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The first mental image you might have when somebody speaks the word art is something light and beautiful, But artist Jerry, when streams work, shows us art can be a little dark and a little disturbing to all of it.

In an effort to get you to think and maybe come to fresh understandings.

Renowned Pacific Northwest artist Jerry Wenstrup is next on northwest now.

Music In the 1970s, Jerry Wennstrom was an up and coming painter in New York studio art scene, but found himself, quote, trying to paint my way to heaven.

Tired of what he thought was a shallow collection of Andy Warhol wannabes in Soho.

He destroyed his 80 painting collection right in the middle of a film being made about his life.

he then unloaded all his possessions and wandered for 15 years before finding his way to Whidbey Island, where he got back into art, got married, and found new inspiration.

The subject of his highly acclaimed second book, A Second Wind.

Wennstrom has done some new painting and mural work around his studio home.

But what stands out is a 33 piece collection of sculptures, often described as cabinets and coffin figures, all made from cedar logs and various metals and found objects.

They're all on display at his home gallery on Whidbey Island, and none are for sale.

Many of the sculptures are interactive, with hidden compartments that transform through the observer's use of levers or cranks, with figures morphing from one thing to another, and with one sculpture even powered by a tiny home built steam engine.

Jerry, thanks so much for coming to northwest.

Now I want to tell people, and I mentioned this in the set up that you live on Whidbey Island.

So it is quite the arduous journey to get down here to Tacoma to participate in this with us and, myself speaking for myself and our viewers.

Thank you very much for making the effort and making the trip.

I want to make sure I fit that in early.

You assumed you assumed fame and destroyed your paintings and left New York.

And you know, we're out and about on the world, on the economy for 15 years.

But here you are again now, in a bit of a reset with the book The Second Wind, some of your new works.

You had complained earlier that your identity was too closely tied to art.

How have you resolved those things?

How have you kind of fixed it so that you're in a happy place now with fame and notoriety?

Back.

Back a little bit?

Yes.

Well, the the art scene in New York at that time, it was like the place to be.

And you know what became a beautiful studio?

Free spaces.

Big open spaces became Helmsley Hotel.

Put came into town, and there was a big fashion industry coming in, and it became like a kind of Faltskog, you might say, where everyone is.

It felt like at some level it left its creative essence and became a bandwagon.

And I felt like and I in some level felt like I was living the lie as well, because I was so driven as a young artist and it just became too small an identity.

You know, I was talking about something larger, but I didn't know what that was, and I had to find that out.

So destroying my work and giving everything I owned away, I felt like I gave my life to the creative process of being.

And that's a really simple thing.

But it's also enormously difficult to be able to do, because I simply trusted life to carry the journey.

And it was the most important thing I've ever done with my life.

I mean, you said you sure you consider your your masterpiece?

Yes, I do.

The I rather call it the masterpiece because it was larger than me.

It was, you know, I felt like it was such a powerful calling that took me out of my, you know, what I thought was my true love, which was art.

And I feel like I became even more of an artist because it included all of life.

And then it became more about being fully present in the moment and letting that be the creative act, let that be the inspiration.

And at first, learning how to do that was it was difficult and scary because I didn't know the territory.

And at this point in my life, this far down the road, I feel like it's become a dance.

It's like learning the dance.

It's very clumsy to start with, and you don't know why you're putting your feet where you are, but then it becomes a dance.

And so the essential learning that came out of that surrender became the dance of my life now.

And although life looks very normal compared to what it was, it's still essentially trusting at that same level and having it beautifully unfold in the way that I never could have done it with my will, intelligence and good intentions.

What's the source of that?

Where does that come from?

You can call.

Are you a person of faith, for instance?

I am, I mean, I love what Jung said Jung was said, do you believe in God?

And he said, no, I know.

I think what I jumped into with some level of knowing.

And it's not like knowing.

Like you put it in your pocket and take it to the bank.

It's knowing like you've come to depend on it.

So completely that it it it doesn't fail.

It carries your life in a way that was unimaginable.

So I know the path I'm on is alive and well, and carries me in a way that has been miraculous to let it all go, to have absolutely nothing, and to be in my beautiful Whidbey Island home doing art again with my beautiful wife, Marilyn.

It was an incredible gift.

There's you know, Joseph Campbell talks about the word, sacrifice, which means to make sacred.

You know, you you put what you love on the altar, whatever that altar is, and it is sanctified and returned.

And I feel like everything I gave up, including art, came back a hundred fold.

