Kesler Woodward

New Year, New Work, New Shows, News

Aubade  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image) 20" x 17" (frame)

It's a new year, but the pace of the last few months is the same. On January 6, I opened the third exhibition of my work in three months, at the Blue Heron Art Gallery, run by the Vashon Arts Alliance on Vashon Island, Washington. On February 3, the big Boreal Birch traveling exhibition of my paintings, Barry McWayne's photographs, and Margo Klass's constructions arrives from the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, where it's been since early November, and opens at Well Street Art Gallery here in Fairbanks.

My exhibit on Vashon Island, a short ferry ride from downtown Seattle, was with noted Pacific Northwest photographer Paul Bannick, whose extraordinary photographs of birds in their habitats have won national awards, were shown recently at the Burke Museum in Seattle, and are featured in his own beautiful book The Owl and the Woodpecker. The show opened on January 6, and on January 8, Paul and I gave a talk about our work to a sold-out crowd. We had a fun conversation about how we work, moderated by Mike Feinstein, who with his wife Gerry organizes an annual lecture series with visiting artists, writers and others for the Vashon Arts Alliance. 

One of the great pleasures of the Vashon exhibition was seeing at the opening and talk many old friends who have settled in the Pacific Northwest--friends who came from all around the Seattle area and as far as Portland. It was especially meaningful that my son Eli and his family--Becca and their daughter Sage--who live in Seattle, were able to come. It was a pure delight to get to carry Sage--my now 4-month old granddaughter--around to look at each of my paintings at her first art opening.

I have resisted, with some difficulty, imposing pictures of my beautiful granddaughter on readers of my blog, but her appearance at my opening gives me an excuse to share my delight in the company of her and her wonderful parents.

It also gives me an opportunity to more formally introduce my companion Dorli McWayne, whom a few attentive readers have already noted my mentioning in posts in the past few months. Dorli and I have known each other for more than 30 years, but until the death of her husband, my close friend Barry McWayne, just two weeks after the death of my wife Missy, I knew her only as his wife, and we had literally never had a substantive conversation.  In the year and a half since the almost simultaneous, sudden and unexpected losses of our beloved partners, we have--with equal parts surprise and joy--found each other, and we are enjoying beginning work on the puzzle of melding two large households and two extraordinarily busy lives.

 Madrones  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image) 20" x 17" (frame) 

For the Vashon Island exhibition, I included several images from the Pacific Northwest, from the colorful madrone trees which I have long admired and have painted often before to scenes from the Skagit River Valley and the North Cascades.

The new Alaska images in the show are all about light. I talked, in my presentation at the Vashon Arts Alliance, about how lucky we are in this part of the far North to have, even in the depths of winter, hours each day of the kind of twilight that people of all cultures and places find magical. In the high latitudes, the sun wheels around the sky at a shallower angle than in more southerly lands, and both nightfall and daybreak are preceded and followed, year-round, by growing or lingering, ever-changing crepuscular light.

An Aubade is a poem or a song to the dawn, and as we once again this year pass by Epiphany in deep cold, begin to hurtle toward the equinox and on toward constant day, I am grateful for new light in the North.

December Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   acrylic on paper   6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)   17" x 20" (frame) 

Light in the North  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   acrylic on paper   20" x 28" (image) 30" x 37" (frame)

 

New Work, Small Pleasures, and a Personal Collection

Sunlight Snowfall   ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas   48" x 60" (image)

Yesterday I rented a big U-Haul truck to take 50 paintings and drawings to The Annex Gallery, just three or four miles from my home in Fairbanks. My solo exhibition, Kesler Woodward: New Work, Small Pleasures, and a Personal Collection will open at the gallery this Friday, December 2, and run through December 24. 

The Annex, founded and directed for the last seven years by my friend and fellow Fairbanks painter Nancy Burnham, is one of the larger commercial galleries in Alaska, and perhaps the most beautiful, with pristine, 14' high white walls, excellent lighting, and a single, simple, open space.  I didn't know, when Nancy invited me to show a year and a half ago--and she almost certainly didn't either--that it would be the last show for the gallery. After seven great years of exhibiting adventurous work in a wide range of styles and mediums, she is closing the gallery at the end of December to focus on her own painting.

As the title indicates, the exhibition will feature a lot of new work. Along with most of the paintings I've posted images of recently here, there are a number of even newer ones, among them Sunlight Snowfall, a 4' x 5' view of snow falling on a bright, sunny day in the birch forest outside my studio window. This is the kind of simple but magical thing I've loved for years to notice, watch, and paint--the sun's casting strong shadows on the forest floor even as a passing cloud in another part of the sky fills the air with flakes of snow.  

Little Birch Portraits  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   oil on canvas   10" x 8" each

Also in the exhibition will be a number of small new works, among them seven very small (10" x 8") oil paintings of individual birch trunks--Little Birch Portraits. I regularly go back and forth from quite large paintings to very small ones, from acrylics to oils, from paintings with very thin surfaces built with layers of wash and glaze to very thick paintings with gestural brushstokes filling the canvas.

I have been doing thin acrylic paintings for much of the last couple of years, using transparent washes and glazes in an effort to achieve a certain kind of luminosity in the larger images of birch trunks, or to depict wide-ranging sorts of snowfall. So it's probably not surprising that one day a month ago, I realized I was missing the feel of applying thick, juicy oil paint, and in the course of just a couple of weeks I joyously painted these seven small birch portraits.

Chatanika Freezeup  ©Kesler Woodward 1987   acrylic on canvas   60" x 84"

The third aspect of this exhibition is work from my personal collection. I decided to take advantage of having the large, beautiful space of The Annex to include some works that I have held onto for myself, over the years--things that have been shown once or twice or not at all and have lived on the walls of my home for anywhere from years to decades.

Almost all the paintings I have done in the past thirty-five years have gone away. My dear, late wife Missy had the option of choosing for herself any painting I did, before it went on the market, and she exercised that option with great restraint. Those few paintings, perhaps a dozen in number, will remain in my family's collection for my son Eli and his family and are not in the exhibition. But she regularly urged me, in the last twenty-five of our forty years together, especially, to retain further examples for myself, not letting all of any series of works go away. That was--and still is--strange for me, as I'm always much more interested in the next painting than the last one.  I'm completely wrapped up in each painting until it's done, and then focused entirely on the new painting I'm starting.  I never have had a hard time letting paintings go, and have been eager to have the ones that are done go out into the world.

So...along with the many new works in this exhibition, I have included a few of those I have retained for myself from various bodies of work. These include two large (5' x 7') paintings from a series I did in 1986-87, of rivers and lakes in the Fairbanks area with the surrounding landscape reflected in the water.  Chatanika Freezeup (above) and Chatanika Breakup, another 5' x 7' canvas, have lived on the walls of my home for almost a quarter century.

Tracy Arm  ©Kesler Woodward 2001  oil pastel on paper  28" x 42" (image) 

It also includes other, mostly smaller works that I have retained from my initial summer as Denali National Park's first Artist-in-Residence, in 2002, and my stint as Expedition Artist for the Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced, a 2001 Smith College-sponsored expedition retracing the route of the last great exploring expedition to Alaska, in 1899. That 30-day expedition along the Alaska coast from south of Ketchikan, through the Aleutians and the Bering Sea, to the Bering Strait and three stops on the coast of Siberia, was for me the trip of a lifetime. 

This part of the current exhibition is by no means a retrospective. It is neither comprehensive nor systematic, but a personal collection of things that I have retained, often serendipitously, for myself over the years. I am hoping that the inclusion of these few works will provide context for the many new paintings in the exhibition, and that visitors to the exhibition will enjoy catching a few glimpses of some of the work that led to the images I am doing today.

Old Growth Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2001  oil on panel   5" x 7" (image)

Denali from Eielson  ©Kesler Woodward 2002  pen and ink  3" x 7" (image)

Fall and Winter

Liberty Falls  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas  36" x 48" (image)

The snow has arrived in Interior Alaska, and so I'm not only remembering wanting it to come, but looking back to the days just before it began drifting down. Liberty Falls is just off the road to Chitina, Alaska, almost seven hours' drive south of Fairbanks--a place I've gone most summers for the past 30 years to harvest salmon to fill my freezer for the coming winter.  Nearing Chitina and access to the mighty Copper River, I'm usually gripped by fishing fever and can't make myself stop to admire Liberty Falls, but I have managed it often enough to paint it several times over the years.

