Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Friday, February 25, 2022
A SECOND WIND: ART RESURRECT
By Jerry Wennstrom
This is a temporary blog page as www.handsofalchemy.com is being overhauled.
A Second Wind: Art Resurrected features Jerry Wennstrom’s second body of art, created over the span of more than two decades. This fascinating volume presents his never-seen early paintings – which he destroyed in 1979 as a liberating act of greater vision and inspiration. A Second Wind also shows the massive, archetypal, interactive sculptural works he created with his return to a settled life in the world – some fifteen years later. Unlike other artists, Wennstrom has not sold his works, nor have they been widely exhibited. They all sit enshrined in his dramatically painted large exhibit space in the woods of south Whidbey Island, WA. His meaningful tales of his early life, his bold-yet-transformative decision to destroy his life’s work, and the intriguing stories behind his creations are as transformational as the art itself. The book also contains an eclectic collection of “creative responses” to his art by dozens of artists, poets, authors, and colleagues ... as well as a glimpse into his life with his wife Marilyn Strong.
Featured in Wennstrom’s book are notables who, over the decades, have been impressed with Wennstrom’s works: cultural anthropologists Margaret Mead and Jean Houston; Jungian analysts and scholars Marion Woodman, Corwin Fergus and Claire Dunne; psychologists/drug researchers Ralph Metzner, and Christopher Bache; storytellers Laura Simms and Vi Hilbert; poet David Whyte, artist Deborah Koff-Chapin, author Dana Crowley-Jack, visionary financier Charlie Hess; the Dalai Lama’s Gyuto monks, and even legendary chanteuse Lotte Lenya (of TheThreepenny Opera fame).
Jerry Wennstrom’s work is embraced by those adept at dream work, anthropology, mythology, Jungian psychology, consciousness, and spirituality. He has lectured at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was sponsored by Parabola Magazine. The interest of these groups in Jerry’s art and life is as much for the resonant universal story that his personal journey represents as it is for the decades of artwork he has produced.