And and ironically, I became more known as an artist for destroying my art than I ever did for creating it.

Yeah, there's the paradox.

You talked about this, and you mentioned trying to paint your way to heaven when you were young in the past.

And it seems like to me, just in looking at your art, you've been negotiating life and death for a long time.

You've been.

There's a tension here that I can sense in.

You've been negotiating that.

What answers?

If you come to about your purpose on earth and whether you have the path to heaven that you've talked about, how does your art and again, you mentioned this, that you've called a false god figure into that.

I mean, do you, do you do you know your destiny, or do you feel like you have insight into that?

What does it left you with?

Well, I think the only freedom is to face our fears.

And that fear to all of us, metaphorically, is indistinguishable from our fear of death because it's the loss of identity.

It's the thing I walked into the loss of of, you know, the thing that the world says, what a good boy are you?

You can do this.

And you know, to let go of all that and to enter that kind of a void when one learns that there is a path through it that is so completely a gift and so completely trustworthy in a way that all of our, you know, our finagling in life and, and strategic arrangements cannot compare with.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I, I definitely pick up you you having faith in a, in a I, it sounds to me like in a higher power and a greater force and opening yourself up to that and trusting that seeing the results as being miraculous.

Yeah.

That's, that's that's interesting.

And it's essentially who we are.

You know, it's it's it's we all have a sense of hope.

You know, if we win the lottery, we feel lucky.

We call it lucky.

We all have a sense of amazing possibility.

And I think that possibility is our birthright.

And if we can open up to it, doesn't matter what we call it.

It's not a religion.

It's it's, it's something that includes it all.

And I think, you know, that's what is our birthright.

So what is what is that thing?

I still don't know how to fully define it all.

I know it, it is.

It is much more than anything in this world.

You know, art is in the eye of the beholder.

I look at your work in the sculptures, in the cabinet cabinets, in the coffins.

And I see, I see it being dark and kind of death centric.

And again, that's in the eye of the beholder.

That's a good view.

Does that put people off?

And contrary to that, what do you think it is that also turns people on or brings people into your what is what are how do you see that that juxtaposition that you deal with a lot and opposites and juxtaposition.

Yeah, definitely two views people could have because what I think is I have the place I have arrived within myself is the place beyond, in a sense, beyond both.

But, you know, the bhagavad-gita says goodness is the final obstacle to God.

It's a it's a quote.

And I think that that duality is something we all struggle with.

And it's neither there's something larger than both.

And what I see in I see it in retrospect, you know, my earlier box like mechanical, whimsical figures are very coffin like.

And yet they dispense gifts.

They do whimsical things, they play music.

They have one has a steam engine.

And so it's almost like, I think what I see again, in retrospect, you face the thing that scares you the most and what you find there is unseen joy.

And if we avoid those difficult places, it's like our life is about running away from our fear.

And there's no freedom in that.

Because the moment we think we've buffeted ourselves completely, it comes in sideways and broadside.

Is that.

And I think the only freedom is to turn into those spooky places.

So yeah, that my art is a little bit spooky, but it's also ridiculously funny and it's all there, you know?

Yeah, but I get the value.

Was you holding that, looking at that, confronting it is the only way to really maybe overcome that fear and to, take your experience in another direction.

Yes.

And live the inspiration because then what you tap into is an inspired possibility at every given moment, whether it's a one on one conversation with another human being, whether it's looking at the girl behind the counter at the supermarket and seeing a moment of sadness and somehow connecting what you're always talking after that sort of letting go and renewal is the ability to tap that inspiration everywhere.

And I don't think we ever master it, but I think we can get a whole lot better at it.

And I think when it becomes a priority instead of, you know, the things that we chase after, like Ramakrishna says, sex and gold, you know, most of us are chasing after I once we chase after the inspiration, once we know where the priority is, it really can become a way of life.

And there's no better life because we go into a moment not knowing and we know something's there that can flip everything on its head, which is not about the duality anymore.

It's not about those two polarities that we spoke of.

It's about something a third body coming in, which is larger than both.

And it it, it often turns our own inner thinking upside down.

And again, people of faith would describe that as having a God, an experience with a creator.

Yes.

Do you offer an experience with our creator or.

No, you're not quite there on that.

Help me interpret what I'm seeing with you.

Yes, yes.

Well, you know, God has gotten such a bad rap in a certain way in the world.

I feel like we are the thing.

We can open and our become.

We can become the thing we love about inspiration, about feeling most alive.

