Kesler Woodward

A New Look

A quick note to comment on the new look for the weblog.  I realized I had grown tired of the bright green background and same old look, so decided to go for a new, cleaner design with the kind of white background that I generally prefer for my paintings.  Realized, too, as I looked at the templates available on Typepad, that I could use one of my paintings for a banner. The new banner shows a portion of one of my paintings of the Alaska Range from the Denali Highway, Denali Highway, September.  The painting belongs to Morris Communications Company, which has one of the largest collections of my work, and hangs in their corporate office in Augusta, Georgia.  Here's an image of the whole painting: 

 

Denali Highway September

©Kesler Woodward 2000   Oil on canvas   36" x 90"

I'll have images of new work up soon, along with professional photos of the Canopy mosaic at the Anchorage International Airport.  I'm currently a couple of weeks' work into another painting looking up through the trees--this one from the forest near Smith Lake in the 2000 acre arboretum adjoining the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. And working on a proposal for a large project for Denali Elementary here in Fairbanks, where I've read to the same kindergarten class every Wednesday morning I've been in town for eighteen years. 

 

A Busy September

Late August and all of September were exceptionally busy for me, not only working in the studio, but traveling for work and exhibitions from Anchorage, Alaska to Aiken, South Carolina. As I indicated in my last post, the installation of Canopy, the mosaics in the Anchorage International Airport, was completed in mid-September, but just as the final sections of mosaic on the column were being installed, Missy and I had to fly to South Carolina for an exhibition of my work at the Aiken Center for the Arts.

  

This was an unusual show, organized by one of my high school classmates, Linda Prior Hunley (on the right in the photo), on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of our high school graduation.  Along with my work, it included a number of Linda's extraordinarily beautiful, large-scale charcoal drawings based on bones and other natural forms, and the abstract bronze sculptures of another 1969 classmate, Esther Randall (on the left in the photo), who currently teaches in the Art Department at Eastern Kentucky University. Despite the lack of any obvious reason for our combination other than our high school graduating year, our work was surprisingly complementary. Esther's tall, thin, elegant sculptures punctuated the spaces between panels of my work and occupied the center of the gallery space in a dense grouping, and my brightly colored paintings and Linda's similarly large, but richly monochromatic drawings faced one another across the beautiful old wood floors of the downtown Aiken art center. 

It was a huge treat for me, not only showing with artists whose work I admired, but for the first time in the town where I was born and grew up. My family has lived within miles of the farm I grew up on since well before the Revolutionary War, and my father, both my brothers and their families, and many cousins are still nearby, so we get back often, but I have had almost no contact with anyone in my high school class in forty years, most of it living in the extreme opposite corner of the continent in Alaska. Moreover, in high school I was strictly interested in math and science, and making art had never crossed my mind. So it was a surprise to many of my classmates who attended the exhibition reception or the 40th class reunion, held in the same space a couple of days later, that I had made a career in art. 

Thanks to the flexibility and cooperation of the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia and its director Kevin Grogan, the Aiken Center for the Arts Director Kristin Brown, and Linda Hunley's willingness to make all the arrangements and transport them, I was able to include in the exhibit two of my large Southern paintings from the Morris Museum's permanent collection. To go along with those two substantial works, I sent eight smaller, new paintings--six Southern scenes and two images from Denali National Park in Alaska. The new Southern scenes included longleaf pine canopies from Aiken's Hitchcock Woods and Congaree National Park (near Columbia, South Carolina), a view of the fall forest colors reflected in a quiet cove on nearby Lake Murray where my father lives, and the marvelous tunnel of ancient live oak trees that extends for more than a quarter mile along South Boundary Avenue in Aiken. 

Above: Harbor Watch, Lake Murray Acrylic on paper, 6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image) 17" x 20" (framed)

Left: South Boundary Acrylic on paper, 6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image) 17" x 20" (framed) 

It was kind of surreal, working with the craftsmen from Munich on the final grouting of the mosaic column in the Anchorage International Airport until just an hour or so before Missy and I caught an all-night flight to South Carolina, arriving just hours before the reception for this exhibition in a place so different in every way. But it was a great delight to show my work to friends and family in my home town, to see and visit with classmates I haven't seen in forty years, and to remember that no matter how firmly I identify myself as Alaskan and am tied to this place, I will always be a Southerner as well.

Portraits

 Chris and Margie Jay Oil pastel on paper, 28" x 40" (image) 36" x 48" (framed)

As if the mix of installing enormous mosaics of the boreal forest in the Anchorage International Airport and exhibiting watercolors of longleaf pines and live oaks in South Carolina weren't diverse enough, my other major activity in September was completion of two large portrait commissions. Chris and Margie Jay are an Anchorage couple that I'd never met before they asked me this spring to work on their double portrait, but in the course of a day's visit with them in Fairbanks and corresponding with them over the months during which I was working on their images, I feel like we became friends.

