Painting in the North

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." 

A Busy Autumn and Small Pleasures

Blind Slough, Petersburg

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

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

17" x 20" (framed)

I haven't posted an update to this site in some time, but I have been busy. Since my last post in early September, I have:

-- Had an exhibition of 27 of my recent paintings at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks.

-- Sent two new paintings to a group exhibition at Collins, Lefebvre, Stoneberger--the gallery that represents my work in Montreal, Canada.

-- Worked on new paintings for three upcoming invitational exhibitions--a show of narrative paintings at MTS Gallery in Anchorage, a show of works loosely defined as "masks" in Fairbanks, and an exhibition in Kenai, reflecting on 50 years of Alaska Statehood.

-- Made a presentation at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Fairbanks, on the role of artists in the establishment and development of Denali National Park, another at an Alaska Historical Society Conference in Anchorage on the way visual arts in Alaska have grown and changed in the fifty years since statehood, and participated in a panel following that conference discussing challenges and potentials for Alaska's next fifty years.

-- Made weeklong field trips to two very different places new to me, one to Larsen Bay and the Karluk River on Kodiak Island in Alaska, and another to the marshes, beaches, pine and palmetto woods of northeast coastal Florida near Jacksonville.

-- Completed the several small paintings posted here, reflecting on my summer visit to Petersburg, Alaska and the unfolding of one of the most beautiful autumns I can remember in Fairbanks. 

Silver Light, Sandy Beach, Petersburg

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on paper

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

17" x 20" (framed)

As usual, it has taken some time for the rich experience of being in a particular place--in this case Petersburg, Alaska in July--to percolate to a level in my consciousness from which I felt I had something to say.  In the last month, I've made three small paintings reflecting on my few days there.

The first day I spent with the group for whom I conducted a painting workshop in Petersburg was at Blind Slough, a lovely spot that I had last visited eighteen years before, and we had an overcast but beautiful day.  The second full day of painting was at Sandy Beach, and as I noted in an earlier post, it was cold, windy, and rainy--classic Southeast Alaska weather that I remember very well from our years living in Juneau in the 1970s.  I loved then, and still love, the silvery light in Southeast Alaska, which just deepens the colors of the rich intertidal zone of the rocky-more-than-sandy beach.

Sandy Beach, Petersburg

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

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

20" x 17" (framed)

Until I painted my own ski tracks gleaming in the low sun on local trails last winter, I hadn't thought much about how seldom I have acknowledged in my Northern landscapes traces of civilization, the passage, habitations, or contrivances of the people who live here. 

Though it's always hard for me to predict what I'll do in the studio next, I'm finding myself thinking more and more of how I can recognize that presence.  The houses seen from Sandy Beach don't diminish the setting, and it seems important, somehow, not to ignore their presence. People live here, in the scattered outposts of this still-remote wilderness, and the way we live is as much a part of this place as the setting that draws and keeps us here. I can't help but think that this is fertile ground for me to explore.

Many hundreds of miles north of Petersburg, in Interior Alaska, we had a cold and rainy summer that reminded me a little of Southeast, but it gave way in September to one of the most beautiful autumns I can remember, with a month of bright blue skies, warm sunny days and crisp fall evenings.  Creamers Field in Fairbanks, a former dairy farm turned wildlife refuge, is one of my favorite places in the fall.  The grain fields are full of thousands of geese, sandhill cranes, and other waterfowl, the colors are gorgeous, and the farm fields are pastoral in a way that calls out to my rural, agricultural upbringing. 

Fall, Barns at Creamers

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on paper

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

17" x 20" (framed)

And so, though I've painted the fields and woods at Creamers many times in past autumns, this year I found myself for the first time including the barns, and a few of the geese taking flight southward. I think it's the contrast between the picturesque, rural setting and the permafrost-laced surrounding boreal forest and wetlands that makes us cherish this refuge--practically in downtown Fairbanks--all the more.

I decided to show the small paintings in this post in their frames, this one time, as examples of the way I frame my works on paper.  Framing is a vexing issue for me.  For years, I used nothing but the simplest possible, metal or square-section wood frames with plain, white mats.  But as my work became more expensive over time, more and more of my collectors not only expected something nicer and more substantial, but often had historical paintings in their homes with much more elaborate frames, and the simple, almost severe look of my frames seemed out of place on their walls. I struggled and worked with various framers for a couple of years, before settling on these materials and design, which are just clean and simple enough for me, but solid and rich enough not to look out of place in collections that include historical work. 

