Painting in the North

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.

Painted Study for Canopy Ceiling

©Kesler Woodward 2008

This is the latest version of our ceiling image, which I finished painting less than two weeks ago.  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 an image looking up through the forest canopy.  I have been at work on that idea, with her ongoing feedback to studies along the way, since late last summer.

In the course of working together over that time, 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.

Last Light of Winter

                             

Last Light-Sun                                                 
Last Light-Twilight

Both paintings ©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on canvas
Each 20" x 16" (image)
Each 21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed)

These two new paintings, a commission for friends in Seattle, have proved a fascinating puzzle and good challenge for me over the last month.  The collectors wanted two images of the sort I have been painting in my "Epiphany" series of views of the winter forest, looking into the sun, but they wanted something more specific as well.  The paintings are intended for the same wall, on opposite sides of a table, to function almost as "windows" looking out on a low sun, bright but twilit winter scene.

I painted the one that actually incorporates the low sun first, essentially completing it and feeling very happy with it.  Then I turned to the second scene, which needed to feature the same light, but not be contiguous with the first, since the "windows" are to be substantially separated. Without the dramatic, guttering sun, I knew it had to be subtler, and at least as much about light as about trees, branches, and snow.  I worked on it for some time, and was pretty pleased with it, but kept feeling that I wanted something more.  This is the kind of situation that normally drives me crazy, but fortunately, Missy and I had a trip planned to Germany, where I would work for a week with a company that collaborates with artists around the world to do major glass and mosaic installations.  That trip, and what it may lead to, is a story for another time, but in terms of these paintings, it was a godsend.

When I returned and looked at the two paintings with fresh eyes, I knew that the second one had to have more.  The two canvases needed to work together, but they were to be two paintings, not one painting with two panels, and so each had to have a separate character, while working in concert.  I completely reworked the sky in the second painting, dramatically increasing the left-to-right transition toward twilight, with its eerie colors, and pushing the intensity of the hues in the branches more and more radically.  Up close, it is almost mosaic-like in the complexity of the colors in the branches, the flickering light on the winter forest.

Nearly completing the second canvas necessitated changes in the first, and around and around I went for another few days, finally just yesterday realizing I was happy with both--individually and in concert.  Another day of fixing and adjusting, and they were done.  These are small paintings, but the desire of the collectors for a specific kind of effect, and my excitement at trying to achieve it,  made the entire process a challenging but immensely rewarding one. 

Bright Tracks

Bright Tracks
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on canvas
40" x 30" (image)
41 1/2" x 31 1/2" (framed)

This morning in Fairbanks it's 14º and snowing, for the fourth straight day.  The good news is that I should be able to get back on the ski trail this afternoon, after deciding a week ago that I was probably done for the winter.  Spring is a fitful, often tortuous passage in Interior Alaska.

I realized, working on this painting, how seldom I have included evidence of my own presence, of any human activity, in my paintings of the Alaska landscape.  I think the last time I depicted the tracks of my skis through the snow was a dozen years ago, when I allowed their furrows to cross the slanting shadows of birch trees in a commissioned painting I completed for the thirtieth wedding anniversary of friends.  I have long been attracted to paths, trails, all kinds of passageways through every kind of forest, as both route and metaphor, so it strikes me as odd that I haven't mined that image more extensively.  One of the great mysteries to me about my own work is how things I notice, admire, puzzle over, and wonder about for years never appear in my paintings, and then one day seem to need exploring.

Bright Tracks combines that beginning journey with the ongoing one of looking into the sun.  This is the trail on which I've skied most days all winter, just yards from my back door, along a remnant of the old Fairbanks Exploration Company ditch through which water was pumped from the Chena River to gold mines in Ester, early in the last century.  It has been one of the chief joys of this winter to be back on that trail, which I walked and skied for the first time more than a quarter century ago, and so even though I'm ready for spring, I'm happy to have another few days of watching the sunlight glint on my tracks.

March

Sun on the Trail
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on paper
20" x 28" (image)

It's March--one of the best times of the year in Interior Alaska. The days are getting rapidly longer. Already, with the early onset of Daylight Savings Time, it's light out until almost 9 p.m., but the snow is still deep and good for skiing, and despite unseasonably warm, even record high temperatures last week, it's mostly pristine, unbroken, all-covering in the forest. 