It was an interesting and different challenge for me, doing as a commission portraits of people I hadn't met before. I have written here about how anxiety-provoking commissions are for me--having, instead of potentially the whole world as an audience, needing to please only one collector, somewhere, an audience of one (or in this case, two).  Portraits, as anyone who has ever done one for someone else can attest, are even more fraught.  But I was excited as I watched their images come to life in oil pastels on my large sheet of heavyweight paper.  

It still seems like a miracle to me, each time I do a portrait, the way the person's personality takes shape through the simple act of careful attention to his or her features. Clearly, who we are really is written in our faces, the set of our mouths and the light in our eyes, and though as I've said before, I couldn't possibly try to paint "personality" directly, it invariably emerges in the course of doing the work. 

 Twins Oil pastel on paper, 28" x 40" (image) 36" x 48" (framed)

I have looked forward for several years to painting a portrait of these twins--a commission from the husband of one of them.  They live in different cities, but as all the other twins I've known, are extremely close, very connected. Before I began work on this portrait, I had met them individually, but we had never been able to get together in the same place, so I had never seen them together.  Seen individually, they are nearly impossible for me to tell apart, but together, I know in a glance who is whom. I was very excited to see how their close similarities and yet significant differences would manifest themselves in my image of them.  

As with the portrait of Chris and Margie Jay, and as is generally true of all the portraits I've completed to my own satisfaction, I am happy with not just the likenesses, but the images as works of art. I don't know how many more portraits I will ever do.  I didn't expect to do any more after the first group of them I did several years ago, but I keep returning to them, from time to time.  But it is absolutely essential to me that any portrait I do be a work of art first, and a likeness second. The likeness is essential, but I want the same things from these pictures that I want from all of my paintings. A tension between abstraction and representation.  A focus on abstract marks, color, texture, and surface up close. A convincing, arresting representation from a distance. And a unique, personal point of view.

The scale of these images is important.  It's important to me that they be considerably larger than life size. As always, when I did these, I wished they could be even larger.  Even with two in a single image, they are about twice life size, and at 3 ft. by 4 ft., framed, they are pretty imposing on the wall. But that scale seems integral to how they work as paintings, and I hope that when people see them, they will be intrigued with them as works of art at least as much as they are by their likenesses.

Canopy - The Anchorage International Airport Mosaics

A quick note about the Anchorage International Airport mosaics that I've included so many images of in recent posts. The concourse where they are located is nearing completion and on November 1 from 2-4 p.m. there will be a public open house not just for our mosaics, but for the newly renovated concourse and all the new public artwork that has been installed in conjunction with that huge project.  More detailed information on the open house will be posted on the Alaska State Council on the Arts website in mid-October, but keep that date and time in mind.  I will post another brief reminder here on my website as soon as detailed information on the event from the Alaska State Council on the Arts is available. 

Canopy Column and Ceiling Mosaics Complete

Installation of the Canopy ceiling and column mosaics is finally complete, and work is nearly done on the new concourse where they reside at the Anchorage International Airport. 

In about a month, the huge wall that has separated the major B Concourse construction site from the C Concourse and the rest of the main terminal for two years will come down, and passengers will walk by our mosaic column and beneath the Canopy ceiling.  

Installation of the mosaic sections on the 9 1/2 ft. tall, 2 1/2 ft. diameter column was quick, in comparison with the huge mosaic above. It took Herbert, Daniel, and Erik only two days to install the column's mosaic sections. The ceiling has no grout separating its 750,000 or more individual, close-fitting tesserae. Because the column's surface is curved, however, slightly spreading the gap between adjoining pieces, and because it is touchable by passersby at ground level, it got a solid, dark gray grout. The darker lines between the pieces not only give it an even greater sense of solidity, but enhance its already somewhat more abstract design. 

From the start, our concept was to make the column intriguing from a distance, beckoning for closer investigation, but not a realistic "birch trunk." Our hope is that passengers will see this single mosaic column as they come out of the security screening area or head from their planes toward this junction of the two main concourses, and will want to examine it more closely. Only when they get near to it will the ceiling come into view, and we hope that the dramatic appearance of the forest canopy overhead will not only reveal the column's reference, but surprise and delight all who walk beneath it.

I took hundreds of photographs during the nine days I spent on site during the installation, and I have tried to give some sense here of the complex logistical process of installation itself, as well as the scale of the imagery and the richness and density of its surface. The images below show Herbert, Daniel, and Erik installing some of the last sections of column mosaic and beginning the grouting process.