For my paintings on canvas, I still use very crisp, modern, pickled-white maple floater frames that I custom order from Metropolitan Picture Framing in Minneapolis. But as I acknowledged in a post a couple of years ago, I do on occasion order hand-carved, gold-leaf frames for collectors who really want them. I was surprised, when I first ordered such a frame for one of my canvases, that the quite contemporary color and style of my painting worked comfortably in that more elaborate setting, but as with the works on paper, I was able to find what seemed to me a good fit both for my desires and those of the collector.

Tanana September

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil pastel on paper

13" x 18" (image)

I thought it might be fun to include here as well a couple of the oil pastel studies I did this glorious fall, sitting on the bank of the Tanana River one day and beside one of the numerous ponds surrounding the Fairbanks airport another. My oil pastel studies are much freer, much quicker and even more subjective in their color and handling than my other work done on location. I do think of them, and treat them, as finished works, and am no less determined to bring them to satisfactory conclusion, but something about the oil pastels makes me attack the scene before me with greater abandon, and what I learn from grappling with the rawer, blunter, more direct medium and working more quickly goes into the work I do later in the studio.

I tend to work alternately in formats that are either quite small or fairly large, and I find that when I've finished a very large painting, sometimes battling it for a month or more, I often want to work very small, on images that I can bring to fruition in days rather than weeks.  And when I've completed, as I have in the last couple of months, a number of small works, I find myself craving the sustained challenge of something large, more daunting in scale and calling for sustained, patient will to bring to fruition. I suspect that's where I'm headed next.

Airport Pond, September

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil pastel on paper

6 1/2" x 8"  (image)

Birches and Small Epiphanies

Birch Couple

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on canvas

36" x 48" (image)

37 1/2" x 49 1/2" (framed)

Once again, I find myself painting birch portraits. I turn to other subjects again and again, but always, sooner or later, return to the individual birches in the boreal forest that surrounds my home. 

Since returning from Denali Park in mid-August, I have been wandering through the woods, watching them turn dramatically, rapidly, day by day, to autumn. Already, the leaves are mostly golden, and the ground is covered with those that have fallen.  The understory is bright with the reds of rosehips, highbush cranberries, and their brilliant leaves. The musty smell of the cranberries permeates the air in the forest, and drifts from it.

For me, as for many others here in Interior Alaska, this is a favorite time of year.  Despite our awareness that it will all-too-rapidly climax, fade, and give way to the long, hard winter--or perhaps in part because of that knowledge--we revel in the brilliance of the season and its fleeting glories. And so day after day, I walk in the woods, and then I return to the studio and I paint the beautiful, individual, striking trunks I find there.

August Birch

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on paper

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

20" x 17" (framed) 

The sun, as we rush toward the autumn equinox and equal parts daylight and dark, is still bright in the forest, and the trees are luscious, sensual in the warm fall light.  I think of them as bodies, their skin soaking up the warmth of the fading summer and reveling in the chiaroscuro of light and shadow while it lasts.  

I am still getting to know the few hundred birches that surround my home, and as Missy and I planted scores of shrubs on the bank behind our house, and a dozen lilacs at the woods' edge, I kept wandering into the grove to see new trees in new light.  The birches around us are tall and thin, swaying deeply in the sudden winds that blow when fronts come through.  Chickadees and redpolls, juncos and white-crowned sparrows flit ceaselessly from the branches to my feeders and birdbath. Flickers are nesting in a standing, broken-off trunk, and robins reared young this summer in a high nest nearby. We see downy and hairy woodpeckers almost every day. 

With the onset of fall, we also hear, far above the forest canopy, the creaking call of cranes, the honking of long skeins of migrating geese, and regularly this year, the haunting trills of solitary, passing loons.

August Birch is just one of several oil on paper paeans of praise to individual birches in our little grove that I've painted this early, glorious fall.

 

Trail at Twilight

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on board

8" x 10" (image)

11" x 13" (framed) 

For many years, I couldn't wait for winter to arrive. I longed each fall for the first snow on which I could ski, and I reveled in the number of times I could ski on my birthday, in early October.  I'm more patient now, in part because I've learned deep in my bones how long that winter will be, but also because I've come to enjoy each season in its turn.  

So I don't long for winter, but I don't dread it, either.  I have been surprised to find myself in the studio this month not just celebrating the fall, but anticipating being back on the trail above my house, skiing through the low-sunlit forest at dusk, with the early winter sun blasting its way through the trees.  It seems all I can do is climb the stairs to my studio each morning, change my clothes, and begin to paint.  It's not until I see what happens there that I learn what's on my mind and in my heart. 

