Guy Anderson
American, 1906-1998
- Names
Guy Anderson
Anderson, Guy
Guy Irving Anderson
- Born
Edmonds 1906
- Active
- Died
La Conner 1998
- Occupation or Type
painter
printmaker
Northwest artist
- Bio
Guy Anderson was a central figure in the Northwest School, a loosely defined modernist movement of painting inspired by nature, executed in a muted palette, and conveying personal, intuitive visions. Anderson was raised in Edmonds and, at the age of twenty, spent a year on Long Island as the recipient of a Tiffany Foundation scholarship, painting landscapes while studying the masters in New York museums. After his return he worked part-time at the Seattle Art Museum, hanging exhibitions and teaching children's art classes, through the 1930s and early 1940s (with two years spent teaching in Spokane for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project). He became close friends with Morris Graves and Mark Tobey, whose interest in Eastern cultures and philosophies influenced Anderson. His abiding interest in the human figure and, since childhood, Asian and Northwest Coast Indian art found full expression in his mature work, produced after he moved to La Conner, in the Skagit Valley of Washington, in the mid-1950s. He painted actively into his nineties.
Artist biography reproduced with permission of Katharine Harmon, author of The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History.
- Gender
Male
- Related People
Associate of: Morris Graves (American, 1910-2001)
Associate of: Carl Morris (American, 1911-1993)
Associate of: Mark Tobey (American, 1890-1976)
Student of: Eustace Ziegler (American, 1881-1969)