Kesler Woodward

Drawings

Wayfinding  ©Kesler Woodward 2025  Oil pastel on paper  28" x 32"

I have for years had a note on the wall of my studio admonishing myself to "Draw More!" but it's been years since I heeded it. A month ago I decided a good place to start would be with some little pen-and-ink birch portraits, and over the course of a couple of weeks I had a great time doing a number of them. I loved just noodling their forms and textures into life with a fine-tipped pen on beautiful white paper, teasing out their so-individual forms without the distraction of hue. It was pure pleasure, starting each one knowing that it wouldn't be weeks of work to finish, and I think I could have happily continued to make them for months.

Birch Portraits ©Kesler Woodward 2025  Pen and ink on paper  9" x 6" each 

When I've finished several small works, however, I invariably become eager to tackle something bigger-- a more ambitious image I can pursue and lose myself in for days or weeks, not knowing exactly where it will lead.

The Forest at My Door ©Kesler Woodward 2025 Pen and ink on paper 20" x 28"

These are the woods that beckon from our living room windows--the forest whose endless trails we run on all year round from our back door. I know this view so well, and responding to it with the same pen I'd used to do the little birch portraits seemed such a simple, only slightly more complicated task. It was after a couple of days of drawing, only a tiny portion of the image worked-up, that I began to realize the commitment I'd made. From there, it was just a matter of settling into the almost zen-like process of representing dense forest with tiny lines for days without trying to depict more than a few individual leaves.

My drawings, like my paintings, are very realistic from a distance and very abstract up close. This one took a long time, but I loved every minute of it, and after finishing it I could have done another, and another...

But of course I began to imagine entering the woods, with color, and as I've so often done since my very first months of making art in college well over a half-century ago (four little completely abstract oil pastels at that time, in response to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets), I turned to oil pastels.

I have a trove of oil pastels. Boxes and boxes of every kind, from the cheapest ones on the market--eight basic colors, affordable for school children--through a panoply of brands of wider color ranges and differing character, to magnificent sets of hundreds of French Sennelier oil pastels that are so soft and sensual that every stroke with them is like a caress. I sometimes employ my entire arsenal of brands and types in a single drawing, choosing firmer ones for crisper parts, softer ones for others, furiously layering and layering, but this drawing is all done deliberately, softly, with those fine Senneliers. The creamy white of the paper shines throughout, between the strokes. It's been some time since I used oil pastels, and I'd almost forgotten what a pleasure it is to explore the forest with them.

The Forest and the Trees

In the Forest of Long Awaiting  ©Kesler Woodward 2025  acrylic on canvas  60" x 48"

For nearly half a century I have made paintings of trees. As my work is quite realistic from a distance but very abstract up close, I've always said that I make "big abstract paintings that happen to look like trees." In a very real sense, though, trees have long stood in for people in my work--in their individuality, their strength, their vulnerability, the way they hold themselves, and the way much of what has happened in their lives is written in their features.

I never know what my next painting will be about until it's done, but as I look back on my work of the last few months, I see that it's been less about individual trees and more about the forest. I don't know what that's about. Perhaps I will have a better sense of what it means when I look up from working again in a couple of months and see what I've done.

In the Forest of Long Awaiting is a large (5 ft. x 4 ft.) painting about the endless woods as ecosystem and metaphor. This is the great boreal forest that circles the globe, and it beckons us at our back door. We walk and run on roadless paths through this woodland in every season and weather, and it is the source of my work.

Into the Woods  ©Kesler Woodward 2025  acrylic on canvas  40" x 30"

When I pass between these two trees, an aspen and a birch, my feet tread a well-worn path, but when I look around me I am no longer looking at the forest, but am in it. Six months of snow and another two of leafless late fall and early spring have afforded me views of the rising and falling land beneath the trees, but in late spring, summer, and the too-brief, glorious fall, the woods around me are not a vista but a tapestry.

Midjourney  ©Kesler Woodward 2025  acrylic on canvas  30" x 24"

In every season I am looking for the light. We won't have darkness again until September. Even then the diminishing daylight and the lengthening twilight will find their way through the forest, but right now, at Midjourney, the sun gleams brightly, and it calls at every hour through the densest leaves. 

The big new painting and several other recent ones have gone, but the half-dozen canvases on this wall in my studio speak to the current role of the forest itself in my work. All but one of these paintings are from the last few months. I'll stop and look again in the fall and think about what I've done between now and then. 

Winter Dreams and Winter Light

A Midwinter Dream   ©Kesler Woodward 2025   Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 40"

We are well past Imbolc, the ancient name for the midpoint between Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, and the days are rapidly lengthening, but I am still having fever dreams of color. I've been dreaming lately about some of my favorite views in Denali National Park, and when I went to the studio to try to make a painting about one of them a few weeks ago, the image that emerged on my canvas was this one--a very familiar place illumined by an almost surreal light.

