Painting in the North

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. 

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." 

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) 

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.

Animals

Magpie at the East Fork Cabin
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on paper
20" x 28" (image)

I have almost never painted animals.  I did a handful of small watercolors a couple of years ago, mostly in response to a dare, or at least a challenge, from another artist who suggested that I didn't do them because I feared I couldn't.  But a couple of things have conspired to bring me back to the subject more seriously.  One is that I am a very inexpert, but avid birder, and numerous friends have asked me why, since I love to watch birds so much, I've never painted them.

Perhaps more importantly, I spent even more time than usual when Missy and I were staying in Denali Park this year looking hard at the wildlife.  We saw wolves, sheep, caribou, moose, and of course lots of grizzly bears, but at the East Fork Cabin itself, we were almost constantly in the presence of humbler creatures--magpies, ground squirrels, and hares--and everywhere we went along the Park Road there were ptarmigan.  I found myself doing something I rarely do. I did quick pen-and-ink drawings of some of the bears, just for the fun of it, and I spent a lot of time sitting on the porch of the cabin sketching the ubiquitous magpies, hares, and ground squirrels.

I've resisted painting animals for years, even though I've become more and more interested in them, mainly because there's so much baggage associated with painting wildlife.  I lived in Alaska for 25 years before I painted Denali--Mt. McKinley--because it took me that long to feel like I had something personal to say about a subject that has long since become an Alaskan cliché. Just as with that image, I don't pretend to believe that I have something startlingly new and profound to say about Alaskan wildlife, but I do, after more than 30 years, feel like I can perhaps paint some of the animals that I've come to know well, honestly and personally and in an individual way.

Ptarmigan at Teklanika
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on paper
28" x 20" (image)

There are two big challenges for me in painting these animals.  The first is the one I always face, no matter what the subject. That's my insistence on having my cake and eating it too--on wanting every painting to be both completely representational and totally abstract.  From a distance, I want you to look and say, "Wow, it's a magpie!" or "That's the most beautiful birch tree I've ever seen!"  But as you get closer, I want you to look less and less at the subject and more and more at the paint, and when you get as close as I am when I paint it, I want you to get lost, as I do, in the abstract welter of color, surface, and form.

But I also want these animal paintings to be portraits, just as the people I painted a few years ago were portraits, and just as I call the birch trees "birch portraits."  I don't want a generic magpie, but the magpie that I watched one particular day, from a few feet away, at the East Fork of the Toklat River.  I want not just "a ground squirrel," but the ground squirrel that lives under the porch of the East Fork Cabin, the one that startled Missy by nibbling on the toe of her boot one day as she was sitting, reading on the porch.

That's the most remarkable thing to me about painting these animals.  I was surprised several years ago, when making four times lifesize oil pastel portraits of my friends Bill and Dale Fairbanks, David Policansky, and others, that their character appeared on the paper without my consciously trying to put it there.  I not only wasn't trying to represent some aspect of their personalities, but I wouldn't have had any idea how to go about doing so. I was astonished when not only did their personalities appear, but I learned something new about each of them from the image that resulted.  Clearly, that happened not through some remarkable insight on my part, but because their character was present in the shape of their mouths, the lines on their faces, the look in their eyes--things that I was simply trying as hard as I could to represent as accurately as possible, while at the same time walking that tightrope between representation and abstraction.

Ground Squirrel Visitor
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on paper
28" x 20" (image)

It's hard for me to know for certain, because when I look at these new images I see, in my mind's eye and memory, the critters themselves as I encountered them.  But it seems to me the magpie in the painting is trying to act nonchalant, knows that I'm no threat, but is absolutely aware of my every move, just in case. It seems to me that this little ground squirrel looks at me from two feet away not just in some disdain, but almost in challenge, knowing that he's the one at home on that porch, and I'll be gone in a few days. 

And the ptarmigan... It's a beautiful bird, camouflaged by its elaborate, patterned coloration, but doesn't it seem in the painting to be exactly the way they always look--I'm sorry, I know it's the Alaska State Bird--befuddled, almost completely clueless, unencumbered by even a hint of the kind of curious reflection shown by the magpie?

I'll get to the bears and wolves one of these days.  I think I'll know when I'm ready to say something about them.  In the meantime, I offer these personal responses to the more modest creatures we shared the Park with daily this summer, and so thoroughly enjoyed.

Denali Wonders

Denali Wonder
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on paper
6 1/2" x 9 1/2"

Missy and I had the unexpected opportunity to spend time again last weekend in Denali Park, driving back to Camp Denali and spending the night there.  It was an utter delight, as always, to be with the folks at Camp Denali.  One of the things that always amazes me is that the guests are almost as engaging as the extraordinary staff.  The place invariably attracts people who are wide open to experience and wonder.  It was such a pleasure to sit in that dining room in the wilderness, enjoying a gourmet meal and listening to the joyfully delivered informal day reports of guests and naturalists who spent their day in activities ranging from strolls in the immediate vicinity to strenuous hikes on surrounding ridges.

The guest cabins were all full, so we had the privilege of spending the night in the historic A-frame cabin that Woody and Ginny Wood built for themselves many years ago, when Camp Denali was first established. On this last weekend of the season for Camp Denali, the night was cold, and we built fires in the little woodstove to drive away the chill, but got up several times to go out on the porch and see Denali partially reveal itself as the clouds briefly parted in the wee hours. 

Denali Twilight
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on paper
6 1/2" x 9 1/2"

It has been, as always for me this time of year, an unexpected pleasure to see the stars again, as the night sky gets dark after months of continuous light.  There's a sadness in the waning summer, of course, and a bracing for the onslaught of winter, but also a relief that the frenetic pace that accompanies summer here is about to give way to quieter time, shorter days, longer nights, more sleep. 

