Donald Anderson: An Artist’s Gift

Stand on the peak of a mountain, contemplate the long ranges of hills ... and all the other glories offered to your view, and what feeling seizes you? You lose yourself in boundless space, your self disappears.... —Carl Gustav Carus from his Letters on Landscape Painting; Carus was a follower of the nineteenth-century artist Caspar David Friedrich.

Donald Anderson is a man who straddles a kind of geologic divide between two distinct worlds—the world of business and the world of art. Trained as both an engineer and a painter, Anderson became the highly successful founder of the Anderson Oil Company, and yet he has also devoted many years developing himself as an artist whose main focus has been painting remote and rugged landscapes that have another worldly quality. Anderson has brought his deep understanding of landforms—with their dramatic synclines and anticlines—and combined that knowledge, necessary to his business career, with his metaphysical longing to merge with the geology that he records in his paintings. In this back and forth manner, swinging between business and art, Anderson is both in the world and resolutely outside of it as his imagination searches the high peaks, the gorges, and the rolling hills for his alter ego, his other identity as a man of solitude very much at home in solitary places.

I first saw Anderson’s work at the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, in Roswell, almost twenty years ago. He opened the museum as a way to showcase the work he collected from individuals who had received grants from the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, a series of year-long residencies that Anderson has been funding for forty-five years. In the course of creating a space for the work of over two hundred artists, Anderson also set aside a wall for his own paintings. His cool and moody palette of de-saturated colors and the distinct sense of geographic isolation in his landscapes act as a stealth counter-valence to the variety of pieces by so many different artists. When I was introduced to Anderson’s paintings, they immediately reminded me of work by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich such as Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist, from 1818. If you took out the figure of the man with his back to the viewer, standing on a promontory in the foreground of Friedrich’s work, you might have a work by Anderson. In Anderson’s painting Canyon Wall, Rain, from 1989, if you added a rocky shelf in the foreground and placed a figure looking away from us, you might have a work by Friedrich.

The painting Canyon Wall, Rain is one of the strongest works in An Artist’s Gift, an overview of forty-three years of painting. Here, Anderson makes no attempt to hide his fascination with the inhospitable and the existentially lonely. Yet, for all the remoteness of the scene, there is a visually elegant handling of nature’s most rugged artifacts. You wouldn’t want to be caught in a torrential downpour trying to scale the walls of these lethal, knife-edge ridges, but looking at this work you somehow feel cradled in the beauty of Anderson’s line and the soft pastel shades of brown, tan, creamy white, and gray seen through a veil of rain. This ironic comfort in the remote and the awe inspiring that we find in Canyon Wall, Rain is totally absent in On the Way to Khyber Pass, from 1969. This dark and brooding painting is enough to induce nightmares, so alien is this landscape, so distant is a sense of any civilizing force. The Khyber Pass image presents a decidedly brutal mood in its black, mountainous up-thrusts about to crunch in on themselves and grind everything to dust. However, this extremely bleak vision, weighted toward nature at its most impenetrable, isn’t really typical of Anderson’s landscapes.

For all the desolate vistas in the artist’s paintings, a blue sky, a raking beam of light on a hill, or a grassy riverbank generally softens the fact that Anderson’s visual metaphysics don’t admit the presence of other people. Anderson is an artist who sees the world as a series of tectonic plates always shifting and creating new configurations of geographic realities that are then subject to the forces of erosion. This is a geologist’s view of landscape—this understanding of deep time and its natural artifacts of matter on a vast scale—and it holds the key to Anderson’s imagination and gives him his vision. That said, the artist’s vision is not without its sensuality, as evidenced in works such as Lakeland Doorway. This painting has an almost cozy feel as the viewer peers outside from within some habitation with its brightly colored door and window framing a gorgeous glacial lake and soft, almost voluptuous gray foothills. Stairs lead from the door down to the lake,` and this half-in, half-out landscape, while not characteristic of Anderson’s work as a whole, is like a gentle but vivid hint of the artist’s desire to balance the inner with the outer man.

— Diane Armitage

February / March 2012, THE Magazine pg. 49
Critical Reflections
Isaac’s Gallery 309 North Virginia, Roswell