Gendron Jensen: Series on Resurrection in Nature

For more than forty years Gendron Jensen, a largely self-taught artist now living in New Mexico, has obsessively and lovingly transformed found relics into wakeful images of uncommon beauty. 

A Wisconsin native, Jensen spent his childhood on his family’s farm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. As a young man Jensen entered the novitiate at Saint Benedict's Abbey in Benet Lake, WI. He would eventually work in the monastery’s print shop, and develop a passion for drawing during long walks in the natural environment surrounding the Abbey. 

The Series on Resurrection in Nature, Jensen’s first body of drawings, consists of sixteen 60 x 72” finely detailed graphite drawings of small natural phenomena such as a black walnut shell, a dragonfly wing, and a raccoon skull. Jensen’s masterful drawings bring large-scale grandeur to some of nature’s smallest treasures, and invite us to join him in meditating upon the inner life that he perceives in nature’s many forms.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.