AT ONE WITH NATURE AND ART

WALTER INGLIS ANDERSON/AMERICAN MASTER ARTIST
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A CRAB SKITTERS ACROSS THE SAND
A CROW CALLS OUT ACROSS FIELDS
A HURRICANE BLOWS THE PALMS BENT AND THE WAVES POUND UPON THE SURF, THE SUN GLISTENS HOT ON A SULTRY SUMMER DAY AND MOSQUITOS BUZZ A TUNE ALL OF THEIR OWN AS THEY SEEK TO BE CLOSER AND CLOSER…..All of these images Walter Anderson wanted us to understand were the song of life, if we just stopped, if we just listened. 
There is a room that Walter Anderson's wife discovered after his death.  He had kept it secret, his hiding place, his sacred place.  No one had ever seen it until his wife unlocked the door that day.  And before her was the story of creation before her eyes.  There was an Adam and Eve, and all God's creatures brimming with life.  Walter was so in tune with the Earth and nature that he reached a level of understanding we will never know.  Perhaps he lost his sanity because of it, or perhaps because he had lost his sanity he could feel and understand in way we cannot.  We may have hints of it, when we walk in the woods and hear its song of crickets, jays, owls, and foxes.  We may understand just a little as we walk along a beach and the tide laps at our feet, the pines sings as their needles blow in the breeze, we find a starfish in the sand trying to burrow in deeper, or a pelican dip his bill low into the water skimming out his daily catch. But where we might hear a tune, Walter Anderson heard a symphony and he was part of that orchestra. 

Walter Anderson's Room of  Creation           photo take with permission of  WAMA Museum

Butterfly details of mural

a deer peaking out 

Blue Jays in Flight

Closer detail of Jays in Flight

Herons fishing

Detail on Fireplace

Fireplace detail

Book by Redding Sugg on Walter Anderson's Mural

Katrina destroyed much of Anderson's work stored in a family concrete vault.  The museum itself had to restoration.  Joining a museum that is not in your community can be a very good thing.  First of all it can be a charity gift of membership, or provide field trips and destination vacations for the family, but it also gives us the opportunity to support art across the USA in communities that need our help…like WAMA or New Orleans Museum of Art, or Museums where hurricane Sandy hit.   Think about supporting art not only in your community, but across the United States and especially in area of need! Join WAMA Today!

Work from the collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans

I will post several sections showing much of the collection from the Ogden Museum in the next few days while in New Orleans.  This is the first section.

As you will notice the styles, media, and time period will vary greatly, the common factor being the origin of the artists being the South.

Linda Benglis                                    Minerva  1986             photo by Elizabeth Gordon

Frederick Brown  1945-2012
Lionel Hampton, Listening, Watching and Grooving with the Band

Minnie Evens (click)

The bio for Minnie said she started painting at age 43 when she heard a voice from God saying, "Paint or Die".  She was influenced by the African American traditions of family, story telling and religion she began to make a vocabulary of images.  The Whitney museum held a retrospective of her work in 1975.

Minnie Evens  1892-1987

Photo by Elizabeth Gordon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnie_Evans

Columbia Restaurant/Ybor City/Tampa

Mississippi Sunset and Gravel Road

Google image /Greg Cartmell/Painting

Cuban Bread Vendor, Ybor City/Florida

A Sense of Place




No matter who we are or where we are we all have a sense of belonging to an area we grew up in or one we claim as our own.  


You may hail from the desert, the mountains, the beach or the tropics it becomes a part of you.  It is more than the name of the village, town or country you come from or live in now.  It is a part of your soul, it is a part of your being whether you choose for it to be or not.  You can feel good about it or be repelled by it, but it is a part of you.  The brain is such that it records and reflects your experiences.  I think we are also finding out with quantum physics that time and place are much different places that we have ever perceived before.  
Artists are sensitives.  They pick up so many different senses on so many levels that people at times refer to us as shamans in our ability to reflect and express the world and environment we live it.  

Highway Men/ African American Artist of Florida

Here is a personal example of what I am referring to.....I was born in the red clay fields of North Eastern Mississippi not long after the end of WWII in a time when civil rights had not yet happened.  I remember the people, the place, the time in pictures in my mind, but more so I remember the smell, the glint of the sun, the feel of the damp humid cold winters, the smell of a hot iron hitting starch with a hiss, red clay on my shoes, flies stuck of fly paper, flood water lapping upon the furnace, the smell of cigarets and pot belly fires in general stores, the lilt of a Southern drawl, the sound of black gospel music on the radio, the whirlpools in the river where moccasins lurked, and the sound of a cane pole lure hitting the water hunting for catfish....I moved when I was 7 to the tropical beaches and palm fronded landscaped of Florida to a multicultural town of Cuban, Italian, and Spanish immigrants and languages as foreign to my ears as the food odors that wafted from the cafes.  

Bette Saar, Artist

It all became a part of me, and became a part of my art, how I express my ideas and self in this world.  You also will remember a smell or the toss of the wind in your hair or the feel of the sun as your walked with your Mother or Father or Brother...you may remember your Grandmothers gnarled hands or the smell of wood in your Grandfathers shop... the sounds of the subway or vendors yelling out in the market, or the feel of sand between your toes as you walk the beach....it is our human experience.  We feel and sense our environment. 

Magnolia Bloom/Mississippi

 I can reject the prejudice I remember as a young child in Mississippi with the smells of the men's white starched shirts as they yelled out, get back boy to a young black man who happened to be opening a door to a my Dad's store before them.  I can have a senseless physical reaction to a place because of a memory associated with it, but it will always be a part of me, as well as, the good and tender moments.  They are however more than memory....if you are like me you have flash back triggered by a smell, a sound or sensation...back to another time and place or emotion.  It is a part of you, it is your sense of place.  If time is not linear as The String theory suggests...if we can cross from one time to other without knowing...it opens up a whole different perspective of place and our senses.  

Euodora Welty, Wrtier/Photographer/ Mississippi 

Tomas Hart Benton/Art of the South

My only objective in writing this piece is to foster creative thinking and how artists as sensitive people express and reflect the environments they move through.  I would appreciate any feed back or further discussion this may generate.  You may leave a comment in the blog or email me directly at rabbits5@aol.com.
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