Chena Ridge Birch

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on canvas

20" x 16" (image)

21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed) 

Journaling

Looking Up the East Fork

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on canvas

40" x 30" (image)

41 1/2" x 31 1/2" (framed)

Many of the people I know keep journals, or have kept them for long periods of time in their past. I have friends who still have journals they created all the way back in childhood, and others who have kept them off and on through their adult years.  I've always kind of envied them.  I imagine how nice it would be to look back and read what I was thinking in childhood, remember what I was doing on specific dates decades ago, peer through the window of a journal at an earlier image of myself.  But I've never been able to do it. When I've tried, I've always felt self-conscious, stilted, silly to be talking to myself.

So it is with some surprise that I realized recently this blog has become not just a way of sharing some thoughts about new works as I complete them, but a kind of personal journal.  Searching this week through earlier posts to find something I'd said, I could see that over the past three years of regular entries, it's become a chronicle not just of my artwork, but of my travels, activities, preoccupations, puzzlements, frustrations, and minor epiphanies.  Somehow, jotting down a few thoughts about each new painting for people who have shown interest, or might be interested, has allowed me to ruminate in ways I seldom take time to do for myself.

Sunset Peak

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

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

17" x 20" (framed)

It has been a little while since I posted new work on this site, but not because I haven't been painting.  The latest paintings on my studio walls chronicle both my travels and my obsessions of the last couple of months.  Missy and I spent a spectacular week at Camp Denali in early July. I gave talks to guests and staff in the evenings and went on hikes daily with guests and naturalist guides, exploring places both familiar and new to me.  Missy hiked, biked many miles on the Park roads, photographed wildflowers, and had--by her own account--one of her best, most relaxing vacations ever.

As always at Camp Denali, we ate wonderful food and interacted with extraordinary people--both staff and guests.  We had sunny weather almost every day, and "The Mountain" loomed impossibly large from just 27 miles away through the window of our cabin every night in the changing light.

Deep Forest Birch

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

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

20" x 17" (framed)

When we got home, we were a little shocked to see how much the summer season had moved along.  The summer here is so short, the pace of change during the growing season so swift, that the forest changes character from week to week. We returned at the height of summer, and the woods seemed deeper, thicker, far more lush than when we left just seven days before.  I found myself wandering among the birches, enamored with the contrasting light and shade, the depth and variety of the foliage greens and the warmth of the trunks in shafts of sunlight. 

It has been a delight to me, since moving into our home on Chena Ridge two years ago, to be surrounded by so many beautiful examples of my favorite subject.  The few hundred birch trees on our own acre of forest mirror the diversity of their color, shape, and character throughout the region, and as so often happens when I've been away from making images of the trunks for a while, I found myself back in the studio painting their portraits.  

Young birches and old birches.  Birches deep in the forest and at the edge of the woods.  Bright days and rainy days. Midday and midnight.  Every meander through the forest that surrounds us reveals fresh views, and I sometimes think I should paint one trunk a day for a year, chronicling the arboreal life of this one small patch of ground.

Bright Day Birch

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

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

20" x 17" (framed)

I miss living on the river, miss watching the waterfowl arrive and leave from season to season and day to day, miss seeing what rafts down on the high water in flood, and what contrivances people take up and downstream. But living in the woods has reconnected me, more than I ever expected, to the boreal forest that inspired me to be a painter of birches three decades ago. I'm grateful to see them out my window, to be able to walk out my door and touch them every day.  

April Snow

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

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

17" x 20" (framed)

Which reminds me of a little painting that I did on the spur of the moment one day in April, and haven't thought to put here on the site.  My friend David Policansky was visiting from Washington, D.C., and he and I had been talking about how the light changes with the seasons, how hard it is to tell the depth of the snow by just looking at the winter forest floor, how it might be possible to know, at a glance, whether it was early spring or late, whether March or May.

I was working in my studio on something else, on a very bright, sunny day.  All the sky I could see from my studio window was hard, clear blue. And suddenly, snow was falling.  The flakes danced in the sunlight, the south-slanting, snow-covered ground beneath the trees gleamed, and the air was full of swirling white. It was surreal, lasted only a few minutes, but was too good to pass up.  I almost never stop in the middle of one painting to work on another, am usually so wrought up about the one I'm struggling with that I can't refocus on a different scene.  But this little flurry in the April sunshine, cast out of clouds I couldn't see, swept me away, and within minutes I was painting snow falling in the forest--a subject I'd moved on from and left behind a year before.

