Denise Anderson, On Being an Artist

John Boylan

As an artist, Denise Anderson never stopped working, never stopped experimenting, never stopped imagining. But she did pretty much stop showing her work publicly in the early 1990s. A trove of her remarkable paintings, collages, and assemblages grew over the years to become a remarkable collection of exceptional work. But much of that work remained unseen to all but a few of her friends or family.

Anderson passed away at the end of August, and now her family and a group of her friends have put on a retrospective of that work and are working to preserve and build on her legacy. The collection spans decades, pulled from the portfolios and rolled up drawings and paintings that filled her studio. Many of her friends are also artists, some going back to her college days at Evergreen State College in the 1970s. A good number of them came together in a vibrant art scene in Seattle’s Belltown in the 1980s, a scene made possible by cheap rents in tumbledown buildings, most of which are long gone. It was a scene built around the Belltown Café and the Two Bells Tavern, also both long gone. Denise was at the center of that world.

Denise was, and she remains, an exceptional painter. But beyond that is the extent to which her art and her life intertwined. She lived for roughly three decades in an old house in the Central District, and over time that house became not just the home for her art, but itself became a work of art, an art installation, a large and intricate assemblage.

Denise Anderson was born in Seattle; her father was a longtime Seattle Times editor. She studied at Evergreen State College, the University of Washington, Instituto Allende at San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, Den Hague in the Netherlands, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She also traveled extensively to Europe, North Africa, India, South East Asia, and South America, with pauses to live in Peru, Spain, and New York, and those travels informed her work tremendously. Through most of the 1980s, she was an active part of a coterie of Seattle artists, including a group of exceptionally vital women artists, that group who had been her schoolmates at Evergreen.

The little Belltown world where Denise lived in the late 1970s and 1980s was something a lot of us dream of but rarely see, a collective moment of energy and creativity and community, a moment that the people who lived it remember later with a deep fondness. Belltown was a place where anything could happen. Adventures and creativity abounded, maybe like a bit of Greenwich Village in the 1950s or Paris or Berlin in the 1920s. Denise contributed significantly to that energy, and at the same time it nourished her. She was a prolific painter, and in those years she showed her work extensively in Seattle and in Europe, with a number of solo exhibitions, including a solo show at what is now the Traver Gallery, one of Seattle’s leading venues.

Denise also faced moments in her life that might have shattered another person: the death of her mother when she was 4, the death of her second mother and the accidental death her brother when she was a young woman, several deaths of close friends, and then later in the 1980s, an episode of violence. After that moment, she kept that wonderful circle of friends, but as an artist she became less public. Eventually she withdrew to that house in the Central District.

She kept working on her art, however; she worked a lot. She painted and she drew. She created huge canvases; a woman of small stature, she had to climb a step ladder to complete them. She worked in many media, painting in oil, acrylic, gouache. But she really loved charcoal. She would produce drawings of charcoal and pastel that are six feet tall, drawings that have both sweep and intimacy, that are abstract yet have a suggestion of a figure, a possible torso, a cage, sometimes an hourglass. The lines and patches of charcoal have a depth, a vigor. You can feel her putting the charcoal to the paper, almost hear that sound that comes when the stick rubs the paper, as she creates these figures that are at the same time not figures. And as she builds up the image, it feels as though she’s working something out, that there’s a huge amount of energy, feeling, power that’s flowing out of her onto the paper.

In recent years, her large paintings and drawings gave way to many smaller pieces, including countless small drawings. If you saw just a photo of some of these, you might assume that they too are six feet tall; they share the scale and complexity of the larger pieces, a graphic texture. These drawings are marked with a vocabulary that extends through much of her work: cages, hourglasses, horseshoe magnets, cocoons, dart boards. It’s a vocabulary that also extends out of her backyard studio into her other body of work.

In the same years that she drew and painted in that studio, Denise saw her house as another sort of medium. Over the years, she filled her home with hundreds, maybe thousands, of objects. These were not the crammed collections of a hoarder. Instead, she would create assemblages that became tableaus: a piece of painted wood, a cup, an awl, an old camera frame, a sieve, a doll, a box of dice, a wooden ruler, a faucet handle, many Buddhas. These would be arrayed, stacked, carefully placed to render a sense of mystery, that same sense of intricate expression that marks her two-dimensional work. She placed them everywhere in the house. They of course have overtones of Joseph Cornell’s boxes; it’s as though she has shrunk herself down and taken up residence in an array of Cornell boxes. Denise’s passions, her home, her story, and her work were inseparable.

