Linda Anderson’s daughter Betty Jane, known as “B.J.,” was born developmentally delayed in 1961. An aneurysm when she was 17 left her with frequent seizures, so she required round-the-clock caregiving.
After praying that her daughter would recover, Anderson experienced the first of many visions.
“I had a visitation,” she says. “This voice — it’s hard to explain, but it was a clear, reassuring voice — told me to stop praying that she would get better because she wasn’t going to be well. But the voice told me I would receive a gift to help with my suffering. When I woke up the next morning, my depression had lifted and colors seemed brighter. Images around me were crisp and clear.”
Using acrylic paints bought by her sister, Anderson painted the view from B.J.’s bedside. The act of daubing paint felt healing. Soon the visions, all-consuming, started coming rapidly. Tableaux from her mountain childhood in Clarkesville would flash in her mind — tilling fields, “putting up” vegetables, tending the moonshine still. Anderson began to paint them. She was 40. Having dropped out of school in eighth grade, she had never taken an art lesson. Painting felt like a kind of sacred transcription. She said she goes into a trance to do it.
“I started seeing pictures in my mind just like photographs — some clear, some not,” she says. “As I think and see these images, sometimes a strong feeling comes to me as if I’m right there, even though it may have been 50 years since I’ve been there. The pictures come in clear, but they don’t stay long, just flash like a camera. The visions and the ability to paint them — that was my gift.”
Around 1980, Anderson rounded up some of her homespun paintings and took them to a county fair in Homer, where she priced them at $35 apiece. Among the shoppers that day was Atlanta artist and socialite Carolyn Caswell.
“I saw these paintings that made use of good, clear composition with the use of vibrant colors,” Caswell recalls. “I had never seen mountains painted like that. The work showed pure naivete; this was clearly a totally naïve artist. I had to meet her. I told her, Linda, you’re a folk artist. She said, ‘I am? My brother says this is a bunch of crap.’”
Thoroughly charmed, Caswell bought all of the paintings. “She gave me a hundred-dollar bill, and I had never seen one of those before,” Anderson says. This new patron then showed the paintings to gallerist Judith Alexander, who had opened the Alexander Gallery, one of Atlanta’s first folk art spaces, in 1978.
Credit: Linda Anderson
Credit: Linda Anderson
Alexander called Anderson to say: “Do not sell any more paintings for $35 — you’re now one of my artists. I will represent you.” Alexander took her to buy oil paints, and the price tags changed dramatically. The gallerist arranged a one-woman exhibition, and it sold out. A second show at the Swan Coach House also sold out.
The proceeds would pay for her other two children’s shoes for school, Anderson told Alexander. They otherwise would have gone barefoot. The visionary artist had not only been “discovered,” she was now the toast of the town. Commissions and gilt invitations poured in. Her life would never be the same.
A hardscrabble life
Anderson is what people mean when they say “salt of the earth.” And she is plenty quirky. Her cap of brunette curls brushes a tattoo of a crescent moon in the middle of her forehead, a symbol of her enduring love of Moon Pies. She wears oversized glasses that magnify her eyes and give her the look of an inquisitive owl, and she enjoys wearing tiaras; she might don a tiara to go to the grocery store. At one point, she had 44 cats. When a favorite calico died, she let insects consume its flesh and then made jewelry out of its bones. She likes to snatch beauty from unlikely places.
Now a youthful 81, Anderson was one of five children who grew up in a dirt-floor house in an isolated pocket of Habersham County in a family of Pentecostal tenant farmers. “We were poor, and it was hardscabble, and we were ‘quarr,’” she says, using mountain slang for “peculiar.”
“I got my first .22 when I was 9, and I would hunt for our meat. It wasn’t a big enough gun to bring down big game, but we ate a lot of rabbits, squirrel, groundhog. The occasional possum or coon.” (Until recently, she still killed squirrels for sport but has lately “promised Jesus” she would stop.)
