Alex Wind, 1948-2006

BLACKSBURG -- Christiansburg artist Alex Wind was known for her over-the-top creativity and generosity.

If you had asked Wind to make you a sign advertising your Celtic festival, as Glade Church pastor Kelly Sisson did recently, Wind would have assembled a replica of Stonehenge on your lawn.

If you asked Wind to salvage some of your broken pottery, as Sisson did two years ago when dozens of her handmade pots were destroyed in an accident, Wind would have fashioned a 50-pound mosaic to hang on your wall.

And friends and family say even after her death Dec. 17 at age 58, she will continue to touch the community through her artwork.

In an 2004 interview about the Joy mosaic, the piece she created from Sisson's pots, Wind said she immediately got a vision of a landscape depicting sky and mountains with the word joy imbedded in its center.

Wind knew something about brokenness when she made the piece. She had recently lost an eye to melanoma and, consequently, also lost her job as a rural postal carrier.

At the time, Wind characterized her struggles this way: "People don't just stumble onto joy. You have to work on an understanding of what's good in your life."

That year the mosaic was the focus of the Glade Church's Lent observance.

This Christmas it will hang over the altar as parishioners celebrate the coming of their savior and the power of hope.

Wind made a name for herself in local art circles when she did a life-size black Madonna and child sculpture while finishing her master of fine arts degree at Radford University, husband Paul Boody said.

Her inspiration for that piece came on a trip to Poland, where light streaming in through the window of a little chapel illuminated a black Madonna, Boody said.

She was drawn to religion only late in her life, when she found Glade Church in Blacksburg, possibly the only church in the area to incorporate an art gallery into its sacraments.

Wind eventually joined the choir and sometimes participated in the liturgy.

When reading Scripture during worship, Wind, a strong feminist, instinctively changed the pronouns of the text from male to female, Sisson said.

That strong personality, coupled with her matter-of-fact response to her disease, inspired those around her.

"I've never met anyone who fought cancer like she did," Sisson said. "She did everything to learn, to meet other people, to problem-solve with her doctors. She wanted honesty and didn't want it masked in any way."

When talking to other people about her disease, Sisson said, Wind often said matter-of-factly that she was dying, then added, "But I'm not dead yet."

It was the cancer that eventually killed Wind. But not before she traveled and spent time with her daughter, Chandra Windpainter, and 5-year-old granddaughter, Kaya.

"She was the strongest person I've ever known," Windpainter said.

In fact, Wind almost died in a car wreck in 1991 while working her mail route in Radford. The call from the hospital "was one of the worst moments of my life," Boody said.

Wind's head went through the windshield. She was out of work for four months. But she survived and went on to lead a rich life for the next 15 years.

"It's been a wonderful journey since then," Boody said.

People think the cancer "is cruel and her life was cut short. But you have to look at the whole picture," he said. "Her involvement in art, getting a master's degree -- those were all gifts that came after the accident."

Shortly after the New Year's holiday, the Glade Church Fine Arts Gallery plans a memorial art show featuring Wind's work.