Al George

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

9 1/2" x 6 1/2"

And then this week, something else.  We attended a memorial potluck on Saturday for our dear friend Al George, who died at age 84 on July 24. Al, his wife Bruth, and their children and grandchildren have been our surrogate Alaskan family for almost 30 years.  We have spent many Christmases, Thanksgivings, Easters with them, celebrated family birthdays with them, and watched our son grow up alongside their grandchildren.

When Missy and I helped harvest potatoes from Al and Bruth's garden and fill their root cellar for the first time, one September more than a quarter century ago, we thought how smart they were to have so many friends our age to help, since they were clearly too old to be doing much of that kind of work themselves.  Now, of course, we're older than they were then, we still work alongside them, their family, and friends in the garden from time to time, and we don't feel old at all.

The potluck, hosted by the family at the homestead where they've lived since the 1950's, was attended by scores of friends from so many overlapping circles of the Fairbanks community. The great food, the fine fellowship, and the easy, comfortable peace that underlay the sadness at Al's passing were fitting tributes to a remarkable Alaskan and dear friend.

So...a variety of recent works I hadn't had time until now to get up on this site.  A small slice of our life in the North, as the seasons fly from spring through summer, toward autumn.  Already, this week, it feels like fall.  It's almost dark now, in the wee hours of the morning.  Runners competing in a race in the hills just outside town this weekend ran through snow flurries. It's early for that.  But we'll have many more nice days, more weeks of picking up our Community Sustained Agriculture share of vegetables from Rosie Creek Farm, and another potato-digging day at the George homestead, before winter sets in.  I like it all--the intensity of summer and the inexorable oncoming of winter, the grand sweep of the seasons--and I wonder what I'll find myself painting next.

 

Fresh Air

I spent last weekend in one of my favorite communities, Petersburg, Alaska, conducting a painting workshop for sixteen local artists of varying ages, backgrounds, and experience. Organized by the "Fresh Air" group of plein-air painters in Petersburg, the workshop was to introduce new ideas and methods for painting directly from life in the outdoors.  These are just a few of the participants, posing with their paintings after a final critique at the end of the first full day of the workshop. 

Most of the members of the Fresh Air group, who have painted together for years in all weathers and seasons, participated along with a number of other local artists. It was a wonderful weekend with an extraordinary group of people. I don't know whether I was most impressed by their dedication, talents, enthusiasm, and hospitality, their willingness to try new things, their flexibility in the face of changing weather and my crazy artistic demands, or their mutual support of one another.

As I usually do in these workshops, I talked about and showed images of my work the first evening, meeting them and letting them know who I am and where I'm coming from artistically, explaining that I don't do demonstrations (and think they're evil), and going over the plans for the next two days. On Saturday and Sunday, they painted all day long in two gorgeous settings--Blind Slough and Sandy Beach. I gave them challenging exercises/assignments, and then went from one to another, working with each individually on ways that they could think differently about outdoor painting, get beyond their comfort zones, discover new ways to connect to their familiar surroundings, make images that were more personal, more individual, and more responsive to that day, that place, that weather and light, and what they saw there and felt about it. As I told them over and over, it seems to me that most plein-air painting deals with eyes and hands, and I wanted them to work at least as much with their heads and hearts.

They did. They were so game--artistically and in every other respect. This is an image of Joe Viechnicki, perched and hard at work in the makeshift shelter he constructed from a branch and a tarp in order to paint the stream rapids entering the waters of the Inside Passage by way of Sandy Beach on a cold, rainy, blustery Southeast Alaska summer day. Other members of the group showed the same kind of determination (and good nature--notice the broad smile on Joe's face in truly uncomfortable conditions) as I gave them task after task designed to make sure they tried new things and worked in unexpected, unfamiliar ways.

I taught painting workshops in Petersburg 16 and 18 years ago, and now, as then, I was knocked out by the vigor of the town, the dedication of its artists, and the good will of the community. This year, as before, I stayed with our dear friend Polly Lee, one of Southeast Alaska's best known potters and painters, an early State Arts Council member and arts leader who has been an inspiration to Alaskans on artistic and other fronts for decades. She, some of the painters in this workshop, and many others in the Petersburg arts community are responsible for the growth of a thriving arts council, museum, an amazing amount of public art, and more in this island community of only about 3000 people.