Anderson’s family also made moonshine — a recurring theme in her work. She learned to drive early and hauled a carload of jars full of whiskey to the city to sell, dodging “Old Law” along the way. Another domestic chore was climbing a tree with her rifle and shooting at the revenuers who came sniffing around.
“Although my paintings show a bucolic peacefulness on the surface, my life was not like that,” she says.
Credit: Susan Shlaer
Credit: Susan Shlaer
Her father died of cancer when she was 13. After dropping out of school, Anderson began working as a maid and a nurse’s aide, eventually becoming a licensed nurse. She married at 17 and proceeded to have three children before divorcing her husband. She had to quit work to take care of B.J., who died in 1999. By then, her art had taken off.
Southern gothic gone global
Today, Anderson lives in a large, art-filled cabin made of weathered poplar outside Clarkesville with Susan Shlaer, her partner of 35 years. Anderson built all the cabinets herself — she is a master carpenter as well as a quilter.
She is regarded as one of the South’s premier folk artists and “memory painters,” drawing on her personal experiences of a bygone Appalachia. She relays scenes of women quilting, of home births aided by a stout-armed midwife, of church congregants speaking in tongues. The crude human figures in her brightly colored landscapes have a kinetic quality; everyone — men, women, and children — bustles with a mulish work ethic.
To take in Anderson’s paintings one by one is to be transported over the mountain, into her singular, uncanny Southern Gothic imagination. Her work has shown in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and Rome, Italy, and is among the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the High Museum of Art, where her 2004 retrospective show set an attendance record with more than 700 people gaping at her work, says Lynn Spriggs O’Connor, curator of folk art at the time.
“Linda Anderson is one of the last true exponents of this loosely defined tradition dating back to Grandma Moses,” said Tom Patterson, an author and curator who works with folk and self-taught artists. “It’s great to see that she’s still at it.”
Despite her comparisons to Grandma Moses, Anderson’s work is distinguished by a dark sense of foreboding. A painting titled “Mad Dog” shows an animal foaming at the mouth and treeing a boy in overalls. There are guns aplenty and copperheads in her paintings. One oil-on-linen is a graphic representation of a hog slaughter.
“People often think of memory painting as sweet, syrupy images that idealize the past, but not Linda,” says O’Connor. “There is so much grit, honesty and impish humor in her richly layered paintings — just notice the details. She doesn’t censor herself. Linda is not P.C.”
Even as her career took off, Anderson maintained a sense of unassuming authenticity. When grand adventures started to beckon, she handled them on her own terms. On one occasion, Baruch College wanted to show her work, but the timing was bad. “I had looked at the Farmer’s Almanac to plant my potatoes, and the signs weren’t right. If you plant potatoes when the signs are in the feet, your potatoes will be small, like your toes.” The institution worked around her planting schedule.
At another show in New York City, Anderson was asked if she would prefer any special food. Well, yes, of course: Moon Pies. One of the coordinators asked her how many people a Moon Pie would serve. “Can you imagine somebody not even knowing what a Moon Pie is?” Anderson says, incredulously.
There have been some changes, though. Anderson no longer drives because she never knows when she will be overtaken by a vision. She has totaled three cars because of it.
“Linda’s life changed dramatically with her art,” Shlaer says. “She went from being a country lady to a sophisticated, cosmopolitan woman.”
Credit: Linda Anderson
Credit: Linda Anderson
A voracious reader, Anderson especially likes to read about other artists. Two favorites are Henri Rousseau and Frida Kahlo (“My mother looked like her — had a mustache,” Anderson says), and for Christmas she got a book about Morris Hirshfield that delights her.
But for the most part, Anderson maintains her “unfiltered gaze,” to use one of the plaudits heaped on her. She is wily in many ways, but in her art, proudly “naive.”
“I never thought I would be the sort of person who would receive a gift like this,” Anderson says. “I’m just a human with flaws.”
ART PREVIEW
“Coming Home to Roost: The Works of Linda Anderson.” Through March 19. Free. Sautee Nacoochee Cultural Center, Hwy. 255 North, Sautee. 706-878-3300, www.snca.org.
