THE NUMBER OF REGIONAL artists of note is not great, and the number of regional painters known for documenting the ocean is smaller still. Rarest of all is a painter who painted one ocean location his entire life. In American art history, that is pretty much narrowed down to one name: Walter Anderson (1903-1966).
As one historian notes, Anderson was "the artist of the Gulf of Mexico," specifically the barrier islands off Mississippi and Louisiana.
In style, Anderson was not an heir to other ocean painters—Monet and Sisely in France, Turner in England, and Homer in America—but was more an heir to someone like Grandma Moses: His was a lyrical, naive, almost childlike way of painting in watercolors. If Homer painted the heroic man against nature, and John James Audubon posed dead birds for his meticulous nature illustration, Anderson had a light, whimsical, colorful touch.
He was probably more Henry David Thoreau than Thoreau himself. That famed New England writer spent time in his cabin in the woods a few miles from his home, where his wife did his laundry. Anderson, who like Thoreau kept a voluminous nature journal, lived far from home: on barrier islands miles off the Gulf Coast, traveling by skiff and dwelling in makeshift hovels much of his adult life.
Even so, he managed to keep his inexpensive paper (often typewriting paper), watercolors, and brush at hand. In the end he produced hundreds of small works. Now, in Ocean Springs, an artsy gallery town across from Biloxi, Mississippi, he is celebrated by the Walter Anderson Museum, plus the region’s Anderson Wilderness Trail and Anderson Crossing.
To naturalists, he was an artistic pioneer. Not only did he paint birds, animals, Gulf skies, and barrier island landscapes, he reflected on Nature, to which he was probably wedded more than to his long-suffering wife and four children (who were loyal to him to the end). He was not the nature lover of today, the brown rice, granola, celery-and-carrot-stick kind. He drank and smoked heavily, and died of lung cancer.
Yet his training was par for the course of a self-conscious painter. He studied at the classical Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and traveled to Europe to hone his outlook. As noted, though, he chose the naive style of painting. One thinks of Gauguin as a parallel. The French painter left his wife and family in Paris and traveled to Tahiti to paint in what is now called the Post-Impressionist style.
If Gauguin painted the local population, wrapping it in myth and mystery, Anderson painted the things of nature. And he knew them well, especially the birds. Once, according to his daughter, he was "marooned" on one of the island when a storm swept away his boat. Anderson called the forced isolation "lovely." His long sojourns away from civilization amounted to, he wrote in his log, a "perfect rapport with nature."
And that nature was specifically the Gulf. One photographer of the region described the landscape as "half desert and half grass flats." Still, Anderson found myriad variety to paint. His favorite haunt was the sizable, ten-mile Horn Island, and other times the 50-mile long pearly necklace-like Chandeleur Islands of easternmost Louisiana.
Born in the Biloxi area, Anderson’s family and brother had a pottery business, still a namesake in today's touristy Ocean Springs community. He was the odd one out, and though normal in many ways—family and kids—he had that odd sparks of the artists. Indeed, he was committed to local mental institutions three times, and escaped twice.
What can the story of Walter Anderson tell us about regional artists and an artist's life? I suppose the first thing is that artistry takes a single minded devotion. His was like a voluntary Robinson Caruso, though not even as domesticated as the Swiss Family Robinson. In his log, he wrote about his feelings toward nature, and documented what he saw—especially the weather—in fastidious, often poetic, detail. He felt that the creatures of the world were the equals of humans.
The clash between his naturalist creed and man came first when the oil industry began to explore the Gulf, and then, during the Second World War, the Army set up testing grounds for bombs and biological weapons on Horn Island. He returned there when the Army left in 1947, and while living a while in leftover military huts, finally chose his tents and makeshift hovels. Clearly, here was an artist-naturalist of monomaniacal dedication—not a bad thing, for the sake of depth of thought and productivity.
Second, by dint of this devotion, Anderson created a vast body of work, buttressed by his autobiographic writings in the log. He was a Thoreau who painted. For realist painters, the work may not be that impressive, but it was consistent. It had a signature and was almost countless in number. The works also have a decorative quality, filled with curly-cues and stylized animal shapes, part Art Nouveau and part Matisse. The volume—that is, "the body of work"—is what counts.
For today's painters, the isolated life and adventures of Anderson may not be plausible (though it often is dreamed of, that paradisiacal, full-artistry life of an Anderson or Gauguin). Less dreamlike is the idea of a "body of work." A signature collection remains. We know something about Anderson's degree of satisfaction with life by his log. His true interior life still is elusive. What we do know, finally, is that by his persistence he entered art history. And as is often the posthumous case, he is now the "artist of the Gulf of Mexico" and has a museum in Ocean Springs bearing his name.