I get at least as much from these experiences as the artists in the workshops I conduct. It is exhausting, as I work with them, talk with them, and explore art and much else with them from the moment I leave my room in the morning until I retire to it at night. But it's also exhilarating and energizing. I came home Monday feeling refreshed and renewed, having made new friends, full of gratitude for the opportunity to have been a part of this group for a few days, and so optimistic about Alaska's art, artists, and community.

You can see much more of the work of the Fresh Air group of Petersburg painters on the website of members Don and Karen Cornelius, at www.corneliusstudio.com. And you might want to check out the work of two other talented Petersburg artists that Polly Lee introduced me to while I was there. Fiber artist Sue Christensen has a great website at www.sjchristensen.com , and you can see some images of work by painter Pia Reilly at www.takugraphics.com/apreilly.html.

Roasting hot dogs for lunch over one of the fires thoughtfully built and tended all day, both days, by Pete Beckett--husband of workshop participant Carol Beckett.

Canopy - Anchorage International Airport Public Art Commission

Canopy Proposal

©2007 Kesler Woodward and Sheila Wyne

I am delighted to share the news that Anchorage sculptor Sheila Wyne and I have been selected to complete a major commission for the Anchorage International Airport. Canopy, which will be located in the two-story clerestory at the junction of the two main concourses in the airport, will consist of a slightly more than 16 1/2' x 36 1/2' mosaic on the angled clerestory ceiling and a 2 1/2' diameter, 10' high mosaic column.

The column, which will take the form of an abstracted birch trunk, will be visible from a distance to most travelers who have passed through security toward gates or are on their way out of the gate areas.  The ceiling, which depicts a view looking up through a birch forest toward the sky, will not be visible until travelers are almost underneath it.  Our vision is that the column will be intriguing from a distance, but might not even be recognized as a birch trunk until travelers walk beneath the clerestory and the image of the forest canopy opens above them.

Canopy study

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Sheila and I have collaborated on the image from the start.  We made a joint proposal because I was excited about the possibilities for using one of my boreal forest images in the dramatic clerestory space, and Sheila has not only produced mosaics for public spaces, but has worked with other painters to translate their work into this medium.  She looked at many examples of my paintings, and it was she who suggested looking more radically up through the forest canopy.  I have continued to work on birch forest paintings, some of which incorporate that idea, and we have been developing our specific design for this project by sending back and forth and modifying digital images via e-mail. It has been very exciting for me to collaborate with Sheila, whose artistic vision is grounded in three-dimensional art, and we've worked toward a model for the mosaic that will incorporate my fascination with painterly surface, and the boreal forest itself, with her facility for enlivening three-dimensional space and challenging the viewer. We're getting close to a collaborative digital image that will serve as a final model. 

In the course of working together over many months, we discovered that there are several outstanding studios that produce mosaics in collaboration with artists from around the world.  In late April, Sheila and Missy and I made a trip to Munich, Germany, to explore the possibility of working with Franz Mayer of Munich (http://www.mayer-of-munich.com) on the project.  We spent a week in their amazing facility in downtown Munich--6 floors, 30,000 square feet of studio space, apartments for artists who are working with them, every conceivable kind of equipment and supplies for mosaics and stained glass, and a large group of master craftspersons who love what they do. We worked with two of those master craftsmen, who over the course of the week produced about a one-meter square mockup of a section of the ceiling image at full scale, exploring with us ways of translating it from painting to mosaic.

Their talents, facilities, experience, and excitement about our project were all extraordinary.  The range of artwork we saw there, in progress or in examples from past projects with major artists around the world, was remarkable.  They are excited, and we are excited to work with them over the coming year, as they produce the mosaics in small glass tesserae, glass cakes, natural stone, and other materials.  We anticipate installation about this time next year.  I will post images and updates on the work in progress during the coming months.  

I am grateful to be working with Sheila, one of Alaska's best known contemporary artists, whose work I have long admired but whom I didn't know well before undertaking this commission. Developing this project has been in every way a partnership, and I have appreciated not only her artistic vision, but her experience with the public art process and her willingness, along with that of her longtime partner Bruce Farnsworth, to undertake so much of the ongoing logistics of the project. And I am grateful for the chance to produce a significant artwork in a striking public space that I will pass through regularly for the rest of my life.  

I am accustomed to working alone in my studio every day, even on large commissions, so this is a very different kind of artmaking experience for me. But I am happy to be involved in this large, collaborative effort, and I think that together we are going to make something wonderful.