Seventy years since the Life Magazine article named the 'Mystic Painters'

I first met Guy Anderson in the La Conner post office, back when you could rent a box for peanuts. There, in the seventies, you had an equal chance of running into a local luminary, your neighbor (might be one in the same) or the person who shouted at you the night before in the bar when you spilled your drink down their back.

I can’t imagine Guy spilling a drink on anyone. Or shouting. He was ever so soft-spoken. And there he was, in the post office, asking me, a complete stranger, “How are you?,” and pausing for an answer. I have no memory of my reply, but I remember his when I reciprocated interest: “Oh, very fine. Just as if everything was right with the world!” He chuckled to himself as he wandered off to his box. It was a simple greeting that told me lots about this man I’d read about, the man who “put La Conner on the map” as an art town.

It was some twenty-five years since the Life Magazine article “Mystic Painters of the Northwest,” a piece of journalism that changed the reputation of our corner of the world.

Guy Anderson didn’t drive. Guy didn’t have running water or electricity, either, when he first came to town, living in a shack on Gallagher’s point, just outside the town limits. Still, Clayton James remembered him entertaining in that abode with elegance, sending beautifully inscribed invitations by mail to his friends, like him, who might have lived only blocks away.

Nelson’s Lumber and Hardware was on North First Street, where the La Conner Retirement Inn is today. Often you could see Guy happily bopping down the street with a roll of roofing paper on his shoulder and a bucket of house paint in his hand, headed for his studio. He had little need for “art supplies.” And he had no concern for small ideas, not even his own intentions sometimes. Guy loved to work on big paintings laid out on the floor. Once a fellow artist walked into Guy’s very narrow studio on First Street and stepped onto a wet painting before he realized what it was. Ever the gentleman, Guy paused to consider the effect before assuring this young man that it was “all meant to be.”

Nor did he share the concerns of archivists. Later, full of success, he built himself a cozy, imaginative home on Caledonia Street. Half hidden, as it is today, you could peek in through the bamboo and see huge paintings on paper hanging in the rain.

Guy was largely self-taught in art and philosophy. He was steeped in classical literature and was as interested in classical music as he was painting. He was a devoted pianist and somehow found room in his tiny living spaces for his beloved baby grand.

All the artists I have spoken with remember Guy as extraordinarily generous with his time, experience and resources. Our mayor, Ramon Hayes, remembers Guy bringing his artist friends to hear him play piano when Ramon was just twenty-one, hired by the Channel Lodge to entertain on weekend evenings. Ramon shared that Guy would typically tip him fifty dollars on those occasions.

Guy Anderson was a Modernist, meaning that he was experimental, tending towards the abstract, heroic in gesture and scale, freeing art from traditional European constraints. He was heavily influenced by the art of the Salish Sea indigenous cultures, sharing with them a desire to show how humans fit into the cosmos. It was this big picture that inspired him most.

He will be remembered by this artist as a person who, for one moment in time, helped me lift my gaze from the mundane to the true opportunity at hand.

Works from the estate of Guy Anderson are on exhibit at i.e. through April.

Maggie Wilder’s exhibit at Perry and Carlson’s in Mount Vernon, “New Work,” runs through April.