Joseph Anderson: Cautionary Tales

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Joseph Anderson's delicately rendered watercolours are lush and visceral, darkly humourous, and surprising, drawing upon such references as Hieronymus Bosch's splendidly grotesque Garden of Earthy Delights and the morally instructive tales of the Brothers Grimm. The titular series introduces a host of wide mouthed, cavity-ridden, ruddy skinned characters enduring fantastic unpleasantries, the stuff of childhood nightmares and folk tales alike. Other large-scale watercolour drawings depict young boys on the cusp of adulthood, in an ambigous emotional state somewhere between fear and excitement, pleasure and peril. In The Boys Encounter Aquatic Creatures Near the Ocean Floor, for instance, dozens of figures are suspended against an inky dark blue ground while some boys mingle with giant seahorses and lobsters, or swim through coral reefs, others are trapped in the tentacles of a massive cephalopod. The exact nature of the encounter and the fate of the boys is never revealed; instead, the richly detailed images allude to numerous narrative possibilities.

Joseph Anderson was born in Edmonton, raised in southern Alberta and currently lives in Saskatoon. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Saskatchewan. Anderson has shown his paintings in numerous group and solo shows, most recently at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in Brooklyn, New York in the group show Passages, the Mendel Arts Gallery in Saskatoon in the group exhibition Wonderment, and the solo exhibition Men with Beards at the Saskatoon Community Youth Arts Programming (SCYAP) Gallery.

Joseph Anderson, The Boys Encounter Aquatic Creatures Near the Ocean Floor (Detail), 2013.