In the fall of 1965, nearly two months before his death, the story goes that the American watercolorist Walter Anderson—“Bob” to his family—rowed out to Horn Island, Mississippi, off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico, a day or two ahead of Hurricane Betsy. This island, a spiritual retreat, if you will, and favored artistic subject of his, proves to be his final battleground, in this full-length drama, of a...
In the fall of 1965, nearly two months before his death, the story goes that the American watercolorist Walter Anderson—“Bob” to his family—rowed out to Horn Island, Mississippi, off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico, a day or two ahead of Hurricane Betsy. This island, a spiritual retreat, if you will, and favored artistic subject of his, proves to be his final battleground, in this full-length drama, of a lifelong war with himself and his ideology about what made art, Art. It was here, lore tells us, in September of that year, that Anderson tied himself to a tree baring flesh and spirit to Mother Nature, surrounded by nothing but what ran wild on the island, to stand witness to the brunt force of a hurricane…so that he could paint its raw beauty honestly. Our story picks up right as the clouds begin to darken, with the first wisps of Hurricane Betsy slowly making her approach into the gulf and her way up to the quiet, shallow Mississippi Sound, seducing Bob, who eagerly invites her ashore to spend the last hours of her destructive life, poised on the edge of his own infamously unstable temper and unaware that within the few months left to the year, he himself would be dead. Through the course of one unforgettable evening two very different forces of nature will collide head-on in an experience that will leave him prostrate in awe at the sublime beauty her wrath can wreak on man physically as much as mentally and emotionally. As the worst of Betsy passes, having ravaged the island, Bob is surprised to find he has survived, and even though repentant at the need for her mercy, he swells with pride that her revenge came not to destroy but to divine for him the truth of his own nature, born out of the audacity, he believes, of a man who he had learned to tame everything but himself.