Throughout her life, Denise Anderson was guided by, and no doubt strengthened by, the power of her imagination and her obvious talent. Whatever she faced, she never stopped paying heed to that power. She never stopped being what she was born to be, an artist.

Denise Anderson: Between Objects

Janine Vigus

Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance…that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. -Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

A grated wire ball and its sketched counterpart, a drafting template and its chalked-in overdrawn double, baskets and hamster wheels upended, compositions of hardware—yellow, rust-orange, black, and bright red with their drawn, chalked, stamped, molded, or painted numbers imported from unknown inventories into formalist compositions of geometric form and color are punctuated with a small, bright red magnet or a yellow wooden sunburst of perplexing origin. Constructivist assemblages of discarded parts in black, red, and yellow pulled from their originating worlds, displayed in cardboard boxes, are frozen in arrangements ready for a blank white wall at a major museum. This ordered disorder fills the home and studio of an artist so drenched in the visual that her life is fused with her work. Like a porous membrane, the division between two- and three-dimensional form that fills the home and studio of this important and under-represented artist is fluid. Denise Anderson passed away at 70 in 2023, leaving behind a rich body of graphic and painted works and an astonishing and densely vibrant environmental work of assemblage that is her home. The current exhibition documents some of this work.

An explosion of artistic practices from the 1970s had included works like Bruce Nauman making daily sculptures in flour on the floor of his studio, Guy de Cointet’s presentation of a book written entirely in code with the author performed by a character actor, and Ed Ruscha throwing a typewriter out the window of a moving car in the Mojave desert. In 1968 the Watts rebellion instigated a detritus-filled urban geography around the red-lined community in Los Angeles. Noah Purifoy, artist, co-founder and first director of Watts Towers, began to gather the products of industrial and consumer culture left behind, remnants of the neighborhood’s rage, and re-form them into elaborate assemblages imbued with the poetics of jazz and improvisation. Annette Messager knit small sweaters for taxidermied sparrows and played with the multiple meanings of fragmented images and language displaced to new contexts. John Baldessari collaged stock images from films to create new narratives.

Similarly, an explosion of work in Seattle—Buster Simpson’s rocks/city benches, a sculpture by Michael Heizer, embedded bits of mosaic in the pavement, began to fill the city. Seattle’s quotidian urban landscape, so rich in the embedded work of artists since the 1970s—seemingly always underfoot or in sight, is in lyric accordance with the objects that form the basis of Anderson’s work—drawn, stamped, scanned and assembled—a love of form crucially fed the city and its artists who were her colleagues and community. In 1973 the Seattle Arts Commission presciently established a one percent for arts program that was a model for other cities. This importantly followed on the 1965 establishment of the NEA by President Johnson, providing funding that arts organizations in the city, like and/or Gallery, established in 1974, and On the Boards, established in 1978. These seemingly dry bureaucratic decisions helped to change the city in ways the Commission could not yet imagine, transforming its pavement, bus benches and shelters, and the built environment into a tapestry of visual delight and unexpected beauty, creating an everyday landscape that provokes appreciation for even the cast-away detritus of daily life. This choreography of visual form is deeply intertwined in Anderson’s work.

A collision of systems—signage, automotive, household, games, electrical, language—is central to the conflation of visual orders that form the artist’s constructions, over-running familiar divisions. What began as a collection of everyday printed material she gathered during extensive travels reflects an innate love of form that, combined with a foundational concern with bodily structure, gradually evolved into surprising and carefully constructed assemblies gathered in Borgesian categorizations—grates: round, rectangular, flat, and bulbous; conical form: fluted, scalloped, glass, and tin; language: stamped in metal, tin and plastic signage, wood type, rubber type, and children’s block letterforms. Borges elaborates: “If there is a universe, its aim is not conjectured yet, we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.”[1] Anderson assembled and combined these unwanted forms, eviscerating or importing their trace, made drawings from them, scanned the drawings and collaged them with others, stamped and painted them. Grates became cages, climbed into towers or spun, and proposed other forms in endless re-assembly as the porosity of her process increasingly became a conversation between media, with the membrane between different registers always at play.

