Kesler Woodward

Travel and Work

I've just returned from a weeklong artist residency on Orcas Island, Washington. My stay in the beautiful Kangaroo House Bed and Breakfast there was the prize for being chosen 2012 Artist of the Year by Artsmith,  an Eastsound, Washington-based arts organization that provides residencies, literary events, and exhibition, performance, and publishing opportunities for artists and writers. 

The week exploring relatively remote, sprawling, lake- and mountain-filled Orcas Island from this peaceful, comfortable base was both restful and energizing, and will lead, in time, to new work. I am deeply grateful to Jill McCabe Johnson, Director of Artsmith, and to her and her husband Charles for their great breakfasts, warm welcome, and care during the week on Orcas.

As always when I travel, especially to new locales, I tried on Orcas to focus on being in the place, getting to know it, rather than making images of it. I try as hard as I can not to even think about what kind of images I might make, but instead give the place itself my full attention, explore it as fully as possible. I sometimes do sketches, and I do take photographs for future reference, so that when the time comes I will get the shape of things exactly right, but I don't try to do work about the place while I'm there.

I know from past experience that if I work from life, I will spend a lot of time responding to the landscape's prettiest, most superficially attractive aspects, and that it is much better for me to give all my attention to the place itself. I pay attention to what it looks like, of course--its weather, its light, its topography--but just as much or more to what it makes me think about, how it relates to what I've been reading, how it feels to be there. I am ultimately, always, trying to make work about what it felt like to be in a place, more than what that place looked like.

Weeks or months, perhaps as much as a year from now, I'll go up to my studio one morning, and I'll realize that the experience of being on Orcas Island has trickled down into my consciousness deeply enough that I have something more personal to say about it than, "Isn't this a pretty place?"  Then I'll marshall my images, and more importantly my memories, and I'll try to distill on canvas or paper something that gets at that feeling. I have no idea what those images will be. The only thing I know is that they won't look anything like the photos I took this month of that pretty place.

 

 

I tend to think that unless I'm in my studio, painting, then I'm not at work, so it's important to remind myself that both getting out every day into the great boreal forest that surrounds my home and traveling to new places are parts of my work as well.  In the last year, I've spent time in many other parts of Alaska, and in North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, and Arizona, and images have come from or will come from all of them.

On my studio wall, in drawers and sketchbooks and elsewhere, are lots of images from past travels--oil pastels and paintings on paper from riverbanks near Fairbanks to Denali National Park in Alaska, Congaree National Park in South Carolina, a bridled titmouse at Patagonia Lake in Arizona, and many more. These are not currently framed and hanging in galleries, and most don't even appear on the "Available Works" section of this website, but they are an essential part of the weird, idiosyncratic way in which I seem to need to work.

So, for example, I have made two trips to Juneau in the last year--more than 600 miles from Fairbanks and a world away in climate and ecosytem. I taught a weeklong workshop there last June, and I went back down in November for the opening of our Boreal Birch exhibit at the Alaska State Museum.

The June trip afforded me the opportunity to get out with artists from the Plein Rein group of plein-air painters into some of my favorite landscapes anywhere. I didn't paint while I was there, but focused on my teaching and on being in that wonderful place with those terrific people. Many months later, well into winter, I made images based on that experience--not the images I would have guessed I would make, when I was there, but of moments and places that seemed to need to be painted when the time came.

Three of those images--a raven sitting on rocks below the tidal waterfall at Amalga Harbor, silvery light off the water filtering through the Southeast Alaska rainforest, and Mendenhall Glacier, which I hadn't painted since I lived there more than 30 years ago--have just this month migrated from my studio wall to my framer, on their way to the Juneau City Museum.

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Paintings will almost certainly come from the November trip, as well, but I don't know when. All I can do is go to my studio and work. What happens there, what I need to paint, only reveals itself to me in its own time.

