When he died in 1965, Walter Anderson left a seemingly inexhaustible store of watercolors, linoleum cuts, and fanciful drawings that cry out for a place in books. Thus comes An Alphabet. It combines his love of language and his love of pictures. Here the letters he created on linoleum blocks leap into a life of their own in eccentric shapes and spellings. They run the gamut of Anderson’s imagination from Apple and Acrobat to Zebra.
Each of Anderson’s letters vibrates with energy, spontaneity, and surprise: O for Opossum, P for Persimmon Tree, and X for Xebec.
Walter Anderson (1903-1965) lived 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 territory. He is known today as mythmaker, local legend, mystic poet, painter, inveterate voyager, and, most of all, brilliant artist.