Underlying much of Anderson’s work is a concern with the body, stemming from the most classical of artistic study—anatomy, and a play between interior and exterior structure. Like an armature and the armors of late capitalist urban life, riven with the collision of the abject and the phantasmagoric that played out tragically in the artists’ own life with an attack in her apartment in late 1980s  in New York’s lower East Side during that city’s crack epidemic, which she fought off fiercely and barely survived, leaving her scarred and with long-term effects of PTSD—graphic forms adorned and protected her drawn and painted bodies until the body itself disappeared into illuminations of the objects themselves that began to fill her work and living space. Undeterred by the miasma of complexity the world assumed for her as she struggled to recover sleep and organization itself, she counterintuitively pursued increasingly complex gathering, sorting, and juxtaposing of an immensity of objects, generating ever more elaborate compositions of form and color.

Anderson was born in the Northwest to an editor for The Seattle Times and the daughter of a frozen food magnate. Marked by the loss of her mother when she was four, she was focused and independent early and used to taking charge of worlds she would come to inhabit—drawing and finding ways to retreat into engagement with the imaginary. She attended public school where her artistic ambition was recognized early and shepherded to the art department of the UW. There, in a special program taught by Bill Ritchie, her ambition began to focus. She applied to a printmaking program in San Miguel de Allende and then at The Hague in Holland before returning to Evergreen State College, where the content and focus of her work began to take shape.

The penultimate anti-Vietnam war cohort graduated high school in 1971, mostly unencumbered by the shadow of the draft that hung over older schoolmates and friends but still steeped in the antiwar and countercultural politics that seemed to well up whole cloth, overrunning the clean white postwar McCarthyist landscape, getting into the crevices and fermenting with anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, antiracist sentiment before just as smoothly and silently receding, but not without leaving important activist residue. Student rebellions in France, sit-ins in the US and elsewhere left their mark, with their mantra that art is in the streets and in the everyday. Anderson said those born in her birth year could “speak through radio waves,” referencing the shared values and faculty of children born in Salman Rushdie’s Indian year of independence. She returned from travels in Mexico and Central America quoting Eduardo Galleano’s 1971 Open Veins of Latin America. Graduating from Evergreen In in 1978, Anderson moved to a Beacon Hill sublet, eventually establishing a studio in Belltown and becoming immersed in the city’s artist community before briefly living in New York. She traveled to London and Spain after recovering from serious head injuries sustained during the attack in her New York apartment and then returned to the city that so deeply influenced and imbues her work.

She purchased a house in Seattle and renovated it, patching plumbing seals and tile cracks with three-dimensional ceramic mosaics and installing a black and white checkerboard kitchen floor, and covering walls in printed ephemera. Anderson’s consistent engagement with visual form grew eventually into a densely beautiful environment as her home itself took sculptural form. Collections of diagrams, collapsing of errant numbering systems, a framed series of abstract marks, a light shade mounted by a painted wooden hunting duck hung with milagros, the light play through drafting templates—green, yellow, orange, and white, stripes and checkerboards, an assemblage of globes, of discarded wooden parts of unknown origin, some painted and numbered; light shades and molded glass covers—the visual delight of her practice is everywhere manifest. Taking the form of ad-hoc spirit-constructions, a reification seemingly drawn from encounters with practices of feeding and clothing forms to maintain their spiritual vitality, the rooms in the house that fill with these assembled beings seem to vibrate with the energy of the care that their tending reveals in the forms they assume. This is the seeming workshop of a minor demiurge—calling color, pattern, and form itself into being. 

An artist’s legacy is constituted both from work left behind and by what others take forward from it. Anderson’s concentrated vision and her restless fluidity between media leaves us with a more vibrant appreciation of the order and disorder of everyday life, the acuity to see the beautiful in what is left behind and unregarded. The immense production of her work and its unfailing beauty is a testament to the struggle, the focus, and the care with which she approached her work, her community, and life itself.

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[1] Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” from Alamut: Bastion of Peace and Information.