Helping artist Gendron Jensen

Artist Gendron Jensen lost his extraordinary ability to draw the bones of nature’s wild creatures when ‘essential tremors’ in his hands took over. A stroke followed. Now, ironically, inoperable bone cancer in his own scapula has been metastasizing into his lungs. Medical bills are mounting quickly.  Like many in this country, his insurance does not begin to cover the  expenses already incurred from tests and treatment - and life’s inevitable extraneous expenses - while struggling with cancer. 

Now almost 80, Gendron has had an unusual journey as an artist.  For more than half a century, he has focused exclusively on one of nature’s most evocative and yet easily overlooked relics: wild animal bones he’s found while hiking the north woods of Minnesota or the extensive lands near his adopted home outside Taos, New Mexico. He draws in graphite - usually with a simple school pencil - on sheets of paper, sometimes as tall as seven feet, making meticulous renderings of the intricate infrastructures of wildlife, some of them road kill he’s come across in his wanderings.  His drawings and almost 30 lithographic projects are in numerous museums in the country including most recently the Whitney Museum of American Art.
At the age of 19, the artist entered a monastery in southeastern Wisconsin but stopped short of taking his vows and enlisted in the navy. Following a nervous breakdown, he returned to the monastery and spent the next four years working in the print shop and living in the beekeeping house. When he was 26, he began drawing. 

From 1970 to ’86, during what Jensen calls his “burning years,” he continued to live in the north woods, doing odd jobs, hauling garbage, building houses, or working in the grocery store. “I slowly began more and more to draw all the time.” He established his first “bone room” in the family farmhouse in Grand Rapids, MN, and still keeps shelf upon shelf of bones in the studio he calls the “ossorium” in his home in Vadito, NM.
In 1987, while she was living in Santa Fe, Jensen met artist Christine Taylor Patten (whose 1,000 meticulously crafted crow-quill ink 'micro' drawings together with one huge ‘macro’ were singled out for high praise at the 2015 Istanbul Biennial). Their courtship took place mostly via the mail, as they sent more than 100 letters back and forth, including photos of works in progress. They were married in August, 1987.
Jensen had his first gallery show in Chicago in 1972 and slowly began to attract more attention with exhibitions in Albuquerque, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and Geneva. Spring of 2010 marked his first New York show at Knoedler Galleries.
In 2013, filmmaker Kristian Berg directed and produced “Poustinia” (from a word meaning “spiritual grounding”) about Jensen’s life and work. The award-winning documentary short www.bonemanfilm.com (available on iTunes)
vividly captures the artist’s process and deeply spiritual connection with his subjects, (“When I find them,” he says of the bones, “I feel this tingling in my hands.”) The film also offers an affecting glimpse into the collaboration between an artist and printmaker—in Jensen’s case, Tamarind Press in Albuquerque, NM, where he’s produced many of his lithographs. Now, he is orally documenting his life out in nature.  
His pencil drawings & stone lithographs, and her ink drawings, small and large, are available for sale.  Those of us who love him—artists, collectors, admirers, and friends—thank you for whatever help you can offer Gendron.