His Art's In The Northwest -- Guy Anderson's Paintings Are Rooted In The Region

``Between Night and Morning: The Work of Guy Anderson,'' on view through Feb. 19 at the Bellevue Art Museum, 301 Bellevue Square. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. $3 adults, $2 students and seniors. Free Tuesday. 454-3322.

Guy Anderson has become living history. No one else has been so deep a part of Northwest art for so long a time.

Even if his paintings were less remarkable, that fact alone would make his new show at the Bellevue Art Museum worth seeing. The show is composed of 20 recent works, and a group of Anderson's early paintings from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Sarkis.

Anderson's art combines the three streams of tradition that blend to give Northwest art its distinctive aesthetic. He paints a softened, classical European rendition of the nude figure, indicates the forces of nature with the swift, energized brushwork of Asian calligraphy, and makes liberal use of the enclosed ovals and the palette familiar in Northwest Coast Indian art.

His theme is man's place in the universe, interpreted in mythological terms, with snippets of Skagit Valley landscape thrown in. The overriding feel is rhythmic. Giant, glowing circles and stylized wave patterns simplified to charging zigzags carry the energy of his work, in compositions that owe more to Japanese than to European art. It is a style that has evolved with gradual grace.

Anderson, 83, gained national attention in 1953, when Life magazine published a piece that still stands as the most widely known article ever written about Northwest art. Titled ``Mystic Painters of the Northwest,'' it featured profiles of four painters and their work: Anderson, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Kenneth Callahan.

Anderson has inherited the mantle by attrition. Tobey and Callahan are dead now. Graves has not lived in the Northwest for many years. Only Anderson continues as a productive Northwest painter. Age has begun to take its physical toll on his body, but is not yet visible in his work.

For most of his career, he has painted with oil on paper. His chosen paper is manufactured for builders, made with a reinforcing webbing that reads through the paint as a textural grid. Anderson lays it flat on the studio floor, painting in strong, deliberate strokes that loop or streak like broken thunder. Some paintings still bear an imprint of the artist's foot.

BAM director LaMar Harrington selected the earlier pieces in the new exhibition to show the movement of Anderson's style. One of the most visible changes is the matter of size. In years gone by, his paintings could be measured on the scale of a foot or two in either dimension. The 1976 ``Purusa'' is about 10 inches square. But increasingly, Anderson has chosen to work on a scale 8 or more feet high, producing work that defies any ordinary home setting.

The earliest piece at BAM is ``Icarus,'' painted in 1949. It has a cubist look, painted in that umber palette so beloved by Depression-era artists. A figure floats horizontally across the top - a motif Anderson has used in many paintings over the years, but back in 1949, the figure was still clothed. One knee is pushed out toward the viewer, grown huge in its closeness.

Shortly after that piece was painted, Anderson began to compartmentalize the shapes in his paintings into organic cells, resembling the encircling ovoid of Northwest Coast Indian art. Some contain figures who float like recumbent dreamers above abstract landscapes, or - as in ``The Birth of Adam'' - curled like a fetus, connected by an umbilicus to a vast, muscular swirl of white.

Large, unframed paintings, hung directly on the wall, constitute a large part of the BAM show. They are recent paintings not yet framed, and they are eloquent testimony to Anderson's enduring power as a painter.

His show supplants BAM's three-month Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition, which pulled in slightly more than 67,000 admissions by the time it closed Jan. 7. That surpassed attendance figures at the FLW show's two previous stops in Dallas and Miami. Harrington estimated that admissions from the show exceeded the Bellevue museum's revenue goal by about 72 percent - providing a comfortable cushion for museum operations.

``Museums constantly battle the bottom line these days, and occasionally we see some light,'' she said. ``The exceptional interest in Frank Lloyd Wright has given us that rare circumstance.''