This year, thanks to my broken, dislocated shoulder, I didn't make it to Chitina to perch precariously on rocks above the nearly half-mile wide torrent of the Copper, sweeping a 3' diameter net on the end of a 10' long pole through eddies of opaque, silt-laden water for hours, sometimes days, in search of sockeyes, silvers, or the occasional king salmon. But just before Labor Day, Dorli and I drove past the Liberty Falls campground on our way to McCarthy--a long 60 miles on a road rough even by Alaska standards, past Chitina. We took a few minutes to stop at  the falls, camped nearby, and on the way back through a couple of days later, hiked up onto and around some of the ridges in the area. 

I've painted falling, fast-running water off and on over the years and never tire of trying to capture a little of its magic.  It's always hard to restrain my impulse to paint the water itself, to let the rocks, the vegetation, and the sticks and logs brought down by the torrent channel the brilliant white of the canvas and the little bits of flashing, flying color and darkness, the way they do the water itself.

 Merlin's Woods  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas  20" x 16" (image)

The fall in Interior Alaska is breaktakingly brief, but always beautiful, and this year it was especially spectacular. I love the brilliant color of the variously yellow leaves on the birches and aspens, set against the dark, blue-green, almost blackness of the spruces, but even more magical for me is the bright red understory of the boreal forest. When it looked like this, just weeks ago, I was dreaming of snow. Now that I'm able to ski out my back door and onto the trails, I can revel contentedly in the memory of that brilliance.

Gorge Creek Snowfall  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas  16" x 20" (image)

Just before the snow started falling here, I completed this small painting of another autumn squall in Denali National Park. Gorge Creek Snowfall is almost a smaller version of the 4' x 5' canvas Harbinger that I completed this summer and posted an image of  in July. It's the same kind of day, the same time of year, the same kind of sudden snow swirling through the bright autumn landscape, just turning my gaze slightly to the left and down, into the dramatic cleft of Gorge Creek. 

Thinking About Snow

Near Teklanika  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   Acrylic on canvas   16" x 20" (image)

It's still fall here in Fairbanks, one of the most beautiful I can remember, but looking around the studio at my most recent paintings, I see that I'm dreaming of snow. It's something of a mystery to me that I never seem to know, until I stop working and look around at what I've done, exactly what I'm thinking about. I just go up to the studio and work, and I'm as surpised as anyone else to see what comes of it.

Near Teklanika is an image of one of my favorite places in Denali National Park--a quiet little pool just off the road near Teklanika campground. Every time I've drive by it, I fantasize about building a cabin next to it and living there, year-round, watching the seasons come and go. I've often stopped the car, gotten out, and clambered through the woods and tundra to walk all around it, lost in reverie. Once, just a few years ago there, I listened to a magical chorus of a whole family of kestrels calling back and forth to each other from the tops of separate trees.

 Smith Lake September   ©Kesler Woodward 2011  Acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image)

Smith Lake, in the middle of the 2000-acre arboretum on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, is a much larger body of water, less than two miles from my home. It's a place I've gone to watch the gathering of swans, the change of the seasons, and some of the first snow flurries of the year, for thirty years. I've painted it in every season, but especially in fall. One year, I had an entire exhibition of paintings I did of objects I picked up in a single walk down to the lake's edge from the Geophysical Institute on the university's West Ridge.

I'll remember this tiny little painting for a long time, as I painted it with my right arm in a high-tech sling, recovering from surgery on my shoulder after a bad fall tripping on a tree root while running on the trails in Fairbanks in July. It was as big as I could work at the time, with my painting arm lashed closely to my chest, on the back side of an ergonomic pillow. It was sheer stubborness that made me go to the studio and work anyway, and even such a tiny painting left me aching at the end of every day. I'm out of the sling now, rapidly regaining range of motion and strength, able to work on any size painting I want, and grateful for the remarkable skills of Anchorage surgeon Robert Gieringer, who put my thoroughly torn up shoulder back together.

