Kesler Woodward

Light in the North

Snow in Faerie  ©Kesler Woodward 2023 acrylic on canvas 48" x 60"

I always feel sorry for Alaskans who "snowbird" for the winter to warmer locales, as they miss the most beautiful light of the year. From January into March, especially, the winter light is not only magical as it gently breaks the long night's darkness, but it grows by nearly an hour in extent from week to week. It's glorious.

Winter is the time when the boreal forest here in Interior Alaska is most clearly unique. With abundant sunshine, temperatures reliably well below freezing, and no wind for weeks at a time, powder snow sits undisturbed on every twig and branch in the forest. We had an early snowfall this year which coated the trees with a thick layer of unusually sticky snow that has held fast the downy accumulation of winter. Every woodland vista is a fairyland abstraction of subtly-colored light. 

First Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

There's nothing quite like that first light of dawn on the birches in the forest. The trunks suddenly appear, singly or a few at a time as if stepping, like the individuals they are, from the darkness of night. 

Glory  ©Kesler Woodward 2023 acrylic on canvas  20" x 20"

By mid-February, the dawn light is growing not just brighter, but warmer in hue, and it's chasing away the darkness. Night is in full retreat, and we are reminded that it is shrinking toward the wee hours before disappearing for months, along with the stars.

The Warmth of the Sun in Winter

Apricity  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

When I posted an image of Apricity on a couple of social media sites the day that I finished it, half a dozen people wrote me to say that they loved it, but that they had to look up the meaning of the word "apricity." I am very fond of old, seldom-now-used words for winter phenomena, and "apricity," a word I've used in painting titles before, is one of my favorites. It's simply the warmth of the sun in winter. I've always taken it to mean either a physical warmth--the way even on a very cold day, you can sometimes feel the sun's warmth on your face or the back of your neck--or a psychological warmth--the way bright sunshine can make you feel a bit warmer, even when it's very cold. 

Here in Interior Alaska, any warmth from the sun in December is purely psychological. On the winter solstice, the sun here is only up for three hours and forty-two minutes. It rises almost due south, about 11 a.m., struggles up to about 1.7º above the horizon at its zenith, and drops below again by 2:40 p.m. There's really no physical warmth from it to feel, but its appearance when it crests the mountains of the Alaska Range on our southern horizon, flooding the sky with the most beautiful and brilliant light of the year, warms our hearts and souls. Apricity is a paean of praise to that warming.

Expectation  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

"Expectation" is another word I've used in titles before. I almost never title paintings until they're done, as I never really know what they'll look like until then, and the titles almost always suggest themselves to me when I sit well back from them and look at them. Here, these two principal trees of our part of the boreal forest, birch and spruce, frame the distant, low winter dawn. When I finished this painting and asked myself what it was about, it seemed to me that they were like curtains about to be parted, revealing the light which was just beginning to break through them, illuminating bits of branches from afar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hoarlight ©Kesler Woodward 2022  acrylic on canvas  10" x 8"

My other go-to source for titles is poetry. I read a lot of poetry, usually at least a couple of poems every day, and the words and the language in them somehow settle deeply into some part of my mind that springs to life when I'm searching for a title. Hoarlight is not only an arcane word for a kind of light in winter, but is a word I first met in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves." It's a wonderful poem, well-worth finding and reading if  you're unfamiliar with it, and worth re-reading if you are.

The Snow and the Stars Come Back in September

The Snow and the Stars Come Back in September  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  acrylic on canvas 24" x 30"

Dorli always says that as each season arrives, I say, "This is my favorite," but right now I'm feeling especially grateful for fall. I do love the 24-hour light of summer in the far north, but after several months of it, I begin to miss the darkness. I'm happy when September comes and brings with it the full reappearance of the stars and the first flakes of falling snow.

Forty-five years after settling in Alaska, I'm no less excited each fall when the first snow arrives. That excitement is something I've painted many times. My big painting of a first autumn snowfall on Smith Lake, a large lake in the woods on the University of Alaska campus, has greeted me and every other visitor to Fairbanks arriving on Alaska Airlines for two decades, and each and every time I deplane, it's a welcome sign for me that I'm truly home.