We can become that.

Call it God.

It's a good word.

It's fine with me and and, you know, and my conversation all the time, even in the face of someone else's suffering, is a kind of embodied prayer.

I'm always talking to that.

You might call it God.

It's fine to go, but my conversation is always looking for that quantum leap in each given moment with what I am doing, whether it's doing art, whether it is talking with my wife and having a conversation, whether it's being with somebody who is suffering, I feel like it's it's an all possibilities.

And whereas before it used to just be in the studio, painting in the studio was like a laboratory.

It was a safe little place to do what I do confront the fear of a blank canvas.

And sometimes you you'd find some kind of inspiration and you and you would, you know, achieve something.

But mostly you didn't.

And I think when life becomes that inspiration, it's everywhere.

And that and we tend to limit it.

We limit it to our family, to our moneymaking schemes, to whatever it is we believe in, when it's everywhere, in all things, and we have to go about it more with unknowing what the next moment is going to be about than with knowing.

It's interesting to I look at some of your work and to me it seems like it references or in discusses in some way and the possibility of an afterlife.

You, you and your wife have a headstone that you've already created for yourselves where it talks about the worms rejoice, but the spirit soars.

So to me that implies, an attitude or a thought that maybe is represented in your right of an afterlife, of a soaring spirit, of something that occurs once you're under that headstone.

Talk about how do you interpret, how do you want us to interpret that?

Because I've been kind of wrestling with my own view of what that means.

Well, I will first say, I don't know about that, but I will also say everything I walked into that looked like death, that sort of rang this.

If you do this, if you walk into this, you will die.

Yeah.

Artistically or spirits.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

And everything I walked into that scared me the most.

Had the most life behind it.

That's all I know about this world, walking into that metaphorical death experience.

And I cannot believe that when we drop the body, it's going to be any different.

But I have no idea.

I mean, I have I fair enough.

Fair?

Fair enough.

Talk a little bit.

You talked about painting and, and you moved into, I guess I'd call them sculptures for a lack of a better word.

But you had to do so much skills development in this time, too.

Maybe it was in your 15 year sojourn.

Maybe it was when you got back to the island.

Talk a little bit about the actual hands on skills piece you had to do for merely two dimensional painting, to carving, to making things.

The some of these mechanisms that are in some of your art, it wasn't you couldn't you couldn't go back to the old playbook.

Well, it just expanded in a I feel like the second half of the second wind, you might say, was, was a kind of it was a renewal of something else.

It was the celebratory side of life.

It was it was fun.

It was exploring.

It was expanding.

And I come from a line of inventors.

My my great grandfather had a shop called the Diamond Factory, where they actually made the gauges for Lindbergh's, plane.

And, you know, it was kind of like.

So I come from a line of inventors of machinists, and I didn't study any of that, but it comes so second nature to me.

And I always use found motors and things that I find that to recycle or the thrift store.

And so that's part of the mechanics of it.

But it's been a celebratory, happy return before I was lost.

You know, I grew up in a poor neighborhood where we were the minority in a certain way, even in the neighborhood.

So the world, you know, when I got to when I was starting to get acknowledged as an artist, it became such an identity.

And that's where it became a false god.

And then but and so I was desperately holding on to that.

I was extremely driven.

I have a, I created a huge body of work which is in Edwin, which is in my new book.

It's all there now.

And, and that was a desperate business.

It was driven, it was willful, it was strategic.

It was all the things the world need.

It says you should be about.

Yeah.

And it was a lie.

And I could not live the lie any longer.

Now it's celebratory and that is a huge difference.

It's fun.

It's happy.

I want to talk about your influences.

And again, this is my observations.

Take them with the grain of salt.

They should be taken with as a as a as a viewer of art.

I see African in there.

I see some steampunk in there.

Yes.

Definitely medieval Christian.

Yeah.

Little shamanistic or even Native American possibly.

And alchemy is one of the terms that is used frequently to describe your work.

Your book, A Second Wind, and some of the other printed pieces talk about alchemy.

That's a word that comes bubbling up to the surface.

Frequently talking about your work.

Talk about that alchemy.

What are your influences?

Am I seeing the right things or am I out of my mind?

Talk about what informs your work.

Well, you know alchemy.

Jung worked.

Jung, Carl Jung said at the end of his life, if I knew the depths of my exploration in alchemy, it's the Western spiritual tradition.

And he says, I would have been doing it all along at some level.

So alchemy is exactly what we are.

