It is more significant to keep one’s painting in a state of severe experimentation than to become a quick success by means of cheap repetition.
— Marsden Hartley, as quoted by Bill Jensen
There is a crack, a crack in everything:
That’s how the light gets in.
— Leonard Cohen, Anthem
To follow the work of Eric Anderson across time is to pace the trails of an American nomad, one simultaneously at ease nearly anywhere and yet ever in search of some lost home, receding just behind the line of the next horizon.
Anderson's life has been lived in a wide variety of environments. Various Brooklyn neighborhoods, suburban northern California, Philadelphia's Italian market, rural Missouri, Northeast Los Angeles, and even (briefly) London — all have served the artist as home at one point or another.
This peripatetic life has gifted him with a love of adventure and a restless desire to seek out new ways of working. He has deployed various stylistic means and conceptual devices throughout his career, each used to convey the particular needs of the story being told.
People are creatures not of fact, as the modernist myth would have it, but of story. Anderson's work attempts to reach, however feebly, toward the numinous, seeking those stories that run back to what C.S. Lewis referred to as "the deeper magic from before the dawn of time."
Curriculum Vitae
Born 1979, Springfield, Missouri
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Education
2007 School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, MFA Illustration
2002 Drury University, Springfield, MO, BA Fine Arts & Design Arts
Solo & 2-Person Exhibitions
2019 A Consuming Fire, (with Luke Whitlatch); Keystone Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2013 Effortless as Fire; Giacobetti Paul Gallery; Brooklyn, NY
2004 Overlong; Good Girl Art Gallery; Springfield, MO
Overlong II; Joplin Law Convention Center; Joplin, MO
Selected Group Exhibitions
2018 Keystone Winter Group Show; Keystone Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Keystone Spring Group Show; Keystone Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2014 Drury | NY | San Francisco | Berlin; Drury University, Springfield, MO
2013 Summer Group Show; Giacobetti Paul Gallery; Brooklyn, NY
2012 Modest in Scale; Abecedarian Gallery; Denver, CO
Summer Group Show; Giacobetti Paul Gallery; Brooklyn, NY
2011 An Evening with Zefrey Throwell (collaborator); Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
February Salon Show; Greenpoint Gallery; Brooklyn, NY
2010 Bring Your Own Art; X Initiative; New York, NY
Tattoo Culture 2010 Group Show; Tattoo Culture; Brooklyn, NY
2008 Tattoo Culture 2008 Group Show; Tattoo Culture; Brooklyn, NY
Entrepreneurship & Innovation Alumni Exhibition; Drury University; Springfield, MO
Photoworks, Prints and Artists’ Books; Abecedarian Gallery; Denver, CO
2007 Tattoo Culture 2007 Group Show; Tattoo Culture; Brooklyn, NY
MFA Thesis Show; School of Visual Arts Westside Gallery; New York, NY
Bird Beak Group Show; Headquarters Studio; New York, NY
Monmouth County Arts Council Juried Show; Monmouth Co. Museum of Art; Lincroft, NJ
Selected Press
Jerry Saltz, How a Joyride in Gavin Brown’s Volvo Became Art, New York Magazine, March 19, 2011