Walls of Light: The Murals of Walter Anderson

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.