I am amazed again and again by how little command I have of what I decide to paint. I never know until I am about to begin, and once underway, I never know where I will arrive. When people I've known for years but haven't seen for some time ask me, "Are you still painting a lot?" I always glibly answer, "All day, every day!" It's very nearly true, and I think it's that element of surprise with every canvas that makes me happy and keeps me at it.

Watchers  ©Kesler Woodward 2025  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 16"

I may be dreaming in technicolor, but as the days grow longer, the real winter light itself becomes almost as fey. The enchantment is most pronounced at dawn and dusk, and it is most striking to me when the rising light strikes the evergreens that stand like stolid sentinels in the mostly birch and aspen forest. At the ground it is still night--not yet even twilight--but among the dark boughs of the spruces, bright spots and shafts of warm color suddenly appear. Flickering ever-so-briefly and then gone, to me they are better than Christmas tree lights. 

Winter in the Arboretum  ©Kesler Woodward 2025  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

This, too, is true winter light. Almost every week for several years I have visited a little 2-acre experimental planting of trees from throughout the circumpolar north, located in the middle of the 2000-acre University of Alaska campus woods. I visited this plot for the first time 44 years ago, when the trees were saplings and forest scientists were actively studying how these species from other parts of the far north would grow in our climate and soils. This fenced test garden, called on campus the "Exotic Tree Plantation," has long been abandoned, but I go in every week to see how those specimens have fared in the decades since they were being studied. My goal is to get to know every tree. 

Unlike in the spring, fall, and throughout much of the summer, little changes visibly in this plot from week to week in winter. I note only the steadily deepening snow and the occasional fallen limb or treetop, broken by snow load and infrequent wind. These fully mature trees from northern Canada, Siberia, and Scandinavia continue, more than a half century after their planting, to slumber through the winter and wake with the spring. All winter I walk around and among them on my snowshoes, admiring them in the changing light.

Conjuring Light

Conjuring Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2025   Acrylic on Canvas   30" x 40"

I am thoroughly enjoying winter and looking forward to months more of it, so I am surprised, as I am about this time every year, that the colors in my paintings are becoming dramatically warmer and brighter. These are not the colors I see in the landscape around me, but fantasies...dreams. When I sit across the studio and look at a just-finished painting like this one, wondering what it's about, I realize that some part of me must be longing for color after months of being swaddled in a blanket of white. I think these must be the mountains and trees in winter, dreaming of spring, and so as at this time every year, I find myself in the studio conjuring light.

Invocation  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 48"

When I begin a painting like this one, inspired by the glorious view south to the Alaska Range from an overlook just below our home, what I'm focused on is not the distant mountains, but the intricate screen of bare trunks and branches through which I see the light from the south. I always think, "Well, maybe I'll put in a few of those trees," and a week later, I'm still painting them. It's crazy to try to paint that foreground network, "growing" the trees on canvas from scratch to disperse the light, but despite the ridiculous hours day after day, I find it comforting, almost meditative, and deeply satisfying to watch it grow. There's no way to convey the wonder of that light without those trees.

At the Edge of the Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 24"

The light in deep winter is wan, but the most delicate and beautiful of the year, and there's no place so perfect to see it as on the snow that burdens the branches of the spruce in the forest. The rising light of late morning dawn turns the dollops on the stunted boughs to jewelry, transforming gnarled limbs to faerie. I never tire of this magic. 

It Would Suit Me Fine If It Snowed All the Time

First Snow  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  acrylic on canvas  30" x 24"

Forty-five years ago, when I was living in Juneau and was a curator at the Alaska State Museum, I made a big (4 ft. x 6 ft.) painting that is now in the Alaska Contemporary Art Bank, titled It Would Suit Me Fine If It Snowed All the Time. All these years later, I still feel much the same way. Few things make me more excited than the first flurries of fall.

One of my favorite places in Fairbanks (where I've now lived for 43 years) is Smith Lake, a sizable body of water in the 2000-acre arboretum that is part of the University of Alaska campus. I've made paintings of that lake in autumn numerous times, and again this year I found myself celebrating on canvas the first flakes of snow falling on its not-yet-frozen surface.  I love the stillness that accompanies this initial harbinger of the half-year winter to come.

 

Go to Sleep, Darlings, Till the Summer Comes Again     ©Kesler Woodward 2024    acrylic on canvas 24" x 30"

Just a couple of weeks after those initial flurries, the ponds and lakes had frozen and winter descended on Interior Alaska in earnest. More than a foot of snow fell at our home in the hills, and on our running snowshoes, we were beginning to pack it down on the endless trails that lead from our back door. I love the way the snow blankets the trees, tucking them in for winter, and I often think of the line by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again," but I'd never used that line as a title. When I finished this painting and asked myself what it was about, something about that last remnant of warm autumn light fading into nightfall on the tucked-in forest made me think, "Oh yes...of course."