What I have not been able to convey, I realize, is the overall impact of the piece, or how it looks as a whole. We have already begun work with a professional photographer who will document the finished artwork thoroughly, and who will "stitch" together digital images of the ceiling in order to show it in a single view with minimal distortion. 

When that is done, I will post some of those images here on the website. But believe me when I say that you'll have to walk through this terminal, approach the column from a distance, and have the ceiling suddenly loom overhead as you traverse the two-story, clerestory space to appreciate its full impact. 

A Busy Month

As exciting as the mosaic installation process has been, it's far from the only thing I've been working on in the last month. In my next post, I'll share some images of and comments on an exhibition of my work that just opened last week in South Carolina, and the two large double-portrait commissions that I've completed in the last six weeks.  

Here is a sneak preview of my work on view in September at the Aiken (South Carolina) Center for the Arts.

Mosaic Installation Continues

Yesterday afternoon Daniel installed the final section of ceiling mosaic on Canopy. We are more than two weeks into the installation process, and the monumental ceiling image is finally complete.  Over the next several days, Herbert, Daniel, and Erik will complete the final cleanup and touch-up work on the ceiling and install the mosaics on the 9 1/2 ft. tall, 2 1/2 ft. diameter column that will lead viewers' eyes to the panorama above. 

It's impossible for me to photograph the entire ceiling at once, so what I've posted here are some images that will, I hope, give you a sense of its scale and drama.  I'll try to put up a few images next week of the column, but I don't imagine that I'll be able to convey adequately a sense of the whole scene. We will have in a professional photographer with greater photographic skills and wider angle lenses, when not only our installation, but the concourse renovation itself, is complete, and I will post images of it then that I hope will do it more justice.

         

     

Erik, Herbert, and Daniel -- very tired after more than two weeks' work on the ceiling installation, but triumphant at having the last ceiling section in place.

Canopy - Installation Underway on Anchorage Airport Mosaics

I am excited to report that the installation of Canopy, the major mosaic ceiling and column for the Anchorage International Airport that I have been working on with Anchorage sculptor Sheila Wyne for more than two years, is underway. 

Sheila, our project partner Bruce Farnsworth, and I met on Monday morning with Glen Fuglestad, Department of Transportation Project Manager for the entire massive airport renovation. Joining us at Glen's office were Erik Breese, an Anchorage artist and skilled craftsman we'd hired to assist the mosaic installers from Munich, and the two master mosaicists themselves. Herbert Hahn and Daniel Heinkelein did virtually all of the fabrication of the mosaic itself, working steadily since last winter and putting in lots of overtime to have it here on time for installation.

Herbert and Daniel had scheduled two days of onsite planning and preparation before beginning to put mosaic on the ceiling, but thanks to Sheila's and Bruce's extraordinary efforts, coupled with those of the Mosaic department and Susanne Tarraf at Mayer of Munich in Germany, the two crates containing all the mosaic sections were through customs and awaiting us on site, along with scaffolding, tools, and everything needed to start work.

Herbert, who has been doing this kind of work for forty years, said he had never reached an installation site with things more ready, and within four hours of seeing the space for the first time, they were installing mosaic.

The packaging, shipping, and organization of the mosaic sections are logistical marvels in and of themselves. All the mosaic sections, as well as work clothes and a box of specialized tools, came in two large wooden crates. Each carefully padded cardboard box within the crates is numbered with the sections it contains, and is keyed to the overall map of entire ceiling image.

Erik mixes the glue and mortar to the right consistency and trowels a thin coat on the back of a section. Daniel or Herbert trowels a base of the same mix on the durarock-covered ceiling, and the section is pressed into place and pounded and kneaded with a rubber mallet to secure it seamlessly. The next piece repeats the process, snugging perfectly with the one before. 

            

As with everything Herbert and Daniel do, it looks easy when you watch them, but Sheila and I both know from having worked on the fabrication with Herbert in the studio in Munich that that is an illusion, built on his lifetime of practice. We feel again, as we did on our trips to Munich, lucky to be working with people who are the best in the world at what they do.

The rhythm of the process is occasionally broken by the need to cut out sections for the sprinkler heads in the ceiling and rebuild the mosaic piece by piece around them, to saw out the section of the image impinged upon by the beam that crosses the clerestory space, by the need for a different kind of scaffolding, or the breakdown and repair of the heavy duty drill used for mixing the cement...a host of little things. But thanks to Sheila's readiness to get and bring anything that's needed on a moment's notice, the extraordinary helpfulness of everyone from PCL--the prime contractor for the project--and all their subcontractors on the site, Glen Fuglestad's support, and Herbert and Daniel's flexibility and experience, the pace of progress is astonishing. 