I continue to paint what has now become an extensive series of views in which I'm looking directly into that ever-brightening sun--paintings that I think of as "epiphanies."   As almost always, I didn't set out to do a series, but began with something I noticed, realized that there were other ways I could do it and other things to explore about it, and one day looked up to find my studio full of paintings on a theme. My friend Len Edgerly asked me a couple of years ago how I know when a series is finished. After thinking about it, I realized that what happens is that one day I find myself, instead of thinking, "Which of my hundred ideas about this do I want to explore next?" thinking, "O.K., what else can I do along these lines?"  When I hear myself ask that latter question, I know the series is done.  Fortunately, by that time, if not before, there's always something else that's driving me crazy that I want to explore.

Smith Lake Sunlight
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Oil pastel on paper
28" x 20" (image)

One of the things I've noticed about March is that every year, I suddenly become aware of skies again.  It seems like all winter long, I'm attuned to the quality of the light, and I watch the changing trajectory of the sun, but the clouds are rarely active or interesting.  It's often overcast, snowing, or perfectly clear.  Sometimes a bank of clouds covers part of the sky, and is moving into the region or out.  But seldom are there active patterns in the clouds, baroque forms and colors that grab my attention, elaborate, complex, ever-shifting structures in the sky.

In March, all those things return, and I'm knocked out, day after day, by the variety and splendor of the display.  Nearly every spring I make images of the sky, usually at dawn or dusk, and I do the same thing again in fall, when twilight and darkness begin to return after months of continuous light. 

So, one day a couple of weeks ago I found myself pulling out my oil pastels--the medium I most often employ to respond directly, explore, react to new phenomena, new places, or sights I haven't thought about for a while.  I hadn't done any of the epiphany paintings of direct sun in oil pastels, and it was a delight to play with the stark light of the bright spring sun, backlighting the spruces that surround Smith Lake, making them darker than ever, and casting flickering, multi-hued afterimages at their margins.

Bright March Light
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on paper
9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image)

Just last week I agreed with a couple from Seattle to undertake for them a new private commission--two paintings of low, bright sunlight breaking through the forest, dematerializing the trees in one panel and casting shadows on the forest in the other.  The two paintings will hang somewhat apart, and will function almost as "windows" in the room where they will hang them, appearing to look out onto a scene that's continuous, but because it's not shown in its entirety,  doesn't match edge-to-edge.  I did something similar for a public art commission I completed several years ago for an upper floor lobby in the Rabinowitz Courthouse in Fairbanks, and found the challenge intriguing, so I'm looking forward to tackling it again in the context of these new "epiphany" paintings.

Thinking about that commission has energized my skiing forays in the woods this week.  I've been looking for sun at just the right angle, for a scene that affords the kind of foreground forest scaffolding I like for the sun to penetrate, and adjoining ground on which the light coming right toward me can cast lights and shadows that are interesting in themselves.  The sun will be lower than in this little study, and the woods almost certainly more open, but as usual, I'm finding new delights while searching for the image in my head. And I hope that also, as usual, I'll end up with an image that does what I wished for, but in a way I'd never anticipated.

Never Night

Never Night, poems by Derick Burleson. ©Derick Burleson, 2007. Grosse Pointe, Michigan: Marick Press, 2008.

I am honored that Alaska poet Derick Burleson chose to use my painting  West Ridge October on the cover of his extraordinary new book of poems. Never Night is a wonderful collection of the Fairbanks poet's reflections on life, family, love, death, place, and home, stretching from his childhood on a farm in Oklahoma to the homestead on which he lives today in Two Rivers, Alaska.

Derick, whose first book, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-1994 won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  You can get your own copy of this volume by visiting your local bookstore, clicking on the direct Amazon.com link to the book in the lower right hand column of this website, or at www.marickpress.com.

It has been a great privilege for me to have my paintings associated through publication with the work of several of Alaska's most talented writers. Blaze, published by Red Hen Press in 2005, juxtaposes thirty years of my paintings of birch trees and boreal forest with poems by Peggy Shumaker, one of Alaska's best known poets. 

The product of a long and rewarding collaboration, Blaze was conceived as a conversation between poet and painter, some paintings done in response to specific poems, some poems written in response to my paintings, and other pairings selected by the two of us to question, challenge, reinforce, and enrich perceptions of each. 

Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace, by Fairbanks writer Frank Soos, was published in 1999 by University of Georgia Press and released in a new paperback edition by them in 2006.  Five of Frank's remarkable essays, ostensibly about fly fishing but at least as much about values and how one lives one's life, are illustrated by a number of my paintings.  University of Alaska Museum designer Wanda Chin created the striking design for this small volume, and the University of Georgia Press produced it exquisitely.

It has been a great joy for me to participate in each of these collaborations, and I hope to do many more in the future.  If there are any of these books you haven't seen, please check them out.  You won't be disappointed.

For more information and details on all of my books, click here to reach the "Books" page on my main website, www.keslerwoodward.com.

Winter Sun

Transfiguration
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on canvas
30" x 40" (image)
31 1/2" x 41 1/2" (framed)

I have been especially struck this year by the way my perception of the seasons mirrors the calendar of the Christian Church. I have thought of the recent series of paintings I have been doing, in which sunlight is breaking into the forest, as "epiphanies," which seems particularly apt since I almost invariably start noticing that phenomenon shortly after the January 6 date of the Church's festival of Epiphany.

As I worked on this new painting the last couple of weeks, I have been continuing to ski on the trails in the woods that surround my home. Both on the trail and in the studio, I have been entranced with the way the growing, brightening, yellowing light of the sun on these rapidly lengthening days transfigures the winter forest.  I was somewhat taken aback, then, but utterly delighted, to find us celebrating "Transfiguration Sunday" at my Lutheran church this week.

Here in Interior Alaska, at this time of year, we are somewhat in need of transfiguration--the radical transformation of appearance, metamorphosis, or sudden emanation of radiance that the term refers to in both secular and religious traditions.  Our days have grown to more than 7 hours in length, from less than 4 in late December, but the deep cold is relentless.  It is -40ºF today, as I write.  I skied the trails at -35ºF recently and was comfortable, not just because I have very warm clothes, but because I was working hard--skiing on snow that refuses to melt and glide, more like sand than ice at those temperatures.

As I frequently try to explain to friends Outside, it is not the extremes of cold that are hard in Alaska--it is the relentlessness of it.  In February, after months of deep cold behind us and more ahead of us, it tries to grind us down.  The transfiguration of the landscape by the brightening sun on these lengthening days is a gift that helps us bear it.  So we pass Transfiguration Sunday, on our way toward Easter and the eventual, perennial, miraculous resurrection of spring.

Gaining Daylight

Morning Light
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on canvas
20" x 16" (image)
21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed)

It's less than a month after the winter solstice, and early this week it was 42ºF below zero here in Fairbanks, but the light is growing.  We've already gained more than an hour and a half of daylight, and for the first time, this morning, I noticed the difference without looking for it.  Still a long way to climb out of the dark, but we've begun, and I find myself in the studio wanting to celebrate it.

Texture

Approaching Denali
©Kesler Woodward 2008

Sharp-eyed visitors to this site might have noticed that the last painting, Approaching Denali, (see the January 7 post below) was done in oil, while most of my recent work has been done in acrylic.  I go back and forth between the two, working in one or the other for up to a couple of years at a time.  The results are remarkably alike, given how different it is to work in the two mediums.  When I see older paintings of mine, I sometimes have a hard time telling which medium I used, myself.  Last year, I was in a museum that had on exhibit two of the largest paintings of mine they own, and the one done in acrylic was labeled "oil," and the one done in oil labeled "acrylic." The process of working, however, is very different.  Acrylic dries too quickly, and oil dries too slowly. When I paint in acrylic, I'm always trying to take advantage of its fast drying time, which is a boon when doing images of the sort I've done for the last year and a half, in which I work in many layers. 

Detail: Approaching Denali

I'm not sure why I decided, when starting Approaching Denali, that I wanted to do it in oil.  I think I just wanted to see if I could excavate the surface the way I'd been doing in acrylic. I was able to do so, and I think the resulting surface is at least as rich and dense as those of the acrylics, but it required even more time and patience than the many-layered acrylic canvases of a similar sort. 

If there is a difference in result, it's very subtle, and I was curious, when I completed that painting, whether someone seeing an image of it on the computer would find its texture different from that of the recent acrylics.  So I asked my friend David Policansky, a scientist with the National Research Council in Washington, D.C., who I thought would be an especially keen and dispassionate observer, whether he could tell a difference.  His response surprised and a little dismayed me.  He said that he not only couldn't tell the difference, but that none of the paintings appeared onscreen to have any pronounced texture.  He's a collector of my work, and has seen a lot of it, so he knows that it does, but he couldn't tell anything about the texture from the image on the web, at all.

Detail: Approaching Denali

That response prompted me to do something I've thought about doing for some time--take some detail photographs of a painting's surface, in raking light, to try to give viewers of my works on the web a sense of what their surface is really like. I think the several detail views of Approaching Denali seen here make it clearer.  In fact, the raking light and tight detail exaggerate the surface incident somewhat.  The paintings themselves, even when seen from inches away, are not quite as craggy as what you see here...but there is a lot going on with their surfaces.  Anyone who has seen my work in person knows that.  It's a large part of the "completely abstract up close, completely representational from far away" dichotomy/transition/mystery I'm always after, and which I've talked about often.   But if you've never seen my work firsthand, my friend David's perception of the images on the web makes me think you may be surprised to see these detail views.  I hope, either way, it's interesting and illuminating.

