Trees North and South

Birches and Sky

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Oil on canvas

24" x 36" (image)

25 1/2" x 37 1/2" (framed)

Again and again, I find myself painting trees. Birches and Sky is the latest in a series of paintings in which I look up through the canopy of the forest toward the sky. 

Sometimes I wish that I could include here time-lapse movies of certain paintings as they come to life. That is within my meager range of technological skills, but I've been reluctant to do it mainly because for so much of the time I'm working on any painting, it looks horrible to me. I'm loath to share the awkward stages through which every painting goes, and in the end I'd rather it seem as if the final image emerged effortlessly from my brush, dripped fully formed into my composition. One of the things I was aware of in this painting more than most, however, is how much time I spend adding richness and complexity to the surface after the image is essentially done, and how little of that shows when viewing it in reproduction.

If you had come to my studio and looked at Birches and Sky from the doorway, a day or even two before it was done, and then come back when I had just signed it and declared it finished, you would probably have wondered what I'd been doing in the interim.  The painting would look essentially the same from that distance, and photos of the full canvas taken before and after that final push would seem essentially identical, as well. The difference is only apparent when you are close enough to the painting to touch it. The last couple of days involve not so much fixing and adjusting (though there is some of that), but trying to provide rewards for the viewer who looks closely, patiently, for a long time. 

Most of those surprises--things like unexpected, tiny bits of contrasting color and texture that peek out from below parts of every surface, interrupted outlines, variegated hues within areas of dark, almost-blackness--happen in the course of the working process. But I always want more, so when everything is in place, when it looks just right from across the room, I continue to add a touch here, a dash there, paint over a small section with an almost identical color, allowing just the smallest bits of the underlying color to show in and around the new strokes...  

It's the fun part for me, this playing with surface and color once I'm past the anxiety of worrying whether the painting will ever work out, once I know that it's going to be o.k. Eventually, though, I reach a point at which I know I'm not making things better or richer, just different. I realize that I'm going round and round over the surface, having a grand time playing. I stop reluctantly, sign the painting, and move on.

Longleaf Canopy

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

28" x 20" (image)

37 1/2" x 29 1/2" (framed)

Moving on right now means getting to work on the Southern images that I will be showing in an exhibition in Aiken, South Carolina in September. As I mentioned in my last post, that show at the Aiken Center for the Arts will include work by my high school classmates from forty years ago, Linda Prior Hunley and Esther Randall.  Longleaf Canopy is based on one of the photographs Linda generously forwarded me shortly after we agreed to work toward this exhibition.  She was clearly right in thinking that an image looking up through the canopy of the Southern forest would intrigue me, and I have to admit that the venerable, magnificent longleaf pines of South Carolina have a hold on my spirit very similar to the birches of the circumpolar North.

I grew up hearing my father sing the praises of the longleaf pine--how it grows more slowly, especially in its early years, than the loblolly and other pines that have largely supplanted it in reforested Southern woods in the last couple of generations, but is more resistant to fire and disease, makes better lumber, and is an altogether superior tree.  The 90 million acres of longleaf pine forest at the time of European settlement in the South have dwindled to around 3 million acres today, but there has been a rebirth of interest in the preservation and expansion of the longleaf pine ecosystem.  I spent many wonderful days roaming the South Carolina pine woods with my lumberman grandfather as a child, and as a teenager exploring the sprawling Hitchcock Woods that enfold the city of Aiken, a 2000 acre tract that is one of the largest urban forests in the United States.

Sycamore Portrait

©Kesler Woodward 2006

Acrylic on paper

28" x 20" (image)

37 1/2" x 29 1/2" (framed)

I don't think I ever consciously realized until I began to paint them, years later, how much I noticed and loved individual trees when I was growing up.  I know that I never realized how diverse and rich the Southern woods were until I moved west and north and was surprised to find so many fewer species.  Aiken, where I grew up, has parks everywhere, and beautiful sycamore trees throughout.  Their bark, like birch bark, is individual and extraordinary.  

This is a tree on the grounds of the First Baptist Church in Aiken--one of several huge, beautiful sycamores which grace that city block downtown. When I go back to visit family there now, I visit these and other trees I grew up with, and I am grateful for what they did to enrich my appreciation for the natural world, even if I didn't know it at the time.