Barring unforeseen complications, the ceiling may be done in another week, and work underway on the 9 1/2 ft. tall, 2 1/2 ft. diameter mosaic column that reaches from floor to ceiling near one corner of low side of the soaring space. When the construction barrier walls are removed and the newly remodeled areas opened in late September, the column will be visible nearby after coming through Security toward either of the two main concourses in this main terminal, and visible from nearly the entire length of both. 

The ceiling, in its 2-story, clerestory space, is located at the junction of those two main concourses, and becomes visible only as travelers approach and pass under it. Our hope is that the column, a somewhat more abstracted birch trunk image, will intrigue travelers as they approach it, but only become representational as the ceiling comes into view, suggesting a grand canopy of birch forest reaching into the sky. The scale of all this--both the imagery and the logistics--is pretty overwhelming to me. It's been a long time in the planning and execution, but it's all beginning to come together. Keep checking this site. I'll continue to post images and some brief, personal commentary as the installation nears completion.

 

Trees North and South

Birches and Sky

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Oil on canvas

24" x 36" (image)

25 1/2" x 37 1/2" (framed)

Again and again, I find myself painting trees. Birches and Sky is the latest in a series of paintings in which I look up through the canopy of the forest toward the sky. 

Sometimes I wish that I could include here time-lapse movies of certain paintings as they come to life. That is within my meager range of technological skills, but I've been reluctant to do it mainly because for so much of the time I'm working on any painting, it looks horrible to me. I'm loath to share the awkward stages through which every painting goes, and in the end I'd rather it seem as if the final image emerged effortlessly from my brush, dripped fully formed into my composition. One of the things I was aware of in this painting more than most, however, is how much time I spend adding richness and complexity to the surface after the image is essentially done, and how little of that shows when viewing it in reproduction.

If you had come to my studio and looked at Birches and Sky from the doorway, a day or even two before it was done, and then come back when I had just signed it and declared it finished, you would probably have wondered what I'd been doing in the interim.  The painting would look essentially the same from that distance, and photos of the full canvas taken before and after that final push would seem essentially identical, as well. The difference is only apparent when you are close enough to the painting to touch it. The last couple of days involve not so much fixing and adjusting (though there is some of that), but trying to provide rewards for the viewer who looks closely, patiently, for a long time. 

Most of those surprises--things like unexpected, tiny bits of contrasting color and texture that peek out from below parts of every surface, interrupted outlines, variegated hues within areas of dark, almost-blackness--happen in the course of the working process. But I always want more, so when everything is in place, when it looks just right from across the room, I continue to add a touch here, a dash there, paint over a small section with an almost identical color, allowing just the smallest bits of the underlying color to show in and around the new strokes...  

It's the fun part for me, this playing with surface and color once I'm past the anxiety of worrying whether the painting will ever work out, once I know that it's going to be o.k. Eventually, though, I reach a point at which I know I'm not making things better or richer, just different. I realize that I'm going round and round over the surface, having a grand time playing. I stop reluctantly, sign the painting, and move on.

Longleaf Canopy

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

28" x 20" (image)

37 1/2" x 29 1/2" (framed)

Moving on right now means getting to work on the Southern images that I will be showing in an exhibition in Aiken, South Carolina in September. As I mentioned in my last post, that show at the Aiken Center for the Arts will include work by my high school classmates from forty years ago, Linda Prior Hunley and Esther Randall.  Longleaf Canopy is based on one of the photographs Linda generously forwarded me shortly after we agreed to work toward this exhibition.  She was clearly right in thinking that an image looking up through the canopy of the Southern forest would intrigue me, and I have to admit that the venerable, magnificent longleaf pines of South Carolina have a hold on my spirit very similar to the birches of the circumpolar North.

I grew up hearing my father sing the praises of the longleaf pine--how it grows more slowly, especially in its early years, than the loblolly and other pines that have largely supplanted it in reforested Southern woods in the last couple of generations, but is more resistant to fire and disease, makes better lumber, and is an altogether superior tree.  The 90 million acres of longleaf pine forest at the time of European settlement in the South have dwindled to around 3 million acres today, but there has been a rebirth of interest in the preservation and expansion of the longleaf pine ecosystem.  I spent many wonderful days roaming the South Carolina pine woods with my lumberman grandfather as a child, and as a teenager exploring the sprawling Hitchcock Woods that enfold the city of Aiken, a 2000 acre tract that is one of the largest urban forests in the United States.

