Walter Anderson’s Little room

Monday September 13, 2013
Site 19, Davis Bayou Campground
Gulf Islands National Seashore
Ocean Springs, Mississippi

 

 

I saved this little room for last because it was most personal to Walter Anderson.

 

Walter Anderson’s family always called him Bob.  His parents, Walter and Annette, had given the little cottage to Bob and his wife Agnes (Sissy) when they were married in 1933.  They lived in it during their early marriage until they moved with their children to Oldfields, Sissy’s family home, in nearby Gautier.  In 1946 Bob moved back to the cottage alone and lived there for the rest of his life when he wasn’t traveling.

 

 

A few days after his death in 1965 at age 62 of complications from surgery for lung cancer, Sissy and her sister Pat went to the cottage to clean it up.  The little room, which Bob added as an extension to the cottage in 1939 as a nursery when his first child Mary was born, had a lock on the door.   They couldn’t find the key so they cut the lock.   Here is what they found -  a world no one had known Bob Anderson had created.

 

 

 

The little room, and it is little, perhaps 10 X 10, is covered walls and ceiling in a mural celebrating life.  It is described in the book Dreaming in Clay as “an astonishing hymn to light and the beauty of one day on the Coast, beginning on the east wall with a flight of sandhill cranes at dawn, and continuing through noon, sunset and night”.  The colors used here are those of the Gulf shore, coral, green, gold-yellow and blue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is very hard to get a full picture of such a small room so you can see what I saw.

 

Most of these photographs are sections but the color and the exuberance is clear.  This is the world Bob Anderson lived in.  I was stunned as I know his wife and sister must have been.

 

The sandhill cranes at dawn are just to the right of the door into the room which along with its wall are covered in moths.  The moth wall faced North.  More about that later.

 

The Sandhill crane wall faced east and the sun flooded in its one window.  This is the dawn wall. 

Although I have a compass with me, I neglect to see if the walls of the rooms still face the original directions now that it has been moved to its new home in the museum.   I hope so.

 

 

 

 

Over the window on this wall, the rooster crows at sunrise.

 

 

 

 

 

This corner of the  East dawn wall and the south ‘glory of the day’ wall is between two windows. 

The single window on the east wall is to the left and a double window in the middle of the south wall to the right.  The trim of that window is the far right vertical painting.

 

 

 

 

 

This is the corner of the South (day) and West (dusk)walls with the south double window trim on the left..

 

 

Maybe this is the rufous sided towhee under the window above.

 

 

 

 

This corner joins the West (dusk) wall on the left with the right (night) wall. 

The trunk was in the room when Sissy opened the door and was filled with watercolor paintings.  The trunk of course was made and painted by Bob.

 

 

 

The chimney on the west wall has the only human like figure.

In the center of the west wall in lieu of windows is a chimney upon which Anderson painted what Francis V. O’Connor called “an ethereal evocation of the primordial Earth mother – a horned young woman rising up from the glowing font of flowers.”   That description is perfect.  The moths fly around her on both sides.

 

 

 

Like Nature Walter Anderson apparently wanted no vacuum and filled all the space in the little room with color and light.

 

Crowning the room, the ceiling has been described as a zinnia which was one of Anderson’s favorite flowers.  But others see it as a mandala-like circle of forms in the style of a Meso-American glyph or calendar stone. 

 

The little room was painstakingly removed from the back of the cottage in 1991 and relocated inside a special room created for it at the museum.
This move undoubtedly saved it from total loss in Hurricane Katrina during which much of the family’s collection of his works was damaged or destroyed.

 

The room is stunning in its power, its symbolism, its color. 

I have waited for 9 years since first seeing Anderson’s paintings at a Smithsonian exhibition in 2004 to visit this place and see these miracles in person.  They were much more than I expected.  Walter Anderson wanted to bring art to the people, to have them experience the feeling of oneness in nature and at least for me, he has succeeded wildly.