Lagoons - Horn Island

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Walter Anderson attended Parsons School of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Like many artists and writers, he was drawn back to the South, which served as an inspiration for his art. Many artistic styles influenced him, including ancient and primitive art, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and American landscape painting. Aldolpho Best-Maugard’s Method for Creative Design, however, had the most lasting effect on his work. This treatise reduced all of art into seven geometric patterns and these forms dominate much of Anderson’s artwork. He was an astonishingly prolific artist who worked in a variety of media, including oil, watercolor, wood, printmaking, textiles, and ceramics. The Brooks Collection includes examples of his work in all of these media.

Anderson believed man and nature had a symbiotic relationship—man needed the natural world in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment, while nature required the artist to fully “realize” the significance of its forms. It was the process of creation that consumed him, rather than the final product. Over an eighteen-year period he braved the elements and made lone voyages to his sanctuary on Horn Island, an uninhabited barrier island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Living as one with his environment, he recorded the island’s landscape, flora, and fauna in sketches and watercolors.

Among the subjects he painted numerous times and in various seasons were the island’s lagoons. Here he depicts one inlet at the height of summer with the lush greens and yellows of the foliage and the brilliant blues of the sea and sky. It is low tide and the artist uses various hues of purple for the sand, shells, and rocks revealed by the receding waters. Red-winged blackbirds perch on stalks of sea grass, while a pair of terns fly overhead. The repetition of shapes and motifs, such as the wave-like arcs of vegetation, unifies the composition and creates an overall decorative pattern, which is characteristic of much of the artist’s work.