Anderson saw what other visionaries see, what any shaman or Zen master
knows, and he tried to capture the flow of life as it spiraled its way
into each and every living form. He captured the "treeness" of trees, the "crabness" of crabs and the "catness" of cats. He was fascinated with patterns of nature, the repetitive forms of convergent evolution, the symmetry of crabs, the motion of birds and the spirals of conch shells. Anderson was so enamored with energy that he lashed himself to a tree
and rode out a terrifying hurricane to better understand the energy of
the swirling forces of clouds, wind and water.
Suddenly I felt a great kinship with this man, for both of us shared
the need to understand how life is put together. We needed to know what
makes a squirrel a squirrel, a cowfish a cowfish, or a beetle a beetle.
And both of us had looked for it in the same place - the Gulf Coast.
The energy in that room was so intense that I could look at it for only
a short while before it became overpowering. Mary Anderson Pickard led
me to an old building where many of his water colors and paintings were
stored. She let me go through the conservation boxes filled with his
drawings. Mary had spent years cataloging and publicizing them so others
could see them. There were stacks upon stacks of folders, each marked,
"insects" or "sea shells" or "turtles," "frogs," "snakes," "birds," "marsh grass" and "trees." He left nothing out.
When he worked, his sketches rained down like snowflakes, sometimes
completed, often only half drawn, half colored. He was like evolution
itself-experimenting with species, picking them up, developing them,
throwing them down and starting again, and again and again. They were a
meditation technique, a path to understanding. The sketches themselves
didn't seem to matter to Walter Anderson. Many were stained and ruined, some
were used to light fires, to stuff into screens to keep the bugs from
eating him.
I looked through the folders until I was dazed, three thousand 8 1/2" x 11" fragile drawings on flimsy paper, yellowing with age. Just when I
thought I couldn't take another, something new would jump out and make
me stand back with awe. He captured the humorous mannerisms of
animals -- for example, how a preying mantis thrusts its butt into the air as it
walks about on spindly legs and stares at the world through bulbous eyes.
Anderson drew sea hares copulating, pelicans in flight. I'm convinced
that if he didn't draw it, it was because he never saw it. Stingrays,
sharks, cowfish and batfish, they were all there. When he painted oak
trees, like the ones that surrounded his cottage, the boughs and trunks
twisted and reached up like living things - almost as if their growth were
filmed by time-lapse photography. Bark fascinated him. He loved its
reptilian scaly nature. He could feel the awesome patterns of wood, their
flowing lines paralleling the waves rolling up on the beach.
One by one I went through his pictures of sargassum weed, blue crabs,
portunid crabs, calico crabs, nudibranchs until I came to a simple and
largely unintelligible sketch mislabled "worms." For it was more words than drawings. Anderson had attempted the impossible -- to capture the
flashing, iridescent colors of a watery ctenophore jellyfish that I attempt
to describe in this book. Like the Tao itself, of which Lao-tzu wrote,
no words can convey the shimmering beauty of this watery jellyfish.
And no brush can render the pulsating colors as they flicker and fracture
in the sunlight into prismatic blends.
He resorted to words, perhaps as a study for later attempts, hastily
scribbling down the hues -- the reds, pinkish reds, purples, yellows, blues,
blushing greens that instantly appeared and vanished, to be replaced
by another hue until the words ran off the page and I broke into
laughter. When I saw Mary's puzzled expression, I explained that you had to see these transparent manifestations of living water, shimmering in the
sunlight; to try to capture them in anything but their living form was
folly.
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