Childs Glacier   ©Kesler Woodward 2011   Acrylic on board   8" x 10" (image)

Another of the small paintings I did while recuperating from the surgery. I was thinking about snow, about how soft it is as it falls, and how miraculous it is that if it keeps falling for thousands of years, consolidates, and flows slowly down from the mountains, it can create such a magnificent mass of ice as the Childs Glacier, which flows into and breaks up in the mighty Copper River near Cordova, Alaska.  I made a weeklong raft trip on the Copper several years ago, 100 miles from Chitina to Cordova, in the company of several other artists and writers, and we floated past this extraordinary terminus, calving giant icebergs into the cold, silty waters of the Copper River.

I love the fall. It's never long enough here in Interior Alaska, and I'm not by any means eager for it to be over. I know winter will be here soon enough, and that it will be six months long. But I'm dreaming of snow, and excited at the prospect of seeing it start falling. 

Harbinger

Harbinger ©Kesler Woodward 2011  Acrylic on canvas  48" x 60" 

After almost three and a half decades of Alaska winters, I do sometimes get tired of the cold and the dark, but I have yet to ever see it start snowing and wish it would stop. For the last several years, since I finally discovered some ways of painting falling snow that were both convincing representationally and satisfying for me in a painterly way, I have painted snowfall of many sorts, in all seasons and locations.  First flurries of the fall, at Smith Lake on the University of Alaska campus. Soft snow drifting down in the boreal forest of interior Alaska in deep winter.  A blizzard at the face of Child's Glacier, just outside Cordova. And many more. 

I stood in the very spot on which the viewer in this large--4' x 5'--painting would stand, looking in this very direction, just last week.  And in today's Fairbanks newspaper, there is a brief note that a snow squall like this one covered the ground at this locale just yesterday--July 18. But I began this painting two months ago, not on site, but remembering the way this view of Sunset Peak from Eielson Visitor's Center in Denali National Park looks in the fall, and thinking about harbingers of winter.  Darkness, absent for months in summer, is coming.  The brilliant fall color, so gorgeous and so startling, is fleeting, and is a reminder that winter is about to descend.  I've watched squalls of snow like this fall in Denali Park in all seasons, but for me they are most dramatic, most portentous, in the fall.  

I finished this painting at 11 p.m., night before last, and was so excited when I lifted it upright onto my easel and stepped back, after days of working on it while it lay horizontally.  Each time I paint falling snow, I think while I'm working of other snowfalls, and of other ways of conveying the magic I feel each time I see it come down. The panorama south of Eielson Visitor's Center, across Gorge Creek toward Sunrise and Sunset Glaciers, is deep and expansive, and I wanted snow not just plastered on top of it, but swirling through it, filling the air.  I love the summer, lament the brevity of fall, but look forward, too, to the winter.  

Plein Rein

I spent a fabulous nine days in early June in Juneau, Alaska.  In addition to seeing old friends, visiting the 13 ft. diameter wooden yurt that Missy and I lived in back in the 1970's, and running on trails that have been greatly improved since those days, I juried a show for the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council, gave two public talks, and did three radio interviews. But the real focus of the trip was two 3-day workshops I taught at the invitation of a hardy bunch of terrific painters who work out of doors in all weathers year-round in Juneau, who call themselves "Plein Rein."  Cristine Crooks, who organized the workshops, and who with her husband Dean Guaneli put me up in their beautiful home on the Gastineau Channel in Douglas, limited the enrollment in each to 13 participants, and almost all of the artists took part in both sessions.

I did a similar stint with the Plein Rein painters in 2007, with many of the same artists, so I knew it would be fun and that I would be impressed with their energy, ambition, and their work itself, but it was even more of a delight to be back with them than I'd anticipated.  We worked each day in gorgeous locations all over the limited Juneau road system, from Auke Bay Recreation Area to Amalga Harbor, Eagle Beach, Auke Lake, Eaglecrest, and Fish Creek--some of my favorite places anywhere.