The thing I missed most about Alaska in our brief time away, other than its people, was the drama of the changing seasons. That drama is most evident around the equinoxes, both spring and fall.  Even after 30 years in the far North, I am both shocked and energized by the breathtaking speed at which the daylight changes, the seasons transform the landscape, and the character of daily life is transformed. I'm always more than ready, impatient, for the transformation in spring, and invariably torn between sadness, relief, and excitement by the all-too-brief pageantry of fall. It's spectacular in the forest around our house in Fairbanks, and awe-inspiring on the wide open tundra of Denali Park.

Denali Park Shadows
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on paper
6 1/2" x 9 1/2"

These three new images are acrylic on paper, handled like watercolor.  They are responses to what we saw, and what we felt, on this last trip into the Park and on our weeklong stay at the East Fork cabin last month.  As so often with my small works on paper, they will probably serve not only as paintings in themselves, but as studies for larger canvases that try to probe even deeper into my memories of a  time, place, and experience.

Denali Splendor

Denali Splendor
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on canvas
48" x 60" (image)
49 1/2" x 61 1/2" (framed)

There are only two places I've been to multiple times in my life that seem to me perfect.  One is the Aspen Institute in Colorado, where I stayed several times while participating in arts symposiums. Originally designed by Bauhaus artist and architect Herbert Bayer, even today every element--right down to the doorknobs, faucets, and trash cans--is thoughtfully conceived, elegant without a trace of ostentation, functional and just right. 

The other place that I always have that feeling is Camp Denali --a wilderness lodge near the end of a 90-mile gravel road, within the boundaries of Denali National Park and Preserve.  It is a place where people from around the world who are more interested in understanding the Park's land, animals, climate, character, and their interrelationships with people than in staying in air conditioned comfort or luxury come for a few days, a week, or occasionally more.  The cabins in which guests stay are perfectly proportioned, beautifully built and maintained, rustic but charming.  Electricity is available in several larger structures--a science/study area, a group library/lounge, and a dining hall.  The food served each evening is thoughtfully, beautifully, and inventively prepared, and simply served. Nothing is for show.  Nothing is fancy.  It's all just perfect.

Denali Splendor is a view of Denali (Mt. McKinley) from there--just the top of it, looming above a ridge in the middle distance, from just above a small tundra pond on the Camp grounds. Every time I've seen it from there, it's seemed impossibly big. There's something about realizing that all that's showing is the top of that enormous massif that makes it even more astounding.  It is one of my favorite views of what we call here simply, "The Mountain."

Missy and I just spent a week in the Park, in an even more rustic but equally magical place, the East Fork Cabin .  Located 43 miles along the Park Road, close by the East Fork of the Toklat River, it is the cabin in which Adolph Murie stayed during 1939-41, when he did his landmark study of wolf/dall sheep and other predator/prey relationships in the Park. Today it serves primarily as a stopping place for Park Service dog team patrols that travel the Park in winter, occasional guests of the Park Service, and Artists-in-Residence who stay in it for ten-day stints in summer.

The cabin is in a location that is not only spectacular, but is a natural funnel for wildlife, between Sable and Polychrome passes. As usual when we've stayed there, we saw grizzlies and caribou passing close by, dall sheep on the surrounding mountains, golden eagles soaring over the adjacent hills and ridges, and more. Within a few miles of the cabin, on this trip, we watched wolves chasing caribou and an encounter between a mother grizzly with her three yearling cubs and a lone male bear twice her size. Another day we watched a grizzly that had taken a big bull caribou from the group of wolves that just killed it, and having feasted on it, lay warily down practically on top of it to nap. On the drive out we stopped to get out and get a better look at a merlin in a tree near the road, and a whole family of them proceeded to call at one another from the tops of trees on both sides of the way.

It's the feeling of gratitude I have for such opportunities, the sense of what a privilege it seems to me to get to be in such a place, and my wonder at it all that I try to get into all my paintings of Denali National Park and Preserve. I've been visiting and painting in and about the Park for more than a quarter century now, and each time I go, I come back excited about having more to say about this place. The 4' x 5' painting Denali Splendor was started weeks before the recent visit, fueled by my anticipation, and was finished this week in the wake of a fresh encounter with The Mountain.

New Paintings

Resplendent
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on canvas
16" x 20" (image)
17 1/2/" x 21 1/2" (framed)

These are the last two paintings I've completed for my exhibition which opens at the Bunnell Street Gallery in Homer, Alaska on the first Friday in July.  I have been doing these multi-layered, heightened-color paintings off and on for more than ten years, but only occasionally, among other, more naturalistic works.  The show in Homer will be the first time I've completed an entire exhibition of paintings of this sort.  It has been an adventure.  Each of these paintings is slow, fraught with anxiety, and painstaking, as I wander around in the painterly, metaphorical wilderness looking for the right combination of image, surface, and color to convey a particular feeling about a place.  They take two, three, or four times as long as my more conventionally realistic paintings, and in each one, I go through a protracted period of near despair, wondering if I will ever find my way to a solution.  I keep layering one color over another, changing the relationships, putting on paint and scraping it away, covering ninety percent of each layer with the next, and one day--often when I'm about to give up and start over--things begin to fall into place and I realize it's going to work out.  Even these small ones take a ridiculous amount of time and energy, but they have a lot of me in them, and they seem to get at something deeper, more meaningful about my relationship to an individual time and place.

Anima
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on canvas
16" x 20" (image)
17 1/2" x 21 1/2" (framed)