These drawings reside inside a 9×6 inch Fabriano sketchbook and were made, following information on the title page, between 2007 and 2009, the year the artist died. Anderson started the sketchbook on a trip to Italy with students from the University of Texas. Thirty-three pages of heavy weight paper imagine landscapes rendered one painstaking mark after another. The artist plunged into a lagoon of horror vacui on each page. The last, unfinished and 33rd page of these crowded, heaving landscapes offers a glimpse into how Anderson constructed each with small, deliberate, pen strokes building up pulsating areas of empty white and frenetic darks. Churches, towers, spires, houses, geological aberrations drool and crawl across his landscapes.

Robert Dale Anderson’s work continues to gain deserved attention since his death in 2009. The AP/RC contains over 170 of his works on paper and will soon add one of his sculptures to the collection. During the Fall of 2014 Flatbed Press in Austin, TX organized an exhibition of his prints and drawings.

BMG