As four years ago, I was impressed by the group's willingness to embrace the crazy things I asked them to do--all aimed at getting them out of their comfort zones as plein-air painters, keep them from relying on techniques and approaches they already knew and were comfortable with doing, and think about making work in new and different ways. 

I seldom do workshops, since I retired to paint full time eleven years ago, after two decades of teaching painting at the University of Alaska. The outdoor painting classes I do teach are, I always say only half-jokingly, "anti plein-air painting workshops."  I work out of doors myself often, and I think that painting from life is important for a landscape painter, but what I emphasize in my infrequent classes is almost the opposite of what most plein-air painting workshops preach. Instead of tips and tricks for getting things down quickly, recognizably, with everything comfortably in its place, I try to get artists to think about what they want to say. Not so much "What does it look like here?" or "Isn't this place pretty?" but "What do I want to say about this place?"  "What does this place mean to me?" "What does it feel like to be here?" I emphasize making art, not pictures, and insist on treating the participants in my workshops as serious artists, not as weekend painters.  

That's easy with this group, as they are not only dedicated, but an adventurous lot, not just in terms of weather, but in terms of their art.  It's a delight to work with so many artists who are eager to try something new, confident enough to get outside their comfort zones, and dedicated enough that I know they will take from whatever experience I provide what's useful to them, incorporate it in their ever-growing toolbox, and continue making original work of their own.

As I said in 2007 after the workshop, it was a treat in every way.  I learned as much from them as they did from me, and I feel like a lucky guy to get to do things like this and call it work. 

 

 

The wooden yurt in which Missy and I lived, 17 miles north of Juneau, in the 1970s.  Still in the same spot, it's now  a storage shed in the backyard of a suburban Juneau home, but then it was not only a little less mossy, but was nestled in four acres of pristine woods. We hauled in our water on a picturesque trail that wound through the forest, then up a giant spruce tree that had been felled perpendicular to the steep slope, with steps cut into it to ascend.  When we found it again a few years ago, I was sad to see it so forlorn and disheveled.  Missy simply harrumphed, "Huh...just about the way I remember it!" 

Boreal Birch

On July 1, an exhibition that two other Fairbanks artists, a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist and I have been working on together for more than three years opened at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska. Boreal Birch: Art and Science in the Northern Forest includes 20 of my paintings, 26 of Barry McWayne's black-and-white photographs, and 15 of Margo Klass's constructions, as well as a number of her small, handmade books--all about birch trees and the boreal forest. Accompanying our images are wall texts developed by Kimberley Maher, a PhD student at UAF whose research is all about birch trees. Kimberley not only challenged us with questions about our work and new information about birches over the three years we worked on this project, but developed curricular materials for use in grades K-12 in the schools in conjunction with the exhibit.

This very large show will be on view at the Pratt Museum in Homer through October 2. It travels to the Alaska State Museum in Juneau for November, December, and early January, and will come to Fairbanks, filling all the gallery spaces at Well Street Art Gallery, in February of 2012.  

It was a delight to work on this collaborative effort. The four of us met regularly, comparing work in progress, talking about birches and the northern forest, and influencing one another. We visited one another's studios. We went with Kimberley into the woods to tap birches for sap and take cores from trunks, and we peppered her with questions about the physiology of the birches themselves.

Barry McWayne, whose untimely death ended his direct participation last August, was the only artist I know who has devoted as much time, thought, and imagery to birch trees as I have. Working in two entirely different mediums, we shared similar visions of the individuality of the birches' trunks, the moods and atmosphere of the forest, and what we both called the "pelts" of the birches themselves. He and I had talked for more than two decades about doing a show of birch images together. Fortunately, Barry had already taken and printed many photographs in preparation for this exhibit, and we were able to use a large number of them, along with some of his earlier birch images, to represent him and his vision fully in the show.

Margo Klass has delighted in birch trees for years as well, incorporating images of them in her work long before she came to Alaska in the last decade.  Her exquisitely crafted, three-dimensional, magical and mysterious altarpiece-like boxes and handmade books combine natural elements from parts of the trees themselves with found objects related only visually or metaphorically to the trees and the forest--all of them transformed by juxtaposition and artistic alchemy.

