The moment I stepped inside the cottage, I felt the richness of the
place and his overpowering presence. One room was totally empty of
furnishings, but every inch of the walls was covered with murals. I stood
there reeling beneath the power of his artwork and vision -- for there, from
floor to ceiling, was a recreation of life on earth. It was so
overpowering I had to sit down, to focus on it one piece at a time in an effort to take it all in.
The essence of luminous butterflies radiated out from the spirit world.
A deer stood amidst the foliage, looking back at me with bland startled
eyes, cranes rose up and an osprey hovered. Creatures of the night
moved amidst the pitcher plants in the Mississippi bogs. I stared in awe at
this tapestry of life, a three-dimensional world captured in two
dimensions, with birds in the sky, turtles crawling along the ground. The
shaft of afternoon light that came through the windows brought out the
vivid colors of the Virginia Creeper vines, the waxy leaves of palmetto,
flowers, ferns and marsh grass, all woven into one. Only the sounds of
real flesh-and-blood birds calling from the real woodlands outside the
windows broke the silence.
Stars burned down from the top of the walls, and an alligator crawled
along the baseboard -- not .as a reptile accurately depicted but as the
dragon from one's childhood, with great rounded eyes and shimmering
scales. It crawled not from the swamps but from the mind, with all its
fantastic dragonlike qualities. And skulking in the bushes, as only a feline
can skulk, was a black house cat, prowling on its mission of the
hunt -- its green eyes aglow.
And there, in the midst of it all, was a forest spirit, a wood nymph or
river goddess in human form, regarding the creatures about her with
love and adoration. Tributaries and creeks branched from her
head in shimmering splendor. Her face bore a wide humorous expression.
She was the goddess of the forest, looking at us all, our egos and
follies. I wondered when and where Walter Anderson had met this spirit, for
while I hadn't seen her directly, I had felt her presence in the
darkest woods and along enchanting streams in moss-grown brooks.
Slowly my eyes made their way up to the ceiling, and there radiating
out in great spiraling form was an enormous pink and red flower. It was
the key to all life on earth and in the universe for that matter. Awed
by it all, I lay on the paint-splattered floor, gazing up, repeating
the words he had scribed on the back of a drawing of zinnias left on the mantelpiece:
"Oh, Zinnias!
Most explosive and illuminating of flowers
Summation of all flowers.
Essence of eccentric form!
Essence of concentric form!"
It was the yin and yang, the positive and the negative, the two
opposing forces of nature that made the great wheel of life go round.
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