J. Gordon Anderson - Contemporary Art

The New Yorker has a great article about Charles Burchfield . It memorably describes him as a "one man movement." His art has something of the lonely quality of his friend, Hopper (and maybe Wyeth?), but there is a psychological, tortured side to it, which the article describes as not so much a commentary on the small towns where he lived and worked, but rather on on his own interior struggle with gloom and spiritual unease. One of my art professors compared a lot of my early work to that of Burchfield's. Not knowing who he was at the time, I looked him up and saw the similarity, though I think now my art looks rather different from his (not completely, but still different enough). But since that first comparison however I have always been interested in this great 20th century American master.

My family is moving to Maryland in a few weeks so I can serve as rector of a parish there. Moving is always traumatic for the artist. 1) There is always gobs of stuff to move. Artists tend to collect more 'junk' than your average folk... pictures, props, supplies, etc. not to mention his own work, so moving always presents a major challenge. 2) Losing a studio space (especially a nice one like I have) is very sad, because the artist gets used to his environment and to some extent it plays an important role in the creation of his work. It takes me months to acclimate to a new studio, which is quite disruptive to the artistic process. 3) While packing the artist cannot work on art or anything else very easily; packing takes up all of your time and energy. So this move, like all of them before, will be an artistic nightmare at least for the short term. But the bright side of it is that besides being closer to family and old friends we will be living in a major metropolitan area. T...

In December the family will be packing up and moving to Maryland where I will serve as rector of St. Alban's in Joppa, MD. As I am from that area, and was ordained in that parish, it is something of a homecoming. It goes without saying that I will miss everyone at my current parish of St. Francis in Virginia. Every time a priest moves to a new parish in our church it sets off a chain reaction, where the bishop has to scramble to find a man to fill the position that is opening up. In as small a church as ours his options are limited, whereas we do not have enough priests, and whereas those who are available may not have the desire or ability to move out of state, etc. I was lucky at St. Francis because I brought in a priest from an outside jurisdiction to help out, and he was later received into our diocese, and he will be taking over for me, but he was literally the only man in the region available to take over as priest-in-charge. The parish probably would have liked a choice of w...