Sycamore Portrait

©Kesler Woodward 2006

Acrylic on paper

28" x 20" (image)

37 1/2" x 29 1/2" (framed)

I don't think I ever consciously realized until I began to paint them, years later, how much I noticed and loved individual trees when I was growing up.  I know that I never realized how diverse and rich the Southern woods were until I moved west and north and was surprised to find so many fewer species.  Aiken, where I grew up, has parks everywhere, and beautiful sycamore trees throughout.  Their bark, like birch bark, is individual and extraordinary.  

This is a tree on the grounds of the First Baptist Church in Aiken--one of several huge, beautiful sycamores which grace that city block downtown. When I go back to visit family there now, I visit these and other trees I grew up with, and I am grateful for what they did to enrich my appreciation for the natural world, even if I didn't know it at the time.

 

Missy

Missy

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Oil pastel on paper

40" x 28" (image)

Five years ago, I did a number of large--several times life size--oil pastel portraits of friends and family. As usual, I didn't set out to do a series at the time. I just took a notion one day to do a large portrait of our son Eli, and was shocked by how much presence it had, and how much of him there was in it when I completed it. Similar portraits of our niece and goddaughter Patricia and a number of longtime friends followed. I ended up showing the entire group of them in an exhibition at Well Street Art Gallery here in Fairbanks, and everyone seemed surprised and delighted by them. The Anchorage Museum purchased the one of Jean Flanagan Carlo, and the University of Alaska Museum acquired my self-portrait. Most of the rest went to the people depicted, purchased by themselves or, more often, their spouses.

I did a portrait of my wife Missy at the time. It was, I still think, a wonderful picture, as a work of art, but it was all-too-accurate in what it captured. It was done within weeks of the unexpected death of her youngest, much beloved sister Cornelia, and though Missy smiled gamely from the 4 times life size oil pastel image, it was ineffably sad. When our dear friend Dale Fairbanks saw it the first time, she burst into tears. It has been put away ever since. Periodically, I get it back out and look at it, and each time it nearly breaks my heart.

I've wanted to do another ever since then, to try to catch her in a happier state, and as our 38th wedding anniversary approached this year, I finally did. Doing it and seeing her reaction to it made this an exceptionally meaningful anniversary. 

I do these portraits in exactly the same way I do my much more frequent "birch portraits" of individual trees. From a distance, and especially in reproduction, they are very realistic. Up close, at the proximity from which I work on them, they are completely abstract--a welter of color, surface, painterly materials. As always, I want to have it both ways. As I've noted before, of course, likenesses of people are much less forgiving than portraits of trees. All kinds of liberties can be taken with the proportions, placement of features, and all else in images of tree trunks, and they still look like birch trees. The challenge with the people portraits is to maintain that same kind of tension between representation and abstraction, while working much more slowly and carefully to put all those abstract marks in exactly the right place. It continues to shock me, how vividly the personalities of the individuals inhabit these pictures. There's no way I could even try to paint their "personalities." I just have to observe very, very closely everything in their faces, and try to record it all as faithfully as I can, all the while focusing an equal amount of attention on the materials with which I'm working. If the sitters "inhabit" these pictures, it's because who they are shows in their faces, and as I've told people a number of times, I've learned something new about every person I've painted, in the course of doing their portraits.

Next month, a couple from Anchorage who are both celebrating milestone birthdays this year are going to come to Fairbanks so I can meet them, spend a little time with them, take photos of them in my studio, and work on portraits like this one, or even larger. It will be the first time I've painted people I don't know, and I'm very curious to see what that will be like. And another challenge that I'm especially looking forward to, eventually, is working on a double portrait for a friend in Denver. His wife is a twin. I know her, and have met her sister, though in a different city, and have never seen them together at the same time. Seen separately, I can't tell them apart. We haven't found a time yet to all get together in the same place, so I can look hard and make some studies, but that is a prospect that I'm eagerly looking forward to tackling.

Congaree Canopy

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image)

20" x 17" (framed)

This year, my Aiken (South Carolina) High School graduating class will celebrate its 40th reunion. I've never been to a reunion, of a high school or college class, and I hadn't anticipated going to this one. But one of my classmates, a very talented artist named Linda Prior Hunley, has organized an exhibition of my paintings, her drawings, and wonderful sculptures by our classmate Esther Randall, to be shown at the Aiken Center for the Arts, where the reunion will be held. So I've been thinking about images of the South. I had a large solo show in 2002 at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, titled Kesler Woodward North and South, that featured equal numbers of Southern and Alaska landscapes, and I have done a few Southern paintings since, but I'm looking forward to working on new ones for this exhibition. 