In the last several years, I have been involved in several collaborative projects with other artists and writers, and the experience each time has been energizing, broadening, and surprising. From a very large scale public art project for the Anchorage International Airport on which I worked with Anchorage sculptor Sheila Wyne and Franz Mayer of Munich Studio in Germany, to two collaborative projects with Alaska's current State Writer Peggy Shumaker and several with Alaska writer Frank Soos, each project has led me to think differently about my own work, posed new challenges for me, and opened up new directions.  I like working alone in my studio, and would never want to change that basic way of life, but these collaborations have been rich leavening for both my life and my work, and I'm looking forward to more of them in the future.

Kimberley, Margo and her husband Frank Soos, who wrote the essay for the brochure we produced about the exhibition, Barry's widow Dorli McWayne, who allowed us to use his images and helped me mat and frame them, and I worked together on the installation in the beautiful exhibition space at the Pratt Museum, with great support from the museum's staff.  We were even more pleased with the results of our collaboration than we had hoped or imagined. If you can make it to Homer, Alaska, this summer, we think the exhibit is one you will enjoy. The following are the dates for the show at its various venues:

Pratt Museum - Homer, Alaska - July 1-October 2, 2011

Alaska State Museum - Juneau, Alaska - November 4, 2011 - January 14, 2012

Well Street Art Company - Fairbanks, Alaska - February 3-26, 2012

Spring Dreams

Spring Dreams  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  Acrylic on canvas  16" x 20" (image)

Two things happen for me, and in my work, virtually every late winter and early spring. My colors get brighter, and I visit my favorite places in the nearby woods--south-facing slopes where the strengthening sunlight rakes the forest with light and shadows.

The colors in my paintings get brighter throughout every winter, as I long for the saturated hues that the returning light and eventual thaw and new growth will bring. Often I ignore true color entirely, allowing myself to fantasize that the land itself is dreaming boldly of a surreal, riotous spring. At the very least, I exaggerate the strengths of the shadows and the colors in the trees of the boreal forest.

One place I find myself, floundering in still-deep snow, nearly every spring is the south-tilting hillside of beautiful woods just below the University of Alaska Museum of the North, on the West Ridge of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. I must have made a couple of dozen paintings, over the last 30 years, within a 100-yard radius of this very spot. And so again this year, I am struck by and need to pay homage to the beauty of that hillside, those woods, and the clear light of the North.

 

Birchbark

Chapters in Birchbark, Forty Pages at a Time   ©Kesler Woodward 2011   Two panels, each 20" x 16"   Birchbark, copper and steel nails on wood

A fascinating exhibit is on view at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks this month. Betula Neoalaskana: Celebrating One Tree includes a number of art works of all kinds made from a single birch tree from the boreal forest here, and more than a dozen artists' "books"made from parts of other birches in the area.

The One Tree idea originated in Cheshire, England in 1998, when a community of artists and artisans made an astonishing variety of products from artwork to furniture, all from a single local oak. Jan Dawe of the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, a longtime admirer of Alaska Paper Birch (Betula neoalaskana), started a project of the same sort with a single birch felled at Cache Creek in 2009. OneTree Alaska has grown to include art, science and education, and projects in many local schools, as well as the works in the current exhibit at Well Street.

The handmade artists' books portion of the show, art works of all kinds using serial imagery and made from parts of seventeen other trees recently felled near Fairbanks, was inspired and organized by my friend and fellow Fairbanks artist Margo Klass. Margo's well known artist books and assemblages have been shown in galleries and museums for many years, the last half dozen in solo and group exhibitions throughout Alaska, and she has taught classes regularly in bookbinding and related techniques here and throughout the country (see margoklass.com).

Chapters in Birchbark, Forty Pages at a Time  is my personal contribution to the exhibition. As I say in my brief statement for the show, birches and the boreal forest have been my trademark images for more than three decades, and I have made hundreds of paintings and drawings and prints of individual birch trees, but I have only made a handful of images from the bark of the trees themselves. 

