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.