Editorial Reviews

Although his art took form in many mediums, this lush and colorful book is the first to focus on Walter Anderson's murals. Anderson's home was in Ocean Springs on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where he spent his lifetime recording the region's flora, fauna, life forces, light, and history of his native Gulf Coast. He is known today as mythmaker, local legend, mystic poet, painter, inveterate voyager, and, most of all, brilliant artist.
Walls of Light presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of Anderson as muralist. His major mural projects, now housed in the Walter Anderson Museum of Art and the adjacent Ocean Springs Community Center, reflect the artist's own arduous journey and struggle to balance a sense of social obligation with a greater desire to exist in a state of oneness with nature.
The WPA murals (Ocean Springs: Past and Present), painted for the auditorium of the Ocean Springs Public School, were government commissions. They are the work of an emerging artist. The expansive murals in the Community Center reveal a mature artist sharing his vision of the Gulf Coast's history and environment with a public audience. The Shearwater Cottage murals, seen in their entirety only after his death, manifest a private, personal epiphany in the light of Anderson's immediate surroundings. Watercolors and block prints--individual works that can be pieced together to create a greater whole--are also viewed as the work of Anderson the muralist.
Walls of Light: The Murals of Walter Anderson further expands our understanding of the life work of this richly complex artist.

Anne R. King is a museum consultant and curator who lives in Columbus, Georgia. John Lawrence is director of the Lamar Dodd Art Center in La Grange, Georgia.

Customer Reviews

Walls of Light - Murals of Walter Anderson, 2008-04-06
by Gara Gillentine (Oxford, MS)

Walls of Light are the murals which cover 3,000 square feet of cinder-block walls in the Ocean Springs, MS Community Center. Walter Anderson saw the walls as a way that he could contribute to society and so he offered to create a mural for the fee of $1. The city provided oil paint and Anderson used it directly on the stucco surface of the block walls.
If you haven't visited Ocean Springs, you should. It's wonderful and the murals, as well as the town, will capitvate you.

Anderson the Muralist, 2000-06-06
by Randy Blythe (Birmingham, Alabama USA)

Walter Inglis Anderson was that rarest of humans, a true visionary, so much so that the word "vision" weakly captures the fiery luminescence of his drawings, watercolors, and paintings. The works photographed and discussed in this book are perfect examples. Largely unheralded in his lifetime and for many years after his death in 1965, Anderson's work deserves more caring and careful studies like this. Co-published by the University Press of Mississippi and the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, this book presents astounding photographs as well as insightful commentary on the murals Anderson painted on rolls and sheets of paper as well as on the walls of the Ocean Springs Community Center and his cottage near Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs. This book is a must for all lovers of the ineffable, mystical qualities of seeing.