Cover Photo: Bluster and Calm

Susan Bennerstrom’s piece Bluster and Calm is featured on the cover of Bellingham Review Issue 82.

Susan Bennerstrom:

I spent the pandemic year of 2020 sequestered in my studio, thinking about and feeling the need for light and space. I loved the solitude and lack of interruptions at the same time that I worried and feared for my fellow human beings, so many of whom were suffering in ways I could barely imagine. “Bluster and Calm” is a visual representation of those wildly divergent states of mind. The painting is based on a perfectly ordinary institutional space in one of Western Washington University’s newer academic buildings. I enlarged the window and substituted a threatening sky and a limitless horizon for the existing view of the parking lot and forest. In spite of palpable menace, peace and protection are always available in some form.

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Susan Bennerstrom has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, and has received a number of awards, including an Artist Trust SOLA Award, a Pollock-Krasner Award, a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship, a Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award, and three Artist Trust GAP Awards. WWU’s Western Foundation has established The Bennerstrom Prize, a scholarship given each spring to an outstanding art student. Her work is included in the collections of St. Joseph Hospital, Virginia Mason Hospital, Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art (Ireland), Western Washington University, and University of Washington Medical Center.