It’s not even Christmas and I’ve already made my first (and perhaps only) New Year’s resolution: I hereby resolve to spend more time exploring the Gulf Coast.

It’s taken me a while to affirm something that should have always been entirely obvious. Over the years, I’ve been to the Gulf coasts of Alabama, Florida and Texas. But I’d never before visited the Mississippi coastline, despite having lived in the state since 2003. (In case you’re wondering, yes, I’m embarrassed.) This changed on Tuesday, when I went down to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, accompanied and chauffeured by Brent Funderburk, my friend and colleague.

Brent’s an amazing artist, a dedicated teacher, and a passionate advocate of the artist and Ocean Springs resident, Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965). He is also a long-term friend of Anderson’s four children, who all still live in the Ocean Springs area and continue to run Shearwater Pottery, the family business. Walter Anderson divided his time between working for the business and pursuing his own art. As is well known, this often involved venturing south to the barrier islands, which are now part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

Here are some of the photos I took during two days spent in Ocean Springs. Click on any photo to enlarge it and to access the entire slideshow.

Ocean Springs Community Center
We started off by visiting the Ocean Springs Community Center, which connects to the Walter Anderson Museum of Art.

 

 

There’s lots to see in the museum, but I only broke out my camera once we’d entered the community center. The buildings communicate for a good reason: in the early 1950s, Anderson painted a large mural in the community center’s main space.

 

 

The murals cover the four walls of the space but, as you can seen, still have to compete with the day-to-day activities of a vibrant community center. It’s difficult to give a sense of the larger scheme of the murals in photographs, and so I concentrated on taking pictures of the work’s many charming details. Bringing the outside inside, Anderson demonstrated his love of the area’s wildlife.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Among this abundance of flora and fauna, there is also humanity and history. On one side of the room, Biloxi Indians and Europeans face, or confront, each other. Notionally, the scene is set in 1699, when the French arrived in the area, but this doesn’t stop Anderson from including his own likeness among the Europeans. The figure at the bottom right of the above photograph has the artist’s distinctive long nose and sports his trademark hat.

 

 

Shearwater
The next morning, we met up with John Anderson, the youngest of Walter’s four children, and he generously treated us to a tour of the Shearwater compound, which consists of studio spaces and houses belonging to the family. Only six years ago, Hurricane Katrina turned the compound upside down but, to the naive eye, that’s not at all evident today. After looking around the showroom, we ducked into the ceramics workshop to see where Shearwater products are made.

 

 

 

 

There’s an amazing sense of time and tradition at Shearwater. Founded in 1928, the operation has had just two master potters over eight decades: Peter Anderson (Walter’s older brother) and Jim Anderson, Peter’s youngest son. When you watch Jim at work you are impressed firstly by his incredible skill and then by a profound sense of historical continuity. At the back of the studio, just behind where he was working at the wheel and beside some recently thrown vessels, I noticed a framed photo of Jim’s father, standing among his own objects.

Walter Anderson’s Cottage

 

 

We also explored Walter Anderson’s cottage, a small mid nineteenth-century building with only a few rooms, but generous and pleasing proportions. Katrina swept it off its foundations in 2005, but now it’s been beautifully restored.

 

 

 

Walter Anderson’s presence and touch is still palpable in his cottage. He made the sliding doors, the built-in cupboards, and the benches; and he built the solid and appealing fireplace with its decorative hummingbird motif, which rises phoenix-like above the fire. The most famous murals in the cottage have been moved to the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, but some painted walls remain in the kitchen and bathroom.

 

 

 

 

Although tasteful order has now replaced the clutter that Anderson lived in during his later years, I assume that many of the objects remain the same. They speak of a life devoted to the coast, to the study nature, and to art. They speak of the kind of life that made the community center murals possible.

Next time I return to the Mississippi coast, I’ll walk the beaches and find some objects to bring home and put on a shelf of my own. It’ll happen sometime during 2012, I trust.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2011 at 7:52 am and is filed under Image-essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.