LOVE AND THE ART OF WALTER INGLIS ANDERSON

All movement is to invisible music although few people hear it. It comes from the sun and the wind and the movement of water and a running rabbit and a crowing cock, and together it is a part of a great symphony.
- Walter Anderson

We all need models for crazy wisdom these days. Van Gogh of course is one. John Berger asks, “Why did this man become the most popular painter in the world?” And among his answers are “because for him the act of drawing or painting was a way of discovering and demonstrating why he loved so intensely what he was looking at, and what he looked at during the eight years of his life as a painter (yes, only eight)…The paintings and drawings were maps of his love…the strokes he makes on the paper are following currents of energy which are not physically his and which only become visible when he draws them.”

Certainly massage and bodywork at best also “follow currents of energy” which are not physically the therapist’s but which become palpable to our clients sometimes only when we touch them. For all of us who aspire to embody art, every object becomes something we can love.

Walter Inglis Anderson was an artist who worked in Ocean Springs on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and spent months at a time alone on Horn Island, a barrier island about eight miles offshore . There he could become one with the nature he loved. Resting in ponds until the creatures became comfortable all around him. Tying himself to to a tree to experience directly the full force of a hurricane. Anderson experienced psychotic episodes during his life, yet the beauty of his creations lives on in the thousands of paintings, sculptures and murals he left.

The singer and songwriter Caroline Herring has left us a beautiful tribute to his life and art in her song and video, “Tales of the Islander.”

Visit this collection of the works of Walter Inglis Anderson.

We all need this love.

Walter Inglis Anderson

Van Gogh - Wheat Field with Crows