The setting for this September painting is the much smaller Ballaine Lake, also on the University of Alaska campus. Unlike Smith Lake, it's readily visible alongside Farmer's Loop Road, and I drive by it nearly every day on my way to the university or to town. I note the swift progression of its freezing every fall, and I watch just as attentively as that little lake slowly, reluctantly gives up its ice cover each May. 

The reappearance of the full panoply of stars in September is for me just as welcome, and I love it when the first bright flakes of snow join those little lights in the sky.

Equinox ©Kesler Woodward 2022  acrylic on canvas 20" x 16"

We Alaskans and others in the far north around the world make more note, I think, of the turning points of the year--the equinoxes and solstices--than do most of those who live in latitudes where the changes are less dramatic.

The autumnal equinox is important for me in all sorts of ways. It's the time of the crazy-hard Equinox Marathon we run here each year--the epitome of what we call "Type 2 Fun"--fun in retrospect.  And it marks here in Interior Alaska more clearly than the vernal equinox or either of the solstices a dramatic change of weather and season.

This year, as most, the equinox came at the absolute peak of fall color in the birches and aspens. I've often painted that riot of color, but this painting marks a subtler, yet unmistakable change in the quality of  light. I've tried to capture some of that light on Ballaine Lake, as the world balances on its swivel point in the annual contest between darkness and light.

Vespers ©Kesler Woodward 2022 acrylic on canvas 20" x 20"

As the light grows softer with the change of seasons, it always makes me think of Vespers--the evening service of thanks and praise that along with Lauds (morning prayer) are perhaps the oldest of the traditional hours of prayer in many traditions.

I love the fall...the changing, softening light, the easing from the frenetic pace of the glorious but exhausting northern summer, and the ancipatoon of winter.  

Gifts From the Forest

Gifts from the Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  48" z 60"

I spent more time completing this canvas than any other I've painted in a very long time. When I look back at notes I've made to myself over the years about painting possibilities, there are so many suggesting I spend a season picking up, or just noting, specific objects in the landscape and painting them one by one on a large canvas--a kind of chronicle of time spent in the forest and some of the things I love there. I finally embarked on that task this summer. As I added object after object to this 4 ft. x 5 ft. canvas over the past two months, it filled slowly, and I began to wonder why I had undertaken such a thing. I never, ever work on more than one painting at a time, and so I couldn't think of painting anything else until this one was complete.

These are far from botanical illustrations. The images here are recognizable renditions of individual leaves, cones, catkins, bark, shoots, twigs, clusters of needles, and more, but they are meant to be evocations of the aspects of those things that intrigue me, not illustrations of them. I exaggerate color, emphasize things I'm interested in, and gloss over other features. I take lots of liberties that an illustrator would never allow. These are simply my personal responses to some of the gifts of the forest this summer.

Not everything depicted here is indigenous to Alaska. I have for more than a year spent time every week in a magical research plot of trees from throughout the circumpolar north, located in the midst of the 2000-acre woods of the University of Alaska campus. In this little 2-acre compound grow two kinds of birches from Finland, pines and spruce and fir and larches from Russia, Scandinavia, and northern Canada, and other species that don't occur in our Interior Alaska forests. The differences in the leaves and bark of Downy Birch,  European Silver Birch, and our Alaska Birch are subtle, just as those trees' responses to this climate and environment are different, but those differences intrigue me.

Trees in Alaska, as elsewhere, are under attack by a host of predators, many of which are aided in their predations by a warming climate. Evidence is on display in these images of the work of not only our familiar Aspen Leaf Miners, which have turned many of our aspen groves from green to gray every summer for years, but also the more recent work of Birch Leaf Miners, which have been dulling the summer green and fall yellow of the birches as they have sweept through our community more recently. Spruce Bud Blight, which I just learned about from a State Forester I took into the Exotic Tree Plantation last week, I now recognize when it appears on the tips of White Spruces, preventing the further growth of every branch it infests.