Just last month we made a quick trip to South Carolina, and I spent a lot of our brief time there looking at the trees and walking in the woods. As usual, these new images are based not on what I saw so recently, but on a trip two autumns ago, to Congaree National Park. Just a half hour drive from my dad's home on Lake Murray, near Columbia, Congaree preserves the largest remnant of old-growth, floodplain forest in North America. It is a magical place, and it was extraordinary to see record-size old growth longleaf pines, hardwoods, and cypress trees at the height of brilliant, fall color.  These two new little pieces are just a warmup for what I hope will be a strong new body of Southern images.  I'm excited to get to work and see what happens.

Congaree

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)

17" x 20" (framed)

Remembering Winter, Dreaming of Summer

Solstice Sun

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on canvas

48" x 60" (image)

49.5" x 61.5" (framed)

I began work on this large painting in the dead of winter, shortly after I wrote my January 2 post about how I really wanted to  paint Fairbanks in the eerie light of 40 below zero and ice fog.  It had been in the -40s for a week at that time, and it continued just as cold for another week. Finally, I began this painting of downtown Fairbanks from the north side of the Chena River, looking directly into the low winter sun through dense ice fog at nearly 50 below zero. 

I'd never included in my many winter paintings downtown buildings, utility poles and street lights, transformers and electrical lines, or anything like the iron railing along the river, and had never tried seriously to paint sunlight blossoming through dense ice fog.  I was traveling off and on throughout January and February, but worked on this painting all the time I was home for two months, finishing it just a few days after returning from Germany in early March. 

It's exciting for me, slowly incorporating more and more human presence, built environment, acknowledgement of people and their activities in my paintings.  I can't imagine that they will ever not be about light, landscape, weather, and place, but I'm eager to explore in my work the ways that people of the North, and what we do, are a big part what this place means.  

Fresh Snow, Denali Park

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)

17" x 20" (framed)

I think sometimes that the only way I really know what's on my mind is to look around my studio and see what I've painted.  Clearly, in the midst of living through yet another winter and grappling with how to represent it at its most severe, I've been dreaming about Denali Park in summer. Missy and I will go there again this summer, stay in the East Fork Cabin in the middle of the Park, and roam territory that we've come to know very well, but still surprises and amazes us.  I think I do more paintings of the Park during the winter than I do in the summer.  They are dreams of warmth in the midst of winter, recollections of light that I long for in January, February, and March. I think I must store inside the memories and images of those brief, intense summers, and access them for sustenance in the short days of December.

This little painting is all about the bright, bright white of an overnight snowfall in the Park, freshly covering the tundra down to a certain elevation.  It's early enough in the day that the snow line is almost perfectly straight, but that will give way to a receding, jagged contour in sunlight and shadow in a matter of hours, over the course of the brilliant, sunny day. 

Denali Summer Evening

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)

17" x 20" (framed)

I visited the Park for 25 years before I painted Mt. McKinley, but in the last few years I've painted it many times, often from this same vantage point--looking west from Stony Hill. What interests me is how different the same scene looks, not so much from year to year, but from month to month in the summer and from hour to hour in the nearly continuous daylight. 

It's a bittersweet time of year--evening in August, when it's still very light out of doors, but the light is soft, muted, foreshadowing the long nights that are fast approaching.

East Fork Brilliance

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)

17" x 20" (framed)

This is a view of the East Fork of the Toklat River, descending toward the river from Polychrome Pass, traveling east.  It's not literally this bright, but this is how it appears in my memory, especially in January.  Winter dream paintings like this one are, for me, not so much about the way the Park looks, but how I remember feeling when I've stood in this place; how I feel when I think about heading back again. 

This is very near the cabin where I stay in the Park, so it's a place I know particularly well.  Nearly every morning when I'm there, I walk up the hill from the cabin, down to the bridge across the East Fork,and part of the way up the winding way toward Polychrome Pass. I look for animals on the gravel bar of the river, watch the clouds and light move across the mountains to the south. The really simple, but fundamental lesson that birders, hunters, and artists learn as time goes along--the more you look, the more you see--has nowhere been more evident to me than here. 

Quiet Pool near Teklanika

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image)

20" x 17" (framed)

It's such a relief, after struggling with a big, complex, multilayered canvas for weeks or even months, to paint very small oils and acrylics on paper that are done in a day, or days. The challenge for me is, as in many aspects of my work, double-edged, two-sided.  I don't want, just because they're small, these little paintings to be inconsequential.  I want them to be about something--memory, phenomena, anticipation, longing...not just pretty views. But I have to remind myself that they don't have to be complicated, and can't be labored.  It's hard for me to just put the image down and leave it alone, trust to my instincts, suppress detail and go for essence. It's hard not to think that because it goes (relatively) quickly, it can't be right,...can't be enough. 

