August 19, 2004
Campus friends remember the inimitable Wes Wehr
A few of Wes Wehr’s works of art hang in a special place in the Henry Art Gallery these days — compact pieces with meticulously layered colors that hint at vast spaces where the earth meets the sky.
The images seem to reflect both the outward and inward themes that attracted this talented man, who died at 74 on April 12 — the rich landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, and the secret world of paleobotanical history that awaits discovery inside fossilized rock.
The rumpled, eccentric Wehr played various roles in the UW community. He was an artist, writer, musician and composer. But officially, he was affiliate curator of paleobotany at the Burke Museum, a voluntary position in which he flourished.
His seemed a life of odd contradictions. Wehr appeared inward and shy, but paid close attention to his surroundings and used social charms when he needed them. He wrote boldly to the brightest lights of his time, and many replied. He spoke quietly but to the right people, and they listened — whether he was recommending art to an exhibitor, stoking an artist’s reputation or finding the right recipient for a freshly unearthed fossil.
Wehr lived in chaotic clutter that might have seemed charming to some, squalid to others. He was non-materialistic, but knew the value of things. He shopped at thrift stores, but the wealth of art that passed through his hands increased the collections of many a museum. He was polite, but didn’t suffer foolishness lightly. He knew what he wanted from people and often pressed hard to get it, but rarely for his own benefit.
Randy James, a Seattle artist and friend of Wehr’s since the early 1980s, said Wehr was gregarious, helpful and had “old-style manners.” James said, “He was very thoughtful about how people would feel about things. He didn’t like disparaging others.” He also appreciated humor and whimsy, in life and in work.
James said Wehr had a powerful, if low-key talent for promotion, and influential people in the arts listened. A casual introduction one day resulted in an exhibit for James, who said, “In art, you have to know the right people, but when you do meet the right people, you’d better have a good story and you better have the work to support it.”
Wehr’s small corner desk in the Burke Museum has long since been cleared out, his personal effects removed by friends. But his memory remains.
“I was very fond of Wes Wehr,” said Ron Eng, the museum’s geology collections manager. “He was such a real person — he was concerned about people and showed it.” He said Wehr read people well and decided quickly — sometimes finally and even abruptly — about them. “He believed he would not make a mistake about someone.”
But he also gave people credit, Eng said — sometimes more than they deserved. “He almost always assumed that if he knew something, that everyone else knew it … and in most cases it wasn’t true, because he knew a lot, and understood a lot.”
Eng said Wehr had powerful networking skills, and worked the phone to achieve his aims. Wehr was not educated as a scientist, but Eng said “he had a trained eye — and if he found something he’d best know to whom to send it.” An example is Wehr’s now well-known discovery of fossils around Republic, Wash. “He was instrumental in making it known as a paleobotanical locality,” Eng said.
In 2003, Wehr was proud to be honored by the Paleontological Society for outstanding achievement that year by amateurs. One nominator lauded him as “a regional treasure and a credit to our profession.” No less of an honor is the fact that fellow paleobotanists over the years have named a half-dozen or more new fossil species after this natural-born discoverer.
People throughout the Northwest art world became accustomed to his voice on the other end of the line.
“He’d call me once or twice a day,” said Judy Sourakli, curator of collections at the Henry and a friend of Wehr’s for years. “He’d say, ‘Wes here. I just wanted to tell you about …’”
Gretchen Van Meter, Wehr’s book editor at University Press, was another of his near-daily calls. “He’d call and say, ‘Oh! Gretchen, I have another thought…’” And when he was finished, “he didn’t even say goodbye, just ‘click.’ He always did give me a chance to talk, but not to say goodbye!” she said with a laugh.
Sourakli said Wehr was always looking to place works of art. She said he’d call collectors and gently instruct them to donate certain pieces to museums he’d name — and sooner or later, they usually complied.
She said she would call Wehr to get answers to obscure questions posed of her. “He was a conduit for questions about Northwest art,” she said. “He knew the cast of characters.”
Sourakli and Eng also knew, however, that the usually even-tempered Wehr could harden or grow impatient when met with resistance, or worse, incompetence. His attention flagged when his own goals were not in play. Sourakli said, smiling, “The conversation went fine as long as you were talking about what he wanted to talk about.”
But Wehr’s loyalty to the collections at both UW museums was constant. “He was serious about filling in blanks in the collection,” Sourakli said. He donated books too, most about artist Mark Tobey, his friend. Each volume was thoroughly annotated by Wehr with hand-written comments along the margins.
Liz Nesbitt, curator of palentology at the Burke and a friend of Wehr’s for the last 10 years, said she encouraged him in his scientific work, always hoping to get his knowledge down on paper. But it was clear the Burke was not his only love.
“There were a lot of things pulling at Wes,” Nesbitt said. “It’s easy for us, we are just academics, but someone like Wes, he was an artist and he was a social person.” And yet, Nesbitt admitted, others probably wished for his art to trump his scientific work. “He was very dedicated to science,” she said. “This was not a frivolous thing for him.”
Wes Wehr wrote in his memoirs, The Eighth Lively Art and The Accidental Collector, about life among not-yet-famous artists in the University District of the 1950s, and of his transitions from composing music to art to paleobotany as the decades passed. But his intellectual pursuits seemed cumulative rather that serial — friends say he seemed to gain knowledge and context as he went, rather than leaving one pursuit behind completely for another.
The paradoxical blending of large and small, of the macro and the micro worlds, seemed as much a theme in Wehr’s art as in his humble lifestyle. “Since he was a child he collected agates and minerals and things,” said Randy James. “He was interested in the micro world, so he just kind of did small pieces that looked like they might have been sliced from a stone, but also looked like a horizon, too.”
Wehr made an oblique reference to recognizing his mortality in The Accidental Collector, and friends noted a vague diminishing of his vigor toward the end of his life. But they said he didn’t speak openly of feeling ill, and disliked the humilities of being a medical patient.
Sourakli spoke warmly about Wehr’s late-life victory lap of graceful memoirs and local celebrity, saying he enjoyed the time immensely. “He went from being a fly on the wall,” she said. “He was taking wings.” He had no degree in paleobotany and no salary at the Burke, she said with feeling, “And look at what he did — I mean look at what he persevered and did!”
Wehr’s friends say it’s still hard, months after his sudden death, to think of him as gone. His seemingly unchanging presence around the campus through the years lent him a timeless quality, making him seem as permanent, expected a part of campus as the fossil collections and art galleries he loved.
“We thought he’d be around forever,” said Eng. Nesbitt said, “I still find that walking past his door is the saddest thing — we miss him.” James said he hopes the art community will remember Wehr “as a really important champion of the lesser-known artist, and “the conscience of the Northwest art scene.”
Van Meter said the last time she talked with Wehr he described his plan to liven up a book reading. He’d pretend to leave his notes at home, she said, then ask for page numbers to be called out. After checking each page, he’d say, “Oh, no! We can’t read this!” or “Oh, that is beyond the pale! Another number, please!” The third time would be the charm, she said.
“And he said, ‘You know, they are going to go rushing to the shelves!’ And I laughed, and he laughed, and then bonk, the phone was down.”
