Date: December 4, 2007 EI Presenter: Linda Schaefers Artwork Title: Totemic Image Year Created: Artist: 1906-1998

A. Five essential aspects of this work of art and the artist 1. Guy Anderson was born in Edmonds, in 1906, and never left the Northwest for long. His family lived simply, but his parents loved art and music, and his father was a carpenter who was capable of making beautiful furniture. Guy’s introduction to Japanese are came when his Edmonds schoolteacher showed him some Japanese prints and he was taken by them. As a young student he continually visited ’s Chinatown and art museum. This early exposure to Asian art had a huge influence on his art and thinking. 2. After high school he studied portraiture with Alaskan painter Eustace Ziegler. Later he received a Tiffany Foundation Scholarship to study on Long Island, and while in New York, he used his weekends to visit the city’s museums, where he was able to see much of the finest art that Europe and the East Coast had to offer. 3. He returned to Edmonds in 1926, where he met , and , with whom he became friends, and explored philosophy, art and religion, notably Buddhism and the writings of Joseph Campbell. He had an especially close relationship for a time with Morris Graves. In researching Guy Anderson, I found that as often as not, when his name was mentioned, so were the names of Callahan, Graves, and Tobey, probably because of a Life Magazine article which appeared in 1953, which dubbed the four artists “Mystic Painters of the Northwest.” The article brought instant and widespread attention to the four artists. 4. Anderson moved to La Conner, WA in 1955 in order to live quietly and concentrate on his painting. La Conner is now home to the which has a wealth of holdings of all four of these artists, known as the Big Four, or the . Although he was offered shows in New York and overseas, he was never driven by the market. He lived most of his life in La Conner until his death in 1998. 5. Anderson read widely, soaking in the myths, stories, and symbols of Native American, Asian and ancient cultures, whose influences can be seen in his work. Some of the images he uses are drawn from nature, from totems, basket weaving designs, tribal landscapes, and the human figure.

B. Questions I would use when speaking with visitors about this object 1. Color – What do you notice about the color? How do these colors make you feel? What contrast do you see? Why do you suppose the artist used this kind of contrast? 2. Texture – Texture refers to what the surface is like. Look closely at the painting. What can you say about the texture of this painting? 3. Line – What kinds of lines do you see? What shapes? Where is your eye drawn? Why is that? 4. What do you think this painting is trying to show? Does the image remind you of anything you have seen before? 5. Do you like this painting? What do you like or not like about it? Why do you say that?

C. Which tours would you include this piece? Learning to Look

D. Additional information

In an interview conducted in 1983, Anderson had this to say: . . . with young people and new people coming into the arts, more attention should be given to art history, rather than finding little methods of how to do things, and how to become famous overnight, or how to be successful out in the world, rather than success within one’s self. And I know, in knowing a number of painters and artists over the years, and having taught a little bit, that there’s always the idea, well, isn’t it a good idea to be successful out in the world? Well I suppose that that is one of the gratifications maybe, but I think it should be a secondary thing. That what you really want to do is to be hooked on the greatness of the whole art field for ten thousand years, and also, you should get hooked periodically on not just what is being done today, in the last 20 or 25 years, but what . . . started in the caves ten thousand years ago . . . that you should want to be successful within yourself and to accomplish the things that you feel are of the greatest importance.

Oral History Interview with Guy Anderson Conducted by Martha Kingsbury At La Conner, Washington 1983 February 1 & 8