These days, I seldom throw away a large painting and start over. I know a big canvas is going to be a struggle, and I know that if I can maintain my focus, energy, and faith--not panic and do something dreadful and irredeemable to it when it's looking awful--I can almost almost always bring it around, often discovering in the process something I'd never have found, if it hadn't been such a fight. But these little paintings don't work that way, for me.  They have to be crisp, light, full of certainty I don't always feel. They go more quickly, but a lot of them get trashed.  The four here survived from nine. All nine were probably necessary to get these four, but it's important to me that I'm the only one who ever sees the ones that were thrown away. 

Canopy - Progress on the Anchorage Airport Mosaics

I've just returned from Munich, Germany, where I spent a week working with the firm that is fabricating the very large mosaics that Anchorage sculptor Sheila Wyne and I are doing for the Anchorage International Airport. (If you missed my introduction to this project, scroll down to the June 27, 2008 posting which describes the commission and includes information on the firm--Franz Mayer of Munich--and images of the proposal.) It was exciting to see the work well underway, with a sizable section of the ceiling image completed, and to talk with the craftsmen there about the ongoing translation from painting to mosaic and a host of technical issues.

Much of my week was spent with Herbert Hahn, one of the two master mosaic craftsmen who worked with us on a sample section when Sheila, Missy, and I went over last spring.  Herbert, on the left in the image above, has created mosaics for the 150 year-old firm for almost 35 years, since 1975.  He has done most of the work on the portion of our mosaic that is currently complete, but will soon be joined full time on the project, he told me, by at least two other craftspersons, and three of them will spend several more months on it before it is complete.  

Herbert is an inspiration to watch at work. He makes it look easy--moving without haste, but steadily and swiftly bringing the image to life. A printed, gridded image of the painting hangs on the wall nearby. A stack of prints of various details is on the table, and a full-scale enlargement of the painting underlies the mesh onto which he sets and glues what will eventually be more more than a million tiny glass tesserae and small, irregular pieces of all kinds of marble. 

Herbert encouraged both Sheila and me to try our hands at working on the mosaic itself, and we each spent about a day and a half completing very small sections.  Sheila has done mosaics before, though none of this sort, and she was slightly more comfortable and a bit faster at it than I, but we both found it much slower and more challenging than Herbert made it look.

It was a good thing for me to experience, as it not only gave me an even better sense of the skill and craftsmanship of those at Mayer of Munich, but helped me realize some ways that the next time I do a painting for translation into this medium, I can make it easier for them.  Over and over, as I selected tesserae by color, shape, and size, splitting or trimming them as necessary, spread small sections of cement on the mesh, and tried to set them cleanly and crisply in place, I thought about how easy it is for me to create a complex shape in paint with the flick of the wrist, and how much more labor intensive it is to translate that shape into bits of glass.

The mosaic itself is astonishingly rich--even more varied in texture, color, and surface than I had expected, while remarkably faithful in overall image to its painted model.  The section they had completed when I arrived, about 6' x 10', was impressive in its scale, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was only a bit more than 1/10 of what will be the completed mosaic. Despite having us there as distractions all week long, Herbert completed another substantial square footage, including the first large areas depicting one of the enormous birch trunks.  The trunks are being done largely in marble--travertine, greenish onyx from Iran, cut and polished pinkish slabs from a Tunisian quarry that supplied material to the Romans, and many more varieties--to contrast with the branches, foliage, and sky.

As I mentioned in my first post about this project, collaboration on works of art with so many people is a new and different experience for me. I am accustomed to toiling alone, in the privacy of my studio. I have completed large public commissions before--one of them, a federal commission for the Pacific Rim Hospital at Elmendorf Air Force Base, involving 4 paintings, each almost 15 feet wide, in two main ground floor lobbies.  It was more than a year of work, but with the exception of some considerable help from my son Eli, the work was done entirely alone. This project seems to me more like a theatrical production--a collaboration of a great many people, in order to bring it to life. I am grateful to be working with Sheila, who has a wealth of experience with these kinds of projects, and who has taken the lead in coordinating the myriad engineering details among us, the studio in Munich, and the Anchorage Airport project managers, architects, and engineers. I'm grateful, as always, to my wife Missy, who helps me keep the ongoing challenges in perspective, and to Sheila's partner Bruce Farnsworth, who continues to provide logistical coordination for our efforts, most recently getting us great flight reservations and tickets to Munich.  And I feel deeply privileged to get to work with the entire staff of Franz Mayer of Munich, who are simply the best in the world at what they do.

And so it grows...piece by tiny piece, day by day and week by week, over months. Late this summer, it will all be shipped to Anchorage in small, irregular-edged sections, and we will get to watch and help Herbert and his colleagues apply some of them to a 9 1/2' tall column, creating an abstracted "birch trunk," and the rest to a 16' by 36' ceiling, creating a Canopy of magical, boreal forest reaching to the sky.

