickard and Joan Gilley for their marvelous insights in working with the Museum Curator, Patricia Pinson in selecting the artworks and suggesting resource material from Walter Anderson’s logs. Thanks to all of the fine Staff at WAMA for embracing this exhibition and giving it their full creative focus!

Deepest appreciation goes to the sponsors of exhibitions this year at WAMA. Due to their belief in the importance of these important core programs, the Museum is better able to fulfill its mission to provide education through the arts to the Coast community and our visitors from around the world.

Of the myriad works created by Walter Anderson, no other subject which captured his passionate vision inspires the public more that his poetic images of birds. Anderson revealed to us both the birds’ physical beauty, and something deeper and more intangible, their soaring spirits. Each of us who view these works is richer in some way from having seen them. They stay in our memories and dreams. The beauty of Walter Anderson’s birds enriches and changes the viewer, as truly great art can.

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.

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

From the Curator...

Bluejays

Birds have that intrinsic ability that we humans lack — flight. From Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines to the SSTs today, human beings have emulated the birds. Somehow, we seek to be free of the bonds of gravity and weight and soar in the space between the grass and the stars. This yearning is not new, and forms an integral part of our free soaring psyche as well as our mythology. Icarus, that rebellious boy, made wings of wax and flew too close to the sun, and Pegasus, the winged steed of the Greek gods became a constellation among his starry peers.

The spiritual side of humanness is often associated with height. When we talk of God, we look up; spiritual icons are often tall and narrow from ethereal saints to gothic cathedrals and church spires. The freed spirit is portrayed as rising above an earthbound body, so loftiness takes on a spiritual element.

Young Heron

Nest

Birds, for Walter Anderson, took on two aspects — first, they became a metaphor for freedom and a symbol of spirituality; and second, they are small bundles of brightly colored or darkly iridescent feathers, which were a constant source of curiosity and delight. He wrote about them in poetic terms (“Birds are holes in heaven through which man may pass”) and studied their characteristics with a scientist’s eye for detail. He drew birds from his youth until his death, portraying them from delicate realism, to strident personifications, to abstractions of flight in a few lines. When his mother told him he should “write 200 words a day,” he changed “words” to “birds.” At one time he began to make drawings for an ornithological book, but like Audubon, he had to kill the birds in order to study the details. Killing them became so offensive that he became very depressed and stopped work on the book. There are hundreds of drawings and paintings of birds by Anderson. Some form the core of the book Birds: Walter Anderson with an introductory essay by Anderson’s daughter, Mary Pickard, published by the University Press of Mississippi. Many of those and others form part of the exhibition Soaring Spirits; The Birds of Walter Anderson. Anderson’s writings about birds provide organization and insight to this show. The key is “flight.” “Flight! . . . our birthright is the space between us and the stars. The wind has come to remind us of our wings . . Our conquest of the wind shall be a victory over our bodies and over the earth itself.”

From this concept, Soaring Spirits explores birds from the egg, “the outpouring of life [that] must find expression” through Anderson’s own losing “his heart to [the pelican],” to birds as “messengers from the sun” and flocks creating “a symphony of sound.” He then drew the dead birds that washed up on shore seeing them as food for the turtles and crabs making “the island more united than ever,” and finally, he portrays the bird’s spirit soaring into a new space.

Soaring Spirits allows us to see into a world of nature that surrounds us, but that we usually glimpse only through quick movement and sporadic sound. The bird world is complete with birth and death, gentleness and surliness, power and weakness. This exhibition also allows us to re-examine the soaring spirit within us. It is more than a mosaic of individual birds; it is about relationships of creatures to the environment, and our relationship to the creatures, to nature, and ourselves.

– Patricia Pinson, Curator

Girl and Bird

Soaring Spirits –
The Birds of Walter Anderson
by Mary Anderson Pickard

Preface

In The Birds of Walter Anderson I have written at length of my father’s relationship to birds and the work that birds inspired. The bird watercolors are my personal favorites. Through them, I learned to know my father again. In them I found his humor, his tenderness, his intelligence, as well as the wonder of his accomplishment. The watercolors prompted my own interest in birds, but most importantly, the father I had missed during his years of withdrawal had come home to me. In birds and in all the wonder of the rhythmic, singing, soaring universe, he had found an all-absorbing reason for being, which his art offers to us all.

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Redheads and Sunset

Tree of Life

Cranes

Birds are intrinsic in Walter Anderson’s art. They soar above the pines on his island, skim the tops of his waves, crowd his sand bars, run along the waters edge and, rising, pattern his evening sky with wings. Dabbling, diving ducks encircle a Shearwater bowl. Two birds in a tree brightly balance a plate. On the shoulder of a vase, dark coots curve against white swirls of water. Pelicans become pottery bookends, candle holders, lamp bases, or wooden chairs.

Far more than a favorite subject, birds were for Anderson a life long interest, inspiration, sustenance, and finally, extension, carrying his personal vision and philosophy far beyond his physical lifetime.

In 1943 from the front gallery at Oldfields in Gautier, Mississippi, Anderson watched gulls, terns, and pelicans feeding in the Pascagoula Sound. They patterned the great cumulus clouds with their risings and plungings, loudly claiming the old pier posts that staggered out toward the green-blue fringe of Horn Island on the horizon. On countless sheets of typing paper the ink line of his dip pen studied the gulls’ glide, the angled dive of the tern, the pelican’s dichotomy of ugly beauty, fragile strength, and awkward grace. He discovered essences of line, gesture, form - distillations of local and particular birds from which he then carved linoleum blockprints, which have a general and timeless power. Working from the particular present reality, he found the universal archetype.

