At his first one-man show, at Phyllis Kind Gallery in 1990, artist Stephen Warde Anderson was the toast of Chicago. “They put me up in a fancy hotel,” he remembers. “Had the opening and a big dinner afterward with a dozen people. They said, ‘It did well. Here’s another check for $1,000.’”
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The 1980s were bull market years for folk and outsider art. At the height of collectors’ interest the creations of self-taught eccentrics couldn’t be produced fast enough to meet demand, so gallery owners descended upon Small Town, USA, turning over every stone in the hope of finding the next Howard Finster. Anderson’s rock didn’t get kicked until 1988, right when the prospective market for his work was beginning to dry up.
Anderson is a small, frighteningly pale man in his late 40s, though he looks much, much younger. With wispy red hair and thick square glasses he evokes a goyish Woody Allen. He’s never been married, never had kids or a job, and, except for a four-year stint in the navy–spent mostly on a guided missile frigate stationed near Athens–has never lived outside the redbrick house his father built at the top of a hill in Rockford. He lives with his mother, brother, sister, and a remarkable number of stuffed animals.
He has a hard time knowing when they’re finished. “The last work with the portraits is in pencil, and you can infinitely work with pencil. Change the shape of that nostril,” he says, gesturing at an imaginary face, “change the shading of that cheek or chin, the corner of that mouth.