A Cold New Year

Colors of the Magpie

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

20" x 28" (image)

30" x 37" (framed)

It's a new year, and so far it's a cold one in the far North. Though we're on the right side of winter solstice and gaining ground in terms of daylight every day, four hours of wan sunlight through the ice fog doesn't do much warming. It's been 40º below zero or colder every day for the last week. (No need to add Celsius or Fahrenheit to that temperature. -40º is where the two scales overlap.) So it is cold, and it is dark, but each winter solstice, especially when it's this frigid and there's dense ice fog, I'm stunned by the eerie, ethereal quality of the brief hours of light.  I've been driving around town and out to the Chena and Tanana rivers in the daylight all week long, ogling the low winter sun and wondering how on earth I might capture some fraction of its mystery. We'll see.

In the meantime, I go to the studio and work, and what I find myself working on is, as often in winter, memories of summer.  This is one of the magpies that hung around the East Fork Cabin in Denali Park when Missy and I were there last summer, often pecking at the wooden shingles on the roof in search of insects. In the same way that I find myself constantly wondering at the myriad colors in the bark of young birches, I was amazed at the brilliant hues--both pigments and tricks of diffracted light--in this gorgeous bird's plumage. Painting it several times life-size enables me to explore those colors more fully, immersing myself in the magic of avian finery.

A Geyser of Light

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on canvas

20" x 16" (image)

21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed)

And I don't seem to have run out of fascination with looking into the sun.  I keep thinking that this series of what I still think of as "epiphanies" is going to run its course, but this winter, as last, I'm still in awe of the power of that wan globe of light and its ability to blast its way through the densest forest, turning the spruces every color of the rainbow before geysering through to freedom. 

People often ask me how I know when a series is finished, when it's time to move on to another subject or theme.  I never know in advance how long any series will run. For a long time, the possibilities seem endless, and I can't wait to get to them all. As I'm working on one painting, I find myself thinking, "Well, what if I did it this way, or that way?" or "I wonder if I could do something with the memory of that?" One day, though, sooner or later, I go to the studio to work, and I catch myself thinking, "Well, I wonder what else I could do with this idea?"  When that happens, I know the series is done.  It may come back to life in a different form, one day, with new memories or insights, but there's no point in my trying to come up with a new variation for the sake of variety.

It's very, very important to me that I catch myself in that thought, and that I pay attention to its message.  The most difficult challenge for any artist, I think, is to avoid making copies, and eventually parodies, of his or her own work.  It's almost impossible, and it seems important to be as ruthless with myself as I can about listening to that internal dialogue and acting on it.

Trapped in the Birchbark: A Self-Portrait Mask

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Birch bark, copper nails on wood

20" x 16" (image)

21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed)

How's this for a totally different kind of image? I worked on this piece in mid-December for inclusion in an invitational exhibition of "masks," called "Countenance," that opened the first Friday in January. I don't usually accept invitations to theme exhibitions, unless the themes are already aligned conceptually with what I normally do in my work. I can't just go to my studio, jump the rails of my inner train, and do something entirely different to match a given theme.  I respect and even envy those who can, but it doesn't seem to be within my power.

The invitation to participate in this exhibit, though, came many months in advance, it seemed intriguing, and in a moment of weakness I agreed to participate.  I worked through all the end of November and the first couple of weeks of December on a commissioned painting I had promised for some time. By the time I finished it, I only had a couple of weeks until work for this invitational exhibition was due.  I almost backed out--almost called the curator and explained that I shouldn't have agreed to do something like this, and that I was sure she would have plenty of other work. But my pride and sense of responsibility got the better of me, and I decided I'd at least try.

It was a lot of fun. The most difficult part was harvesting the birch bark. I used to have pieces of actual bark pinned all over one wall of my studio, for inspiration and as models, but I've long since gotten rid of them, and so I had to harvest birch bark in the middle of winter.  I discovered that it was impossible to strip the bark from even the oldest standing dead trees in the forest around my house, in their frozen state.  I ended up cutting lengths of trunk and bringing them in to thaw beside the furnace in the garage for several days, then stripping large sections, cutting them up, scraping their undersides down, and finally gluing and nailing them with copper nails, in a pattern, onto the solid board backing. Finally, I cut and peeled away sections of the surface, revealing darker underlayers of the bark, to create a stylized self-portrait.  Not exactly a mask, but close enough, I think, and very much about me and my work.  I don't think I'm going to take up making images out of actual birch bark, but it was fun to step completely outside my normal way of working, respond to the theme, and still do something that felt personal and "real."