Growing up in the heart of Canada -- Outlook, Sask., to be exact -- one of Anderson's fondest memories is of digging in his garden and tending to his giant 12-foot sunflowers. "Gardening is one of my three passions," he says. "The other two are art and travel." Luckily, he's managed to combine all three into his daily life. After 29 years as an art teacher in North Vancouver (he received the B.C. Art Teacher of the Year Award in 1992), Anderson now tends to his garden, leads tour groups through Asia (his next trip is to the Yellow Mountains of China's Anhui Province) and, of course, spends a lot of his time in his home studio, taking and processing pictures.
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Many of Anderson's subjects come direct from his own wild and tropical garden -- flowers like the Hebe, Astrantia, Nigella and Liastris, for example -- that he must unearth and cart inside. Rather than photographing these things of awesome beauty in their prime, Anderson normally waits, getting instead the moment before they bloom or the point of decomposition, when petals start to yawn.
"I'm not interested in the moment of absolute beauty," he explains. "I want to expose beauty that most people don't see." That need breeds peculiar behaviour: he'll often run out in the middle of a rainstorm to capture his flowers when they are closed and sopping wet. He's also filled his home with containers of dead plants because he likes to watch them. "I keep having to tell the cleaning lady not to touch them," he says, laughing.
With The Secret Lives of Plants and Flowers, Anderson admits he has included more examples of plants in full bloom as a personal ode to summer. Images like Lumiere XLIV, Delphinium and Lumiere XXXVIII, Liastris, are brilliant, colourful macro shots of plants at their peak. The show also includes series that move from bud through bloom to decomposition of particular blossoms and capture partial dissections of plants.
Because Anderson uses a custom-built, large- format camera and depends on extremely long exposures to capture his image, he takes most of his photographs at night, when there is less risk of vibrations caused from cars passing in the street. Anderson displays these 8.5-by-11 inch images in transparency form over light boxes.
"I used to tell my students that as soon as they came through the door to my classroom they were artists," he says, explaining his view on creating art. "I wanted them to make art that was true to them." Anderson is applying that same goal to his own pictures and trying to make the images as unique as he can. As he puts it, "I want to capture the real splendour after the splendour has gone."
© National Post 2004
