Kesler Woodward

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"

Winter Light

A Birch at Her Tryst  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

The calendar says it's fall, but it has been winter in Interior Alaska for a month and half. We've been running on snowy trails in the forest for six weeks, and our hours of daylight are rapidly diminishing, but we are entering the season with the most beautiful light of the year. In A Birch at Her Tryst, the already low, late October sun still has enough power to blast its way through the trees as it rises, and it still casts sharp shadows on the blankets of snow. I wasn't thinking, as I painted it, about the Scottish poet Sorley MacLean's most famous poem, "Hallaig," as translated by Seamus Heaney, but when I sat and looked at it after, I thought that beautiful birch in our yard must be trysting with the morning light.

Matins  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Dorli and I make note of where, exactly, the sun rises in the waning weeks of the year. We watch it come up farther and farther south each day until the winter solstice, when it will rise just a few degrees east of due south. We want to know precisely where and when it will break the horizon, as on clear days when we're  out on the trails at sunrise, we and the friends who run with us will be looking at that spot for the momentary, altogether magical "green flash."  We never see that phenomenon until December, when the rising sun peeks above the crisp, clear peaks of the Alaska Range one hundred miles south of us. But we watch for the sun morning after morning throughout the fall, marveling at the color that rises before it, even when there's just a sliver of light between the horizon and a low bank of clouds in sky. It's our way of observing the canonical hour of Matins, as we wait for the dawn and the hour of Lauds.

Forest of Gold  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 20"

There are crystalline days in the Interior Alaska winter when the blue of the sky is like this--stretching from horizon to horizon like a taut tarp--featureless, without depth. There are minutes on those days when molten golden light somehow spills from that cold blue sky, gilding the tops of the snow-laden trees before reaching the ground. Moments before, it's twilight. Moments after, it's day. I love those few moments between.

September

The Snow and the Stars at Denali in September  ©Kesler Woodward 2023 Acrylic on canvas  48" x 60"

I almost never make paintings about my most recent experiences, or about places that I've just visited. It typically takes me a long time--months or even years--for my experience of being in a place to settle into my consciousness deeply enough that I feel like I have something personal to say about it. So I was surprised to find myself starting this large canvas as soon as I returned from yet another wonderful stay at what is perhaps my favorite place in the world--Camp Denali--an extraordinary wilderness lodge within the western boundary of Denali National Park. I have been giving a week of talks there every other year for a quarter century to their guests and staff.  

Dorli and I hiked each day of this last week of Camp Denali's season with their guests and their amazing naturalist guides. The tundra was ablaze with color, and the snow crept steadily down the mountains, reaching the park road. We hiked one day to a high valley in several inches of still-falling snow, and another day on the gravel bar of the McKinley River, within a few miles of the foot of Denali itself. 

The Snow and the Stars at Denali in September is a distillation of that experience, with wonderful people in a uniquely beautiful place. I love September, when the stars come back after a summer of continuous light and as night falls it's hard to tell them from the first flurries of the coming winter.

Numinous ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 20"

This much smaller painting also came in the afterglow--so to speak--of an even more recent experience. I made the 720-mile round-trip drive to Anchorage and back last week to deliver The Snow and the Stars at Denali in September  to the couple who purchased it. I left home before dawn on icy roads in freezing fog, wondering why I hadn't just crated and shipped that big painting. But the roads and the sky cleared, and it became one of the most beautiful drives I've ever made in almost half a century of traveling that highway. Fresh snow covered every mountain peak right down to the road most of the way. It was brilliantly sunny every daylight mile of the 14-hour trip, and as the light faded at road level on the way home, it lingered on the peaks of the higher mountains of the Range. It was numinous.

Veil of Morning  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  30" x 40"

I had just finished Veil of Morning the night before we left for Camp Denali. It is a paean to a particular quality of light that sometimes appears at morning or evening in the summer hours here, its exact hour shifting as the length of our days expands and contracts with the seasons. It is fleeting, most wondrous in the late spring and early fall when it enkindles the trees' bare branches, and it always feels like a gift when I catch it.  

Snow in Summer

In contrast to almost everywhere else in the country this year, it has been a near-perfect summer here in Interior Alaska. Bright, sunny days. Just enough rainfall. Almost no smoke from wildfires. So I have to wonder, "Why have I been painting snow for the last six weeks?"  My three new paintings, each quite different in approach, have one thing in common--my preoccupation with winter.

Snow Dreams  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  30" x 40"

I love the dense tapestry of snow that the boreal forest becomes in winter. Here, we have weeks without wind, and I like to watch the snow drift softly, inexorably, onto every branch and twig, gradually closing the deep perspective of the bare fall woods into weavings of color field abstraction. Snow Dreams is simply what its title describes...my memory and dreams, in the heat of summer, of that rich tapestry in winter. 

What to Want  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  16" x 20"

I do love the months of continuous daylight here in summer, especially the last hours of evening and wee hours of morning when the midnight sun grazes and just slightly, briefly falls below the horizon. But for beauty and magic, to me there's no comparison to the twilight dusk and dawn of winter--so welcome each day in the months of long darkness. The cold, clear air of midwinter enables the wan sun's transfiguration of the treetops as it struggles to rise a degree or two, almost due south, over the Alaska Range.

It's July, and I'm happy to go to Goldpanner baseball games, run the verdant trails in shorts, watch Dorli's flowers bloom and her vegetables burgeon toward harvest, and admire the summer growth of exotic trees in the University arboretum and around our home. But in my studio, my dreams are all of snow and the light of winter.

Crystal and Kept

Crystal and Kept  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas   48" x 60"

Late winter/early spring is a time of mixed emotions for me. I am excited by the burgeoning hours of daylight, of course, but I'm always sorry to see the snow go away--first lose its deep, crisp purity and then raggedly retreat. 

A major consolation for the messiness of spring thaw for me is the occasional appearance of something called "ammil," a British word I learned long ago for the fleeting glitter of ice that frequently forms on bare twigs when freeze follows thaw. Somehow, having a word for the phenomenon encourages my noticing it. The more steeply rising and rapidly strengthening spring sun steals these little glints almost as soon as they appear, but for me they are always a welcome gift.

The beauties of early spring are subtler than those of winter, sharper and shorter-lived, but they are real. They make me think about the lines in Seamus Heaney's poem The Singer's House - "So much comes and is gone / that should be crystal and kept."

Grandfather  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

A new friend, Frank Keim, took me on a several-hour walk last fall from his home just north of Fairbanks to an extraordinary local remnant of old-growth forest. He calls it "The Legacy Forest." It's more than 100 acres of woods I'd never visited or heard about, just minutes from my own home--filled with some of the oldest and largest spruces, aspens, and birches I've ever seen in Interior Alaska. Somehow, this patch of forest escaped the felling of nearly every mature tree in our area in the early 20th Century Gold Rush, to fuel the riverboats that brought settlers and supplies to our part of Alaska. Just as miraculously, this swath of Legacy Forest has dodged destruction by lightning-started wildfire for more than a century and a half. 

The enormous white spruce in my painting Grandfather is only one of hundreds of giants in that forest, and not the largest, but it is the one that struck me most, framed in rosy autumn light by curtains of deciduous trunks and boughs. Walking those woods with Frank--a wise and thoughtful leader for more than half a century in local preservation efforts and appreciation of the boreal forest and all that lives in it--was a privilege and a pilgrimage.

Flurries at Vespers  ©Kesler Woodward 2023   Acrylic on canvas   20" x 20"

I so often find myself painting out-of-season. What we call Green-Up happened here this year on May 16--the birch and aspen leaves unfurling in their annual budburst, turning the winter-bare trees that surround Fairbanks to carpets of green hillside in a single day and a half. It is an altogether magical transformation that I dearly love, and I have often painted the newborn yellow-green leaves and trees bedecked by sudden summer. But this year I found myself just two weeks later painting bare trees and evergreens at the hour of Vespers, softened in their silhouettes by flurries of snow. 

I never know what I'm going to paint until I'm about to begin work on a new canvas. I'm happy that it's light all night now, and that it won't be dark until August, so I wonder why I chose to paint the falling snow that has just gone, and which will return soon enough, not long after deep twilight like this returns to the North.

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.