Walter Inglis Anderson

Here in a volume of astonishing beauty is a menagerie of animals created by the acclaimed artist Walter Anderson. This colorful collection of art assembled from the hundreds of works he produced conveys his lifelong fascination with animals as inspiration for his artistic vision. For Anderson, that vision encompassed the realm of music, which he perceived in the animal world and translated into images in watercolor, oil, ink, pencil, clay, and wood. Anderson's animals resound with a timeless musical power. Mary Anderson Pickard writes in the introduction: "A rhythm of frogs encircles a cereal bowl. Across a sheet of typing paper flows a cat's melodic line. Horses resonate in wood or clay. In watercolor, curling green lizards harmonize with angled intervals of grass."

A cat drinks from a saucer of magical milk and becomes an accomplished musician. Illustrated with thirty-three linoleum cuts.

"When renowned Mississippi artist Walter Anderson read Don Quixote or the Iliad, he heightened the intensity of his engagement with each by creating line drawings of the characters on typing paper. Each morning his wife, Agnes Grinstead Anderson, collected the many sheets the painter casually discarded in a night's reading and drawing." "Along with thousands of paintings, sculptures, block prints, and writings, Walter Anderson (1903-1965) created over 9,500 pen-and-ink illustrations of scenes from Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Pope's Iliad, and Bulfinch's Legends of Charlemagne. He also drew inspiration from such sources as Paradise Regained, Temora from The Poems of Ossian, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, and Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle." "In Illustrations of Epic and Voyage, Redding S. Sugg, Jr., has brought together 120 of Anderson's pen-and-ink drawings based on the painter's reading of literature." "Sugg has divided the illustrations into three categories: "Figures and Attitudes," composed of single figures; "Scenes," featuring interactions between characters; and "Sequences," consisting of series of scenes from books. Illustrations of Epic and Voyage includes a contextual introduction by Sugg, as well as captions describing each illustration."--Jacket.

The letters of the alphabet are featured in linoleum block prints by the Mississippi artist, Walter Anderson.