His natural gifts and fine training were augmented by his voracious reading. The birds of art history enriched his vision.

On the eastern wall of the Little Room sand hill cranes herald a dewy morning in the Gulf Coast long-leaf pine savannah, evoking those cranes who march silently across the walls of Egyptian tombs, long ago avian inhabitants of the marshy Nile delta.

An ancient miniature painting of a Persian garden where rarefied trees are jeweled with brightly colored birds is titled “Tree of Life.” Anderson’s plate design fills a tree with the vivid warblers, buntings, orioles, tanagers and grosbeaks of the Gulf Coast spring and fall migrations. He delighted in seeing them, glowing like lights in the dark live oaks. A more personal tree of life inspired a late watercolor; the budding big leaf magnolia tree he’d planted beside his cottage blooms with cardinals, thrushes, towhees and thrashers.

Literature deepened his experience of birds. Drawings of ducks in letters he wrote from the mental hospital are labeled with a Wordsworth quotation: “ . . . scarcely inferior to angelical.”

The ducks were inspired by the guilt Anderson felt for having shot ducks while hunting with his father and brothers in the marshes of Louisiana. More guilt over the deaths of birds that were killed to provide models for plates for a proposed bird book seems to have contributed to his breakdown. Guilt for these and other deaths and losses not so easily named, finds poignant expression in an illustrative drawing of the albatross burdened sailor from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge.

Duck Design

Redwings

Hawks at Sunrise

The poetry of Walt Whitman and, I expect, his favorite Yeats, provided ideas from which the Venus panel in the Community Center derived, albeit translated into the Gulf Coast vernacular of Osprey, tern and fish.

An evolving muse figure, represented in one of his/her many manifestations by the girl on the chimney plaster of the Little Room, can be traced to Greek, Indian and Mississippi River myth and legend. His awareness of the symbolic bird in art and literature gave his own experiences a heightened energy.

In January of 1944, having spent several days walking across country to see the Mississippi Sandhill crane in its habitat, he was camped in the woods. “I was on the point of leaving when a strange and sacred thing happened. I felt I needed a sign that the birds still loved me and I thought if only one of you will come a little closer I will know, and at once a hermit thrush came and sat on a stump a few feet from me and a woodpecker came and lit on a trunk . . . Then suddenly I know the meaning of love . . . that love meant having an object to love and not reception...”

The pelican became his particular totem. Classically, the pelican symbolizes Christ’s love, and on the Louisiana state seal Anderson knew it as the beneficent mother who feeds her children with her own blood. As a boy fishing, he had learned to look for pelicans to find fish. To see pelicans meant good luck. To the artist, the bird was an inexhaustible model, prompting more images than any other subject. Some of his pelican models died because they were ill or carelessly handled, and his harbinger of luck also became an Anderson Albatross. He enjoyed being with pelicans, spending weeks at a time on North Key on the Chandeleur Islands where thousands nested in 1950. By 1960 Anderson saw the decimation of those flocks due to the effluence of pesticide from the moth of the Mississippi River. From thousands they were reduced to none. Thankfully he saw the beginning of their return. In 1965 on Horn Island he watched pelicans fishing and on the back of his watercolor exulted “17 in one flock!”

“How strange, how incredible is the relationship between matter and spirit.”

Walter Anderson often referred to his subjects as “food” which sustained him. The birds on Horn Island kept him well supplied. He approached them with acute sensual consciousness as though seeing each for the first time. Because he had no preconceptions the happy accident could and did happen. He loved combining two things to have them suddenly produce a third.

Red winged blackbirds were “the artist’s friends in camp, and everywhere on Horn Island.” He loved their song, likening it to a favorite phrase from Beethoven. A flock of redwings offering “a symphony of sound which almost overcame the listener with its persistent note of joyous harmony” appears in a watercolor perching, plunging, and fluttering like notes of happy music in the marsh grass. And yet he sees too their greed. Fighting over his spread of cooked rice, they inspire a watercolor in which their rapacious appetite becomes a monster of sensuality.

If Anderson’s subjects were “food” or matter, was his art that of transformation?

Conclusion

Within each of us is the longing to reach, to lift, to fly. Tennessee Williams and, before him, Robert Browning wrote, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Some things cannot be said with words. Words contain, surround, limit that which needs open, boundless space. In the Anderson birds we glimpse the artists’ metaphysical grasp of the ineffable. His great gift to us is its wordless expression.

For Walter Anderson, birds were chief among those “ . . . holes in heaven through which man may pass.”

Fall 2002 at WAMA

September 24, 2:00 *
Gallery Walk with Exhibition Curators Mary Anderson Pickard, Joan Gilley, and Patricia Pinson

September 29 *
Dauphin Island Bird Migration Tour
All-day excursion led by Master Naturalist Latisha Galbrait

October 17 - 19 *
Join WAMA for a weekend with Stephen Kirkpatrick, nationally acclaimed wildlife photographer

Thursday, Noon
Brown Bag Lunch Lecture and book signing

Friday, 4:00 - 9:00
Wildlife Photography Workshop

Saturday
Trip to Horn Island by schooner for a day of bird watching & photography!

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* Dates are subject to change. For more information, please contact the WAMA Education Department, Educate@WalterAndersonMuseum or 228-872-3164, x 111.