A satisfying display of mystical art

I am continually arriving from some strange place and everything I see is new and strange.

Today we visited the Ogden Museum of Southern Art to see "Walter Inglis Anderson: Everything I See is New and Strange," the Smithsonian's Anderson exhibition which drew over 300,000 visitors. For its New Orleans showing, the exhibit has been expanded to include some of Anderson's New Orleans watercolors.

Anderson, a native of New Orleans, lived most of his life on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and is known for his watercolors, oils, drawings, sculptures, murals, linoleum block prints, children's books, furniture, and pottery. Much of his work reflects his interest in mythology and history, but it is for his startling nature studies that he is best known. Anderson spent much of his time on the Mississippi barrier islands, particularly Horn Island, and painted and drew frogs, turtles, flowers, trees, and birds. He was especially fond of pelicans, and wrote intimately of them.

Walter Anderson believed that only when nature and art become a single entity do we attain of sense of wholeness toward both nature and art. His art, like that of all mystics, is often playful, and is a beautiful synthesis of modern European schools of thought and more primitive, unconscience processes. Later this year, PBS will air a documentary on Anderson, "Walter Anderson: Realizations of an Artist."