Brushing Shoulders with Walter Anderson

Casey Mathews was surprised to find so many daytrippers on the western tip of Horn Island. He was dirty, delirious, and carrying multiple backpacks of water and gear. The daytrippers were sipping Coronas on the backs of their powerboats.  “I’m sure I explained that I was on some trip out to the island that our school does on an annual basis, that sort of thing, [to honor] the legacy of Walter Anderson [1903­–1965],” said Mathews, an alum of the Memphis College of Art [MCA].  Anderson’s name would likely have translated to the daytrippers; the influential Gulf Coast artist is well known for his watercolor studies of Horn Island. Mathews was one of forty artists from MCA, a rotating group that cloisters itself each summer on the remote barrier island where Anderson found, in his words, “an exaggeration of riches.” “It would’ve been more interesting if I had sat down and had a beer with them and talked to them about it,” said Mathews. “But these guys, they think about the island different anyway.”

The next day, a tidal swale blocked Mathews’ way back to the old circus tent that serves as the artists’ base camp.  “I took all my gear off and I put it over my head to protect everything, and I had to wade out into the water a hundred meters or so in a big arc out into the ocean and walk up to my neck in water out into the ocean to get around it.”

Mathews’ story was extreme, but these types of encounters with nature are common in the dinnertime conversations the MCA artists share each evening on the island. Each night Don DuMont, the trip’s leader, makes sure everyone is accounted for, then reads aloud from the Horn Island logs of Walter Anderson: The poor thing after hours of waiting had caught a fish, saw me and dropped it and was bound and determined to wait there until he caught another… DuMont helps serve the meal, which often includes fish from the same lagoons in the Logs, and then people chat about where they’ve been that day.

DuMont calls it a “foreign land.” On the eighth morning of the group’s thirty-third trip to Horn Island, I walked down “Walter’s Trail” with DuMont, who teaches sculpture at the college.  As we crossed a moonish landscape of dunes towards the Gulf side of the island, osprey whistled from a tall pine that the group calls “the broccoli tree.”  DuMont, a Vietnam veteran in his sixties, recounted the history of the program, which was the brainchild of his friend and fellow professor Bob Riseling. It began in 1985 as a kind of experiment and has since become an official course of the college, developed weird traditions, and evolved into what I saw when I was out there—alum and professors with groups of students (who are completely sponsored by patrons) roaming one of the most ecologically pristine places in the South.

“It would’ve been more interesting if I had sat down and had a beer with them and talked to them about it,” said Mathews. “But these guys, they think about the island different anyway.”

A shell-strewn barrier of dunes gave way to a long beach and the violent chop of the Gulf, where DuMont pointed out the student’s village. Horn Island is one of fifty barrier islands that line the northern Gulf of Mexico. Barrier islands serve as shields for the mainland; they’re the last line of defense against whatever the capricious Gulf of Mexico throws at them.  The students, camped on the south side of the island, some of whom have never camped in their life, stare it right in the face, and their droopy tents told the story. Sam Smith, a first year student at the college, was proud of her work propping her tent up with an umbrella pole and undaunted when it covered her like a wet blanket during a storm, though she and her dad were “gonna have words” about the twenty-five dollar tent he bought her off Ebay. It is likely her father had never camped in such a hostile place.

Orrin H. Pilkey, a lover and scholar of barrier islands, said that these landscapes are “among nature’s most flexible and dynamic environments.” In his book, A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands, he wrote, “Buildings that line hundreds of miles of barrier island shoreline around the world are inflexible objects, protected only by the strength of concrete and steel. Barrier islands follow a different strategy. They respond to violent storms by bending, changing, moving, and later recovering.” Horn Island, one of the most undeveloped barrier islands in the Gulf, is remarkable for its ability to still do so.