(Remember that if you click on any of the images on this site, you can see them at a much larger size.)

Details:  Approaching Denali

Dreaming about Denali

Approaching Denali
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Oil on canvas
36" x 48" (image)
37 1/2" x 49 1/2" (framed)

Each winter, especially in the darkest part of the season, I seem to begin dreaming of more color, and dreaming of Denali. I go back to small images like the one below, done in response to particular views of the mountain from different places, at different times of day and in varying weather, and I mine those images and my recollections of them.

I think only someone who has spent a lot of time in Denali National Park would even recognize this as Mt. McKinley.  It's not a traditional view of the massif, which is so often depicted from the south, near Talkeetna, or from the north, near Wonder Lake.  It's not even exactly the same view I've painted numerous times, from Stony Hill, looking west.  Instead, it's a view of the mountain as it just begins to appear over the shoulder of Highway Pass, along the Park Road.  The mountain itself is mostly hidden by one tail end of the pass, and clouds are rapidly moving in, already beginning to break up its distinctive silhouette. I'm racing to get to see it before it disappears.

This is the great advantage of having time in the Park, of going back again and again--not only seeing, but learning to enjoy the mountain not just from the "best" vantage points, and on "perfect" days, but in many of its moods and weathers. This year I'm hoping, and planning, to go in during the winter--to spend some time in the vicinity of this view and others while the land is still locked in winter white.  In the meantime, I remember what it was like the last time I was there, and I crave the intensity of color that I miss during these short, dark days of December and January.

Clouds at Denali
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on paper
6.5" x 9.5" (image)

Christmas

Denali National Park - Fire and Ice
Missy Woodward and Kesler Woodward
6" diameter painted ornament for the 2007 White House Christmas Tree

This was the most unusual project since I painted the Alaska Easter Egg one year for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, during the Reagan administration.  But it was an honor for Missy and me to produce the official Denali National Park ornament for the 2007 White House Christmas tree. 

Paul Anderson, the Denali Park Superintendent, told me back in August that First Lady Laura Bush had decided to make "America's National Parks" the theme of this year's White House tree, and he asked if I would paint the ornament for Denali Park.  I was, of course, delighted at the opportunity to be able to do anything for the Park, and accepted enthusiastically.  But when I began the task, I had a terrible time.  I kept trying to turn it into a painting, not make a decoration.  After coming home to find me more and more frustrated every day for a week, as I painted new images on and wiped them off, Missy took pity on me and agreed to help.  She is an extraordinary designer, craftswoman, and decorative painter, and with her efforts, the 6" diameter ball became an accurate rendering of the profile of Denali and the surrounding peaks, with a dramatic night sky and the aurora blazing in curtains of light above it, all the way around.

Missy beaded not only the mountains, but the auroral curtains, staying up late into the night each night for a week, gluing on row after row of tiny seed beads.  We took the best photos we could, but they don't do it justice.  Like the other couple of hundred ornaments on the 18' tall tree, each celebrating a different national park, monument, or preserve, it is a beauty and a delight. We are both pleased and proud to have been able to do this for Denali National Park and Preserve.  And I'm grateful to have a partner whose skills, energy, and good will can save me when I overconfidently agree to do things that I don't have the particular talents for at all.

My work at Collins, Lefebvre, Stoneberger Gallery in Montreal, Canada

In other December news, my 2006 painting Snow at Christmas was featured in, and on the cover of the announcement for, a group show of gallery artists at a Montreal gallery that has been representing my work since this past spring.

Collins, Lefebvre, Stoneberger is an outstanding contemporary art gallery in that city, specializing in fine art of the Americas.  I have spent a considerable amount of time traveling, adventuring, and painting in Canada, from the Yukon Territory to Algonquin Park in Ontario, James Bay and Hudson Bay in Quebec, to the Madeleine Islands in the Gulf of St. Laurence, and it is a great pleasure to be represented by such a fine gallery in that country.

To see my work at Collins, Lefebvre, Stoneberger, and some of the other terrific work they show, check out their website at http://www.collinslefebvrestoneberger.com/.

The ornament for the White House and the show in Montreal are the highlights for my work this month.  I have a new painting nearly done that I hope to have completed and up on the site soon, but right now Missy and I are enjoying the delights of having a house full of immediate and extended family for Christmas.  It was -45ºF the day before they began arriving, on the shortest day of the year, but it has happily been milder, even occasionally above 0ºF ever since, and we're gaining light every day now.  On the comeback trail!

Happy Holidays to you all.