 

Equinox   ©Kesler Woodward 2024   acrylic on canvas   36" x 48"

The transition from late summer to winter is fleeting here, barely slowing for an always-too-brief but brilliant fall.  The autumnal equinox provides the pivot. Just two weeks before the first snowfall in town, the forest was a blaze of color against the impossibly bright blue, early September sky.

I never know what I'll paint next until I'm about to begin, and I seldom find myself painting "in season," but time seems to move faster and faster for me these days. I think I must have needed to grab this blaze of color as it flew past. 

New Works Ready for a New Exhibition

These are just a few of my new paintings in the studio, awaiting transport to Well Street Art Gallery here in Fairbanks for an exhibition with 3 outstanding artist friends--Todd Sherman, Jim Brashear, and Bonni Brooks--all of whom live on our short street. "Merlin Lane Artists" opens this Friday, September 6, from 5-8 pm at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks.

Todd, Jim, and I were colleagues for many years in the University of Alaska Art Department, and Bonni, another longtime friend, is an extraordinary tapestry weaver. We all now live just a few doors apart in Taiga Woodlands, a forested subdivision in the hills overlooking Fairbanks, and we thought it would be great fun to show our very different work together. 

A Few Acres of Snow ©Kesler Woodward Acrylic on Canvas  54" x 84"

At 4 1/2 feet by 7 feet,  A Few Acres of Snow will be my largest painting in the exhibition. This big, celebratory scene of winter in all its glory was the centerpiece of a solo exhibition of my work in Montreal several years ago, but I have never shown it in the U.S.  I am excited to have it back and to show it here. The fun title, suggested by the gallery in Montreal, is what the 18th Century French writer Voltaire called Canada in his most famous work, the novella Candide.

 

Mysteries  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 24"

Right now, summer is waning after months of continuous light in Interior Alaska, and darkness is beginning to steal back into the late hours of twilight. There is richer color in the clear evening skies, and real night is trying to slip in around the edges. I'm always intrigued by the mystery and wonder of that inexorable invasion.

 

Celestial ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

The stars, which I've missed all summer, come back in September.

 

Snow Music ©Kesler Woodward 2024 Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

And the coming snow is on my mind. I love the months of continuous summer light, but as the days get rapidly shorter, I begin to look forward to the first falling snow. It is only truly dark here for brief periods in the spring and fall. When the last snow disappears in late April or early May, and it's not yet light all night, we have darkness for a few hours each evening. Again in early autumn, when the days grow shorter and the nights longer, for a little while we have real darkness. But soon, the brilliant white snow will start to settle softly not just on the trails and forest floor, but on every twig and branch in the woods, and every bit of ambient light from the moon, the stars, or the lights of our homes is reflected and multiplied a thousandfold. It is never truly dark here in winter. In Snow Music, I'm dreaming in the fall about the colors of winter.

 

Merlin Birch  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  20" x 10"

And birches...always more birches...

Whether gathering wild lowbush cranberries (lingonberries) in our own wooded yard or running with friends on the endless forest trails that lead from our back door, I am surrounded by the birches I love. I can't remember a year when I haven't painted some of their portraits.

I go back and forth between painting in oils and painting in acrylics. The ethereal light of the northern sky seems to me to require the myriad thin layers of transparent acrylic I employ to try to capture some of its magic. But the bark of the birches, just as beautiful but marked by scars, peeling layers of growth, and other events in their lives, is more physical. The life of a birch is written not just in its form, but in its "skin," and celebrating that this year has seemed to me to call for the greater sensuality of oils.

 

 

 

 

Woodland Neighbors  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  24" x 30"

Twins  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  30" x 24"

Oils and Acrylics

Aglint  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 48"

As I've said in this space many times, I never know (or even think about) what I'm going to paint next until I finish a painting and am about to start a new one. I never, ever work on more than one painting at a time, and while I'm working on that painting, it's all I can think about. When it's finished, it goes on the studio wall out of the way. As I put up a new canvas, I start to ponder what I want to paint next, and at the same time, whether I want to work in acrylics or oils. For me, paintings that are about light, like this one, seem to need to be in acrylic, so that the light can pass through the transparent pigment, bounce off the pure white of the primed canvas, and return to the viewer's eye almost as if backlit. 

Aglint was painted in the last days of winter, as the glorious light of the long season of cold was just beginning to change to the burgeoning light of  spring. I'm always excited that the days are growing longer, of course, but I always want to cling just a little longer to the crisp snow on the branches in the forest and the magical light that fills the winter woods.

