Warren artist John Anderson is currently showing about 60 artworks at the Mad River Arts gallery in the Waitsfield Village Square. Created in the past 12 years, they include drawings in graphite and colored pencil, paper sculptures and photograph series.
His exhibition “What’s the Big Idea?” runs through February 29. To wrap up the show, he will give a talk tonight, Thursday, February 22, at 5 p.m. in the gallery.
Andersons’ artworks are guided by concepts. “It could be a metaphor, a challenge, or a set of rules – it just has to carry through the process,” he said. He recounted getting a poor grade on a history paper when he was in college. The professor told him that while he grasped the course material, the paper lacked a big idea. “That sort of changed my life as an artist and architect,” he said.
In a series of drawings called “Un-built Projects,” Anderson depicts buildings that could not be constructed according to the standards and practices of any society today. “They’re so fantastical that they remain unbuilt. Their shapes and qualities suggest a program that we don’t even know about yet,” he said.
Similarly, his series “UFOs” draws on themes of science fiction and fantasy – interests that “are often the perfect place to create images with absolute freedom,” he wrote in the show brochure. These are floating cities and spacecrafts with “a very tenuous relationship to the ground.” They were drafted with precision, he said, “which I owe to my long practice as a hand-drawing architect.”
Anderson is also captivated by lines. This is apparent in a series of drawings in which the paper is heavily filled in by a Prismacolor Ebony pencil – a soft, intensely black graphite that “when rubbed vigorously into the paper, a metallic sheen emerges, almost denying the surface of the paper,” he wrote. White lines come into view against a black background – and “controlling these thin lines while applying messy graphite around them was a tense, but somehow pleasing process,” he added.
Anderson sees his work as open to interpretation. “I want there to be ambiguity,” he said. “I have no agenda for people to see it in a certain way.”
“I find that kids are actually much more open and free in interpreting my work than adults,” he added. Fittingly, on February 20, Anderson led a group of Crossett Brook Middle School students through a series of artmaking exercises in the gallery.
Anderson devoted himself full time to art practice in 2010 after a 38-year career in architecture. He opened his studio in Burlington in 1973, designing commercial buildings, housing, and other projects.
Starting with a concept was important then, too. He guided clients to begin with the most fantastical idea they could imagine, devoid of all the constraints that would inevitably come to bear on a project – building codes, budgets, and all the rest. “It doesn’t have to be logical,” he said. “It can be irrational. It can even be impossible. But it’s a starting point.”