But there are pure marvels as well...the beautiful, red-violet "flowers" that are the emerging female cones of the Siberian Larches, which make these deciduous conifers look like they're in bloom for about a week each spring. The different-shaped leaves on different parts of an individual highbush cranberry plant. The quite different needles of Norway Spruce and White Spruce, and the changing appearance of a cluster of White Spruce cones between when I picked it up from the ground and when it opened and dropped its seeds, drying on the windowsill of my studio.

I don't think you need to recognize these species to appreciate this painting. But I hope that seeing it, you will be as delighted as I have been all summer by the diversity and wonder of these gifts from the boreal forest.

My exhibition opening this Friday, July 1, in Anchorage at Georgia Blue Gallery!

Treeline  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

A couple of weeks ago, Dorli and I loaded 13 of my recent paintings in our van and drove them down to Anchorage for my exhibition that will open at Georgia Blue Gallery this Friday, July 1. If you're in Anchorage this week, please stop by the gallery and say hello during the opening reception Friday, from 5-7 p.m.

Treeline is the newest and largest painting in the exhibition, at 4 ft. x 5 ft.  The gallery space is not huge, so the other paintings range from several 3 ft. x 4 ft.  and 3 ft. square canvases, down to a couple of 16" x 20" ones and one 20" x 10".

Treeline is not a scene, but a kind of "group portrait" of some of the individual trees I love growing here, pretty close to the treeline in both latitude and altitude. It was inspired in part by reading a terrific recent book called The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, by Ben Rawlence. It has entire chapters on the fate around the circumpolar north of some of the trees I most love--white spruce and black spruce, downy birch, Siberian larch, Scots pine, and more--and some of the consequences of climate change reflected in their spread or retrenchment, and the lives of those who live in and around them.

Below are just a couple of the thirteen paintings that will be in the exhibition at Georgia Blue Gallery, 3555 Arctic Blvd. in Anchorage. Images of and information on all of the paintings are in past posts on this site, and in my "Available Works" album at the top of the right-hand column of this page. 

Our granddaughter is visiting for a couple of weeks in Fairbanks, so I will only be flying down for the opening reception on Friday afternoon and back that evening, but I'd love to see you if you're in Anchorage and are able to drop by the gallery reception from 5-7 p.m.

Be Still and Wait ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  36" square

 

A Gentle Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 20"

All the Light in the Boreal Forest

All the Light in the Boreal Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

It's light late into the evening already, this spring, and the boreal forest glows in that late light. The tops of the trees catch the last of the sun's rays as the forest floor begins to darken. The treetops suddenly, briefly blaze and then quietly begin to soften and subside into the not-quite-dark of the spring night.

Here, in that late light, are some of the trees I love---the most ubiquitous trees of the Interior Alaska forest--white spruce, aspen, and birch.

Whispering Tree  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  40" x 16"

For forty-five years I have painted birches more than any other kind of tree, and more often than any other subject. In 2005, Red Hen Press of Los Angeles published Blaze - a beautiful 160-page volume featuring  thirty years of my paintings of birches, juxtaposed with poems by my friend, Alaska Poet Laureate Peggy Shumaker.

I made paintings in response to Peggy's poems, she made poems in response to my paintings, and we selected other, wholly independent images and poems from past decades that we felt could speak to one another. Even today when I open that volume, seeing my work in conversation with her poems makes me see my own paintings in new ways.

Very few people, even those who know my work well, notice that I paint aspens almost as often birches.

Whispering Tree is a tall aspen whose crown I admire almost daily in different lights as I make the short, 15-stride walk between our back door and my studio.

The Celts and other ancient peoples called the aspen the "whispering tree," as its leaves tremble in even the slightest breeze. They told tales of how the fluttering leaves helped the wind speak to the ancestors, make connections between this world and the next, and bring gifts of inspiration and poetry.

Every tree of the boreal forest abounds with myth and mystery in the old stories. Every year I learn more of those stories, and though I don't illustrate them, I can't help but think some of those tales creep into every painting I make. 

         

Three April Drawings - Studio Window, Lodgepoles, and Trail to the Forest - Pen and ink on Rives BFK paper. 13" x 9" each. Unframed.

