1. Wesley Conrad Wehr was an American paleontologist and artist best known for his studies of Cenozoic fossil floras in western North America, the Stonerose Interpretive Center, and as a part of the Northwest School of art.
16 Facts About Wesley Wehr
1. 2.
Wesley Wehr was born as the only child of Conrad J Wehr and Ingeborg Wehr, in Everett, Washington on April 17,1929.
3.
Wesley Wehr graduated the University of Washington in 1952 with a Bachelor of Arts and a recipient of the Lorraine Decker Campbell Award for original composition, then continued on to his Master of Arts in 1954.
4.
However after a comment by Theodore Roethke, Wesley Wehr became self-conscious of his musical works and stopped composing feeling that "The life went out of it".
5.
Wesley Wehr started out studying music composition, and later expanded to poetry classes with Roethke in his senior year of university.
6.
Wesley Wehr first began painting in 1960, being inspired by pots of paint and a box of Crayola crayons over the Christmas holidays.
7.
Wesley Wehr was a student of the noted poet Elizabeth Bishop in 1953, and in 1967 she wrote a gallery note for a showing of Wesley Wehr's paintings.
8.
Bishop notes that Wesley Wehr was a collector of natural objects such as agates, amber, and fossils.
9.
Wesley Wehr noted that Wehr's works possessed a "chilling sensation of time and space".
10.
Wesley Wehr met the future chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Kirk Johnson, when Johnson was in his early teens.
11.
Wesley Wehr continued his love of petrified wood through correspondence with George Beck of Central Washington University.
12.
In 1976, Wesley Wehr was appointed as an affiliate curator of paleobotany at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
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Wesley Wehr maintained this position for the rest of his life.
14.
Wesley Wehr coauthored several technical scientific papers with paleobotanical colleagues.
15.
Similar to Wehr were Beck, who was an accomplished musician, and V Standish Mallory who trained in his early life as a composer and musician.
16.
Five days before his 75th birthday, Wesley Wehr suffered a series of heart attacks and died on April 12,2004.