Walter Anderson endeavored to feel the full force of the island, which he visited in severe isolation. He capsized and nearly drowned three times in the tiny boat he rowed to the islands—he detested motorboats and wrote that they are a symbol of man’s impatience. Man, he explained, “has developed a propeller which is supposed to take the place of both wings and fins.” Troubles of the trip were like a toll he had to pay in order to attain his wings. Aside from the charter boats that bring them to the island, though, Anderson would have appreciated the tactics that the MCA group takes to survive there — the primitive campsites, the burns and blisters. Each year the lights from the Pascagoula shipyard get a little brighter and cellular service creeps farther across the island, but the MCA group honors a no cell-phone policy—the agreement seems like an important ingredient to the recipe of their trip.  I couldn’t think of an answer when Casey Matthews asked, “When was the last time you were really alone?” Without a phone, a car, a connection to someone else?

Shortly after I arrived, I watched the folds of a copper bowl take shape between the beatings of a wooden mallet and the wet sand of the island. Master metalworker Richard Prillaman developed the island-specific technique over the course of twenty trips to the island. He sat with his legs spread in the water’s edge for hours each morning. Crabs crawled, mullet jumped, and Richard tapped and coaxed the smooth spiral form out of the metal. Later, he threw the bowl into the fire. Some years, he told me, the chemistry in the water has given the metal surprise lusters that can’t be replicated. “We come here to brush shoulders with Walter, so some of the essence can rub off.” Much of that involves leaving behind the tools and technology of a master metalworker’s shop that are supposed to make things easier and instead honing in on the basics of the material. “There’s no substitute for this sand,” he said.

In the twenty-six years that Walter Anderson roamed Horn Island, he swam in the bubbles of alligators and was bitten by a cottonmouth snake, but he rarely crossed paths with a human being. One day on the island, a group of young men saw Anderson, and only one of them had enough courage to approach the artist. He walked over and asked for an autograph. Anderson handed him a line drawing of three and a half fish and inscribed it, “These are mullet. W.I. Anderson.” Anderson later said it was the only time he had been asked for an autograph.

Each year the lights from the Pascagoula shipyard get a little brighter and cellular service creeps farther across the island, but the MCA group honors a no cell-phone policy—the agreement seems like an important ingredient to the recipe of their trip. 

Sixty-five years later, the drawing of those mullet hangs on the wall of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, a multi-million dollar space designed to reflect the footprint of a cathedral. There, Anderson’s birds dance in flight, wreathed in multicolored rays and halos. People from across the world travel to Ocean Springs to see the creations of the man who strapped himself to a tree on the tallest dune on Horn Island during Hurricane Betsy and who realized such a radically close relationship with the natural world.

Down the hall from the mullet, Prillaman’s copper bowl with folds like a seashell is displayed on a pedestal. Surrounding the bowl, a set of tiny oil-blackened hands reach out from a hermit crab shell, an alligator-headed man sits cross-legged like a Hindu god, and a black snake creeps beneath morning glories in bloom. The exhibition is called The Islanders, and it includes work from MCA’s previous two journeys to Horn Island.  

In one of his worn-out composition notebooks, Walter Anderson described the sensation of seeing a young heron climbing up a tall tree and making a drawing of it. “This does not mean that I am going to be content with that one image for the rest of my life. It will generate power in me for a while, then I need another. One image succeeds another with surprising regularity on Horn Island. Whether they could be shared is another matter. People need different things.”

Anderson made Horn Island into his sacred space, and the artists of MCA followed him there. “It’s taking yourself out of the mundane day-to-day activities and placing yourself in this different situation where you’re subject to a higher power—in this case nature,” Mathews told me. “The island is more relevant today than it’s ever been. Because we’re so connected to everything.”

During his lifetime, Walter Anderson was thought crazy for his desperate excursions. Mathews described a similar disconnect following his own time on Horn Island: “You might as well be Buzz Aldrin telling people about your trip to the moon.”  

“The Islanders” is on display at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art until August 22. Work from this summer’s Horn Island expedition will be shown in the galleries of the Memphis College of Art from August 14 until September 29. walterandersonmuseum.org. mca.edu.