I don't draw often. A note to myself on the studio wall says, "Draw More!" but I very seldom make time to do it. As soon as I finish one painting, I'm eager to begin the next. But a few weeks ago, I decided I just wanted to take a break and draw for a few days, and I so enjoyed simply responding with pen on good paper to the views from my studio windows and to some of the less-familiar trees I'm getting to know in the "Exotic Tree Plantation" that's part of the University of Alaska arboretum.

Studio Window is, as the title suggests, the view from the big north window of my studio, of just a few aspens on the steep slope below, casting sharp shadows on the still-pristine snow, still 3-feet deep in early April. 

Lodgepoles was a fun drawing because only someone really into trees and looking very hard would notice, from this vantage point, that they are lodgepole pines planted in an experimental plot, and not the white spruces that are everywhere here.

And Trail to the Forest, drawn with a finer-tipped pen, is a view of a birch and an aspen from the west window in my studio, at the very beginning of the endless trails that we and several of our friends run on three times every week, all year-round.  

It's been sunny every day here for a month. The sap is rising in the birches, and I'm tapping a few of them to make syrup. Happy spring!

It Was Both Light and Dark

It Was Both Light and Dark  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

The light keeps changing in my most recent paintings. It breaks in rich hues over a dark horizon in one, suffuses the sky with glory in another, and is eerie in a third. I'm not sure what this is all about.

The trees of the northern forest are, as always, the foreground and setting for these new paintings, but even more than most of my work, they are about the light. I don't set out to make paintings about mood, about the state of the world, or even my own state of mind in these fraught times, so I'm puzzled when I finish a painting and regard it, wondering what it has to say to me, and what it might say to others. 

Vault of Heaven  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

For the past two years I've made paintings about twilight--trees and the forest as they emerge or begin to disappear at every stage of dawn and dusk, and sometimes as they glow softly in the night. The liminal hues have almost invariably been muted, and I didn't intend Vault of Heaven to be that different. Somehow, the color got away from me, as I built the sky with layer after layer of transparent washes, and I was shocked by the resulting atmosphere's sensual brilliance. I thought hard about softening it, muting it, but I couldn't bring myself to give it up.

Sentinel  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on panel  20" x 16"  

Sentinel is much more muted. It presents a similar scene, but a very different mood. Its eerie light, as well as its composition, may have something to do with my having started it just a couple of days after the invasion of Ukraine, but that wasn't my conscious intention. 

Sentinel is painted on a cradled wood panel of a sort that I enjoy using from time to time. These archivally primed panels are very smooth, with none of the "tooth" of woven canvas. I like to have a surface that "talks back" to me a bit as I paint, so I almost invariably find myself roughing it up, and in this small painting, I worked the sky extensively, layering and scraping it repeatedly. The process resulted in a different kind of illumination in the pre-dawn sky--distant lights seen through darkness.

New Paintings in a New Year

Be Still and Wait  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

I love the winter, and 45 years after moving to Alaska, I have yet to see it start snowing and wish it would stop. But about this time every winter, I look at the most recent paintings I've made and realize that I must be craving color. As I've said many times on this site, I never know what I'll paint next until I actually begin a new painting, but I can't help  noticing the burgeoning light, the open water, and the rich, brilliant colors that have once again found their way into my January and early February paintings.

As usual, I didn't really know what Be Still and Wait was about until it was done. But as soon as I'd finished it and sat across the studio looking at it, lines from "East Coker," one of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" came immediately to mind, and the title arrived fully formed. I've made paintings inspired by those poems for more than half a century, and it seems there may be more to come.

The Woods in Winter Dream About Spring  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 20"

The colors in The Woods in Winter Dream About Spring are even brighter, and less literally real. This is a scene at the heart of the 2-acre study compound of trees from throughout the circumpolar North, planted by researchers at the University of Alaska almost 60 years ago, that I have been avidly exploring and getting to know for the last year. Granted access to that compound last spring, 40 years after seeing it for the first time, when the trees were just saplings, I am visiting it every week, trying to get to know every tree.

It's as much a delight to be in that exotic boreal garden on my snowshoes, making new paths in more than 3 feet of utterly pristine, unbroken snow, as it was to see two varieties of birches from Finland leaf out in spring and two kinds of larches from Siberia turn golden and drop their needles in the fall. I was in that garden last week, and it occurred to me that perhaps the spruces at the heart of it are craving color as I am, dreaming in their slumber about the riot of spring, summer, and fall. 

Tomorrow to Fresh Woods  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas 24" x 24"

Tomorrow to Fresh Woods is, for me, about not just the beauty of bare branches against the sky in the twilight, but about looking ahead to light, on the other side of anxious times and loss. Its title comes from one of the last lines of  English poet John Milton's famous 17th pastoral elegy "Lycidas." 

My wish is for more light, for all of us, in the new year!

Trees and Twilight

In the Boreal Garden  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on canvas  48" x 60"

I have continued this autumn to visit the Exotic Tree Plantation in the University of Alaska Arboretum, watching the trees that were planted there from around the circumpolar north respond to the change of seasons.

Two species of birches from Finland--downy birches and silver birches--continue to thrive there, several decades after planting. Two species of Siberian larches, Siberian pines, and Siberian firs are all doing well, and a couple of dwarf stone pines from eastern Siberia have survived. Spruces from Norway, Canada, and Alaska grow not far apart. Lodgepole pines from 29 sources in northern Canada grow alongside Jack pines from the Canadian Northwest Territories and Scotch pines from Finland. All three green alders transplanted in 1967 continue to grow, and one of several triploid (extra chromosome) aspens grown from tissue cultures in a lab in Wisconsin has survived, and is spreading by root cloning.

This little two-acre plot is a microcosm of wonder for a lover of the boreal forest like me. I see new things each time I visit, and I bring others in with me who open my eyes to more. I love seeing the mists rise in the trees at dusk and the needles of the larches go golden and drop for the winter, and I marvel at the way spruces and pines are alike and not alike, as are birches and aspen.

A Gentle Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on canvas  24" x 20"

And I continue, for now, to be bewitched by twilight. I'm interested in the way these images of dawn and dusk seem to suggest different moods to different viewers--from transformation to uncertainty, from foreboding to hope and reassurance. I think viewers find in them what they bring to them, what they hope or need to find or what they worry they might. I am as surprised when the light comes up gentle and kindly as I am when it broods, and as genuinely puzzled myself by each.

Ancient Voices  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 24"

Arboretum

Arboretum  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 48"

40 years ago, I visited for the first time a fascinating 2-acre compound of exotic (non-native) trees in the middle of the 2000-acre arboretum that is part of the University of Alaska campus. The saplings I saw there were grown from seeds of trees around the circumpolar north, planted by forestry scientists at the university to study how other northern trees might thrive, or not, in this environment. I was fascinated by what the scientists who gave the tour had to say about the early results of the experiment. 

Those studies ended decades ago, and now those trees--enclosed early on by a tall, chain-link fence to protect the saplings from moose and hares--have become fully grown and are only distinguishable on close observation from the native forest that surrounds them. I've run and skied on trails right beside the compound for years and have longed to get back in there to see how they are doing and study them more closely. Finally, just this past summer I was able to get access to the plot. I've since spent countless hours in that 2-acre "Exotic Tree Plantation," as it's called, read as many reports about the studies as I have been able to find, and am on my way toward my goal of getting to know every single tree there. 

  Portal  ©Kesler Woodward 2021   Acrylic on Canvas   48" x 60"

The paintings in this post are my first two about my fascination with the site and the trees in it. I am awash in delight at the subtle differences in the leaves and bark of the different varieties of birch from throughout the north, and I have fallen just as in love with the varieties of conifers, with their diverse needles and cones. Every time I enter the garden, I feel as if I've gone through a gateway to faerie.

I honestly don't know what these new paintings are "about," or what they have to say. I'm just doing what we artists do--bearing witness to the wonder we feel at the world--and I'm singing personal praises to the richness and diversity of the great Boreal Forest that circles the globe.