Earlier conversation talking about the duality, the, you know, the opposites, the end goal of alchemy is the conjunction, which is the union of opposites, which again, it's that emergent third body which is larger than both.

That's the goal of alchemy to have to have the they, you know, calling it the sacred marriage within.

You know, we have it within.

We can have it without.

And that makes a solid physical marriage in the world and a marriage within oneself.

So that, of course, alchemy, having studied Jung a lot and love Jung for his wild, wild exploration, it's certainly an influence.

But you know, there were also artists who influenced it, like Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who, you know, who quit painting and and decided to play chess for the rest of his life.

So, I mean, what is it about getting to the end game of your I love what the Paramahansa Yogananda says to set out on any holy purpose which our lives are, whatever you want to call him.

It's a holy purpose to set out on any holy purpose, and to die along the way is to succeed, to metaphorically die.

I think the end game is always a kind of metaphorical death and renewal.

So if we take the thing, we love to the max, we're going to have to grow larger than that willful strategic creation.

And that's alchemy.

Alchemy is that larger thing.

And it's not just alchemy, it's in every spiritual tradition.

Talk a little bit about archetypes.

I see some of that in your work, too.

You know, Madonna figures, devil figures or demon teaming type figures, again, with these opposites, but also from, you know, long traditions in many cultures that kind of bubble up and appear in your work, and all the characters to, correct me if I'm wrong, seem to be female.

So talk a little bit about maybe the female archetypes that have followed us up from pre-history all the way into, you know, current art, or at least, you know, the, the Western tradition in terms of, I see some pre-Christian, and Christian imagery in your this alchemy again, kind of comes through.

But talk a little bit about why would the female form quite a bit and and this the presence of archetypes that we kind of recognize from a number of different things.

Yes.

Well, the archetypes emerge naturally with what we do.

I mean, it's sort of the poetic, you know, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time comes through.

I love what the young Ian Marion Woodman says that she said she said kind of outrageously the the quote Second coming is the emergent feminine.

You know, in a certain way the masculine.

There are cycles in our journey on the planet.

The masculine, the patriarch has run its gamut.

It's it's sort of at the end game.

We're seeing the worst of it now in our country, where, you know, it's become about raw wanting of things and advantages and so the emergent feminine, it's only natural when something reaches its peak and it's begins to go to seed, that the next level of understanding comes through.

And I believe not that I strategically arranged this way, but those feminine figures emerged out of the spirit of the time, the zeitgeist.

I feel they're larger than me.

I don't sit there thinking I'm going to do a female figure.

I think it just shows up.

You know, you start with a three foot wide tree and you end up with a female figure doing interesting things.

I feel like it.

Again, speaking of that embodied prayer, that's what emerges when you're asking what is like, what is our journey about right here and now?

It's different from what it may have been a hundred years ago.

There's something new emerging.

We can participate in that emergence.

It's feminine talk.

And I and I would argue, too, that maybe the feminine might predate the masculine.

I mean, these oh, of course that is true.

Yeah.

So I mean, you know, we can we can keep going into the Wayback machine too.

But I want to take this last 60s here, for a little naked self-promotion talk about your book, A Second Wind.

Where can people learn more, find out more?

Can they come to wing the island and see your work?

Talk a little bit about how people can access you.

Yes.

Well, our website is Hands of alchemy.com.

My first book is The Inspired Heart An Artist Journey of Transformation by Sentient Publications, and my new book is A Second Wind, and that's also by Sentient Publications.

And there there are videos, you know, the parabola originally parabola magazine video is on YouTube that you can see and in the hands of alchemy that is called and yes, people come all the time.

I mean, I have all my work, all my sculptures are in the gallery.

There are over 30 of them.

It's 1000 square foot space.

Many people come and, you know, my wife does does, works with people's journeys in the space as well.

So I mean, it's it's all available, I would say.

But don't bring a checkbook.

Right.

Don't bring a checkbook.

I mean, that's it.

By art, your work is not for sale, correct?

That is correct.

Okay.

In fact, if I, if I find the right home, it will be given.

Jerry, thanks so much for coming to northwest now.

Great conversation.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate being here.

I appreciate you and all your crew for for doing this Consuming art is a lot like consuming media should be the bottom line.

If you never experience things that challenge your worldview or disturb you a little.

Some might argue that you're doing it wrong.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

You can find this program on the web at kbtc.org.

Stream it through the PBS app or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

That's going to do it for this edition of northwest.

Now until next time, I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.

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