Chapters in Birchbark is made from a large piece of bark from a birch identified by the scientists who are studying the trees--which had been felled for other purposes--as NR7 (Nenana Ridge 7).  Jan Dawe has told me that NR7 was the second oldest of the trees on the site, based on coring and counting of its growth rings, and quite possibly one of the oldest birches in Alaska.  It is very, very old for a birch tree, predating the U.S. Civil War by  a couple of decades. I have never worked with bark as old and thick as the piece from which this artwork is made--a strip almost 4 feet high and more than two feet wide, which curled almost immediately after peeling into a very tight, strong, 6-inch diameter roll.

As in previous pieces of this sort I have made, I painstakingly unrolled this bark and forced it flat again by attaching it to a sturdy wooden backing with a patterned arrangement of nails. I then added cutout pieces from the same piece of bark, or cut away layers of the surface, to create the images. 

Birch Panels 1-4: For Barry McWayne  ©2011 Margo Klass and Kesler Woodward

In the same exhibition is another artists' book that Margo Klass and I made in honor of our dear, late friend Barry McWayne.  A close friend of mine for more than 30 years, with whom I had worked, traveled, and celebrated many life events, Barry was one of Alaska's best and most widely admired artist photographers when he died unexpectedly last summer. He and Margo and I had been working for almost two years toward an exhibition of our artwork, all about birches, which will open this summer at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska, and travel to the Alaska State Museum in Juneau this fall and Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks next February.  As our statement about the piece for the current exhibit explains:

"Before his sudden death last summer Barry McWayne came to Jan Dawe’s house to select birch material for his One Tree project. He walked up and down the row of bark samples looking for the piece with the most interesting formations and variations. He settled on NR8, a pre-Civil War tree, oldest of the Nenana Ridge group. We’ve made this book in Barry’s honor, not as he would have made it, but as an attempt to honor the way he was uniquely able to isolate and preserve beautiful passages of bark in his well-known photographs."

It is a privilege to have been able to work on this piece in Barry's honor, from the bark he chose. As I said when I spoke at his memorial service last summer, Barry was not only a dear friend, but was the only artist I know who has loved birch trees as deeply and explored them in images as fervently as I have myself.

It was also a privilege to work on this piece with Margo, in whose style and technique the work is made. I have long admired Margo's work, and I appreciate it even more now, after being introduced firsthand to the painstaking, labor-intensive processes that are involved in the making of her magical, mysterious boxes.

A North Carolina Exhibition

It has been some time since I've posted new images and commentary here--not because I've had nothing new to share, but because I've been so busy that I haven't had time to share it. The last couple of months have been full ones on many fronts.

The views here are of my February exhibition at Christa Faut Gallery in Cornelius, North Carolina--just north of Charlotte. John Ruck, the gallery owner, did a beautiful installation of the seventeen paintings I sent--ranging from one as small as 5 x 7 inches to five that were 4 x 5  feet--in the gallery's beautiful space. It was a great treat for me to show a large body of my new work in the South, and especially nice that the gallery is so near Davidson College, my undergraduate school. Former professors, friends from the area, and other friends and family from South Carolina to Virginia and Washington D.C. drove or flew in for the opening reception, so in addition to a solo exhibition, it was a lot like a reunion.

Retired Davidson College English Professor Gil Holland and his wife Siri--longtime friends and collectors of my work.

Davidson College is where I fell in love with art, where I became a painter, and where I became, essentially, the person I have been all my adult life. It was a great pleasure to return for the first time in many years to the campus that I loved, and love, and to revel in the flood of memories engendered by the place and the people who are still there.

More dear friends (and also collectors of my work), who flew down from Washington, D.C. for the opening reception. David Policansky and his wife Sheila David, both of whom I met in 2001 when David and I were members of the Harriman Expedition Retraced, a 30-day voyage along the Alaska coast from British Columbia to the Bering Strait and the Siberian coast, retracing the route of the last great exploring expedition to Alaska, in 1899.

Sherwood Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

One of the new paintings in this exhibition, Sherwood Forest is an evocation of the returning light in my own backyard, the birch forest through which I ski onto my neighborhood--Sherwood Forest--trail nearly every winter day.