Artists
William Anderson
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William Anderson was born in 1952, in Edinburgh Scotland. He immigrated to Canada in 1975 and, as a young Mechanical Engineer, quickly became enamoured of the great Canadian wilderness. Having received a camera in the mail, as a young boy (from a stranger calling himself “dad”) and without the means to purchase film, William had practiced framing objects often and long enough, to make the first step of recording the Canadian landscape, a natural one.
In 1979, whilst employed in a copper mine in Port Hardy B.C., William became greatly interested in the works of photographers like Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and their precursors. William soon built and locked himself away in his first (Black and White) darkroom – and with a pile of books to lean on, taught himself how to print everything from Silver Based black and whites, to more exotic alternative processes like Gum Bichromate, Cyanotype, Van Dyke, and Platinum.
Many of the resulting works now belong in private, corporate, and public collections, including those of: Michael Kenna, Robert K. Byers, Craig Richards; The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies; The Olga Havel Foundation, Czech Republic; The Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, Scotland, and the Petro Canada collection.
After a sojourn into filmmaking and in spite of his traditional large format stills roots, William quickly exploited the new color (pigments) and expressive freedoms to be found in digital based photo arts. And with a continuing interest in Abstract Expressionist painting, its precursors and politics, William’s main concern is with nature’s inescapable influence on our psyche, the “self” part of self expression, and its inherent worth in spite of art manifestos and our self ’s claims of transcendence. Is abstraction a move away from nature, or is it
William now lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
William Anderson's photographs have been exhibited and collected in numerous countries, including the Czech Republic, Israel, England, Scotland, Canada, and the United States.