Brothers ©Kesler Woodward 2024 Oil on Canvas 20" x 16"

The birch portraits, by contrast, often seem to want the richer, fleshier sensuality of oils. As I walk out my door, I greet the birches which I pass by every day like old friends, noting the way the shifting light brings out their individual colors and the way they change as they age, season by season and year by year. And as we walk or run on the endless trails through the surrounding forest, I invariably spot new ones, wondering why I hadn't noticed this one or that one before. 

The woods are dense with these tall, thin trunks. I can almost never see a single tree in its entirety, in isolation. I always feel like I'm greeting new ones face-to-face, and so I seem to always paint them eye-to-eye. 

Taiga Birch ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas 20" x 10"

A New Exhibition and New Paintings in Oils

Three Graces  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  36" x 48"

I have just returned from Reno, Nevada, where my latest solo exhibition of 16 new paintings opened with a terrific reception at Stremmel Gallery on February 8. I am so grateful to be able to show my work in that big, beautiful, museum-like space, and to have my work represented by the outstanding and supportive people there. A number of paintings in the exhibition have already been claimed by collectors, but the full exhibition will be up through March 9. You can see the gallery's online catalog of the exhibition here. 

Since shipping the last paintings for that exhibition more than a month ago, I have of course been back in the studio and hard at work. I go back and forth, over the years, between painting in acrylics and painting in oils, and for the first time in almost a decade, I've started working again in oils. For the last month I've been coming in from the studio late every night, saying to Dorli, "I'd almost forgotten what a joy it is to push thick, sensual oil paint around on large canvases. I'm having such a good time!"

I've painted "birch portraits" like these for more than forty years, continually amazed by the variety and beauty of these trees as I walk and run the trails of the boreal forest. I paint other subjects--mountains, skies, the light of dawn and dusk, and more--but sooner or later I always return to these beautiful trees. They have long taken the place of people in my paintings—in their individuality, their strength, their vulnerability…in the way what happens to them in their lives is written in their “skin.” 

 

Olden Dances  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas 48" x 60"

But I also love the other trees in the northern forest--spruces, larches, poplars, and especially the aspens that are as plentiful as the birches surrounding our home. Many people here think of all the trees in our local forest, and all the trees in my paintings, as birches. But comparing this big (4 ft.  x 5 ft.) painting of bold aspen trunks, Olden Dances, with the slender birches of Three Graces speaks directly, I think,  to the quite different character of these mainstays of the boreal forest. 

The leaves of aspens, which the ancients called "Whispering Trees," tremble in our summer winds, and their tall trunks sway gently, dance slowly, even in the near-total calm of our long winters. I think they are dreaming  of the coming spring.

Cloths of Heaven  ©Kesler Woodward 2023-24  Oil on Canvas  48" x 60"

 

 

Solo Exhibition at Stremmel Gallery in Reno, NV - Opening February 8

My second solo show at Stremmel Gallery in Reno, Nevada opens this Thursday night, February 8. If you are anywhere near Reno this week, please stop by and say hello at the opening reception!

For more info on the exhibition, and to see a full online catalog of the 16 paintings, click on this link:

Following the North Star - Paintings by Kesler Woodward

Or you can go directly to the online catalog here! 

 

A New Year, New Paintings, and a New Exhibition

Alleluia ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on canvas 36" x 48"

I have been hard at work since my last post, and I have images of a number of new paintings to share. These and virtually all of my available work from the last year will be on exhibit next month in a big solo show of my paintings opening February 8 at Stremmel Gallery in Reno, Nevada. I had a very successful show at that outstanding gallery three years ago, and I feel so fortunate to have them representing my work.

In the past couple of months, I have been surprised to find  myself painting mountains. It continues to bewilder me that I have so little control over what I paint. The control I can and do exercise is to go to my studio every day and go to work, but it always comes as a surprise to me what I find myself painting. 

The light in these new paintings is much like that in the forests I have been painting for the last couple of years. It's early morning, or dusk, or evening--those lingering hours of twilight that we enjoy here in the North in every season of the year. Alleluia, my first painting of this new year, is for now the culmination of the new series--a larger canvas than the others, with dramatic twilight on steep, rocky peaks that rise out of endless fields of snow.

A Mountain Epiphany  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  24" x 24"

A Mountain Epiphany led the way to painting Alleuia. In this smaller painting  I embraced color well beyond the naturalistic to express my joy at finding my way into these new mountains of substance and spirit. 

All the Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 24"

Each of these new mountain paintings is my attempt to capture a different hour, or just a different few minutes, on these surreal peaks. In All the Light, it is nearly gone, casting only a faint, subtle, lingering glow on the side of the mountaintop facing the sun, which illuminates for a moment more the thin clouds high above it.

Heavenly Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas 24" x 24"

Before and between these mountain paintings, I've continued to paint the no less dramatic but more intimate light of the North Woods. Out of the Dark and Heavenly Light speak to two very different moods in the boreal forest--each of those moods engendered by the liminal light of the North.

Out of the Dark  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"