New Year, New Work, New Shows, News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Fall and Winter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking About Snow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boreal Birch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring Dreams

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

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

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

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

 

Birchbark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A North Carolina Exhibition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well Street Art Gallery

My big solo exhibition at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks opened October 1 and continues through the end of the month.  27 paintings of birches and the boreal forest, 25 of them brand new. It was a great treat for me to get to use both the gallery's large exhibit spaces, which are normally divided between concurrent solo exhibitions by two artists.  As usual with exhibits in Fairbanks, the First Friday opening reception was a three-hour crush of people.  We artists are so lucky, I always think. In how many other professions, every time you finish a big project or body of work, does someone throw a giant party for you, invite the whole community, and treat you to a celebration with a couple of hundred friends?

David Mollett, the gallery owner, did a terrific job of installing the paintings in the galleries, mixing up the sizes and providing long viewing vistas for the larger works.  He told me at the opening that when he finished the installation, he wondered whether I had come in during the summer, measured the walls, and painted paintings of just the right number and size so that they would fit.  I just laughed and assured him that no, I had just painted as hard as I could for as long as I could, until I ran out of time.  I did wonder later, though, whether he really thought I was that compulsive!

I've posted images of all the paintings in the exhibition at the beginning of the Available Work Album, which you can access by clicking on the icon at top of the right hand column of this page.  But I'll post a few of them here, for even easier viewing.

Nineteen ©Kesler Woodward 2010  Acrylic on canvas  48" x 60"

Calling   ©Kesler Woodward 2010   Acrylic on canvas    24" x 36"

Wounded   ©Kesler Woodward 2010   Acrylic on canvas   20" x 16"

Colors of Winter   ©Kesler Woodward 2010   Acrylic on canvas   24" x 36"

Birch Woods for Denali

Birch Woods for Denali     ©Kesler Woodward 2010     Acrylic on Canvas     2 panels - each 48" x 60"

Nineteen years ago, Missy and I took our son Eli to Denali Elementary School in Fairbanks for his first day of kindergarten. That day, I asked his teacher Katie Brown whether I could come in to read a story to the class once a week. Little did I know, that day, that I'd still be reading to that kindergarten class every Wednesday I'm in town, almost two decades later. It is, quite simply, the most purely unalloyed joy of every week in my life. 

Katie Brown is a remarkable teacher, whose main mission in life seems to be trying to catch one of her students doing something good, something well, something right, and reinforce it. And Denali is an extraordinary public school--perhaps not unique, but certainly rare in Alaska or anywhere else, in its stability, sense of shared purpose and mutual encouragement, and delight in its mission. I got to know all of Eli's elementary school teachers well, reading to each of his classes weekly as he continued through the sixth grade. Five of those seven teachers are still there, almost twenty years later, along with many of the staff who helped make his elementary school experience such a rich and rewarding one. When he moved on to Middle School, I stayed, reading to Katie Brown's kindergarten class, and for several years now to another of Eli's wonderful teachers, Sharlee Reabold's, second grade class as well.

Tim Doran, who took over as Principal when Eli was in first grade, is still the Principal today, and his leadership has unquestionably fostered and helped sustain the school's continuing spirit and sense of close community. So I shouldn't have been surprised, even though I was, when he approached me several months ago to say that he wanted to commission a large painting for the dramatic two-story stairwell on the south end of the building--a space which is not only beautifully lit by big, high, southern and eastern windows, but is visible through those windows, especially on dark winter days, as the school is approached by road from the south. 

Tim wanted birch trees, birch forest--my signature subject matter--and I was happy to oblige. When the two 4' x 5'  paintings I've just finished are installed side by side, a foot or so apart, high in that space, I hope they will look like windows themselves, into the heart of the great boreal forest that surrounds both the school and the Fairbanks community.

Denali Elementary is full of brightly colored, wonderful art of all kinds, ranging from student work, to historical paintings purchased in the 1950's, to stained glass, sculpture, murals, mobiles, and more, some but not all of it commissioned through Alaska's Public Art Program when its new building was completed just a few years ago. Tim was able to find funding for my paintings through fundraising and the support of his PTA, and I am deeply honored that I will have a major piece of my artwork permanently enshrined in this remarkable place.