Pelicans

Cultural Writing. Art. PELICANS presents seventeen of Walter Anderson's pen and ink drawings of pelicans as well as an essay by Anderson on his time spent roughing it on Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands amongst the pelican communities he had come to study and draw. His daughter, Mary Anderson Pickard, adds a felicitous preface about her father's interest in the pelicans as artistic subject and the natural history of the Chandeleur Islands. Birds, for Walter Anderson, took on two aspects - first, they became a metaphor for freedom and a symbol of spirituality; and second, they are small bundles of brightly colored or darkly iridescent feathers, which were a constant source of curiosity and delight. He is recognized as one of the major American watercolorists--a select group that includes John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Arthur Demuth, and John Marin.

Mary Anderson Pickard, Walter Anderson’s daughter and author of the preface, who lives in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, is the author of several books on the art of Walter Anderson, including Birds, A Symphony of the Animals, and The Voluptuous Return. Writer, painter, actress, and former curator of her father’s estate, she has given tours and lectures at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, the Memphis Brooks Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and is a contributor to the recent volume The Art of Walter Anderson.
Christopher Maurer, who edited this volume, won the 2003 Eudora Welty Prize for his biography Fortune’s Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson. Professor of Spanish literature at the University of Illinois--Chicago, he is the editor and author of many books and articles on Spanish poetry, including Federico Garcia Lorca’s Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and How a City Sings from November to November, also published by Cadmus Editions.