Guy Anderson

Guy Anderson

Anderson, Guy

Guy Irving Anderson

Edmonds 1906

Washington

La Conner 1998

painter

printmaker

Northwest artist

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.

Male

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)