Kesler Woodward

Changing Seasons

Persephone  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 24"

Spring is an especially dramatic time in Interior Alaska. In a matter of just a few weeks, daylight soars from wan and short to brilliant, and night disappears. One day in early May, all the trees on the hillsides leaf out, and from one day to the next the landscape changes from bare to green. The delicate yellow- green of those newborn leaves deepens within another week, and it's early summer. 

I almost always make a painting or two about this overnight transformation of the forest, as after four decades of seeing it happen, I'm still startled and delighted by it every time. Persephone, just completed last evening, is my this-year's response. When I began this painting a week and a half ago, I thought I might call it Primavera, but as it often does, the image took on a mind of its own, and when I finished it and pondered what it was about, I realized that it had turned into Persephone. 

 

Golden Hour  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

In April of this year, before the new leaves appeared, but when the trees were often bare of the soft snows that rest on every branch throughout six months of winter, I found myself paying particular attention to the spare beauty of their crowns in the golden hours of twilight and dawn. I've painted the forest in countless ways for more than four decades, so I'm always surprised when I find myself noticing a different aspect of it. Like True at First Light, which I wrote about in my last post, the three smaller new paintings I've completed since then are explorations of the intricate tracery of bare treetops, punctuating golden sky.

 

 

 

Susurrus  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

I almost never set out to paint a "series." Usually it's just as with this run of four paintings--different ways of looking at, thinking about, and depicting something I've noticed and want to explore and/or celebrate. I make a painting, and in the course of doing it, I realize there are other ways I could do it, and other things I have to "say" about its subject. I do another, and then often another, realizing each time I finish one that there are other things I want to say, and other ways to say it. When the impetus runs its course, at least temporarily, I often look up and find my studio full of a "series" of related works.

This series was interrupted by this year's glorious budburst of green, but it's given me yet another aspect of trees to explore in the months and years to come.

 

Gloaming  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  16" x 20"

 

True at First Light

True at First Light ©Kesler Woodward 2019  acrylic on canvas  30" x 40"

It's a nice time of year in Interior Alaska. I love every season here, but late winter to early spring is one of the most dramatic, in terms of rapid change. We're gaining almost an hour of daylight a week, and already it's light outside my studio windows until 10 o'clock in the evening. Beginning in just a few weeks, we'll have no real darkness until mid-August.

Though very different in handling and appearance, both my new paintings are responses to this unique, transitional season. 

The title True at First Light is borrowed from one of my favorite Ernest Hemingway novels, but I think it's an apt name for this paean to the intricate beauty of the forest treetops on the hillside at our home, in the dawn light of early spring. As always, I'm not interested in simply rendering a scene, but am trying to capture what I can of the character of my experience being in a specific place, at a particular time, in a certain quality of light.  

So as always, everything in the painting is a fiction. Here are not the literal trunks and limbs of the very treetops I looked up to, one fine morning a few weeks ago, and these are not the "true" colors of their myriad branches. But more than any photograph I could take, the painting is true to my experience that morning...True at First Light.

Birches in Winter Dream About Spring ©Kesler Woodward 2019  acrylic on canvas 36" x 48"

The somewhat larger Birches in Winter Dream About Spring is just as "true," I think, but is more obviously a fiction--almost a fantasy. It is as loose, expressive, even riotous, as True at First Light is delicate and intricate. I began painting it weeks earlier, toward the end of more than five months of relentless winter whiteness. I love the long months of winter and am always sorry when the pristine snow starts to disappear, but I do find myself at the end of each winter craving color, and it's during that time that I often make my most colorful, wildest paintings of the year.

In Birches in Winter Dream About Spring, I'm imagining that the trees in the late winter forest are filled with the same longing I feel for brilliant hues. In it, I imagine that the robust birches still slumbering just outside my studio toward the end of a long winter are dreaming in technicolor of a coming spring. 

 

     

And one last thing, for now...

Last fall, I wrote here briefly about the 9-part television series Into the Woods, with Kes Woodward, that was produced and shown locally by KUAC, our local Public Television station. I was surprised and delighted by its popularity, and by the number of people who found it interesting and inspiring. KUAC is airing all nine episodes again this month and next, during the station's spring fundraiser, so there is an opportunity for those in Interior Alaska to see some or all of the segments on the local, over-the-air broadcast. 

Many collectors of my work who read or heard about the program, but don't live in Fairbanks, have asked me how they might be able to see the series, and I was sorry to have to say that the programs weren't, and still aren't, as of this date, streamable online. The station did, however, put together a deluxe 2-DVD set with all nine episodes, plus a lot of extra material that was cut for time from the half-hour programs, and a few mildly embarrassing out-takes. (In the course of scores of hours of filming over three months, I often made unguarded observations on the spur of the moment, and there is one whole section of the extra material titled "Kes' Pet Peeves.")

So...if you are unable to see any or all of the episodes and would really like to watch it at your leisure, KUAC Public Television is offering the 2-DVD set as a thank-you gift for a donation of $140, at this link: https://kuac.org/kuac-friends-group/one-time-donation/ I want to emphasize that if you do so, ALL of your donation will go to KUAC. The program itself was a completely volunteer effort, on my part, and my time and energy, as well as any donations, go completely to support public broadcasting in Interior Alaska. 

 

Headlong

Headlong  ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 48"

It has been some time since I've painted rushing water, and I had a great time tackling that ephemeral imagery again in my new painting Headlong. Much of the cascading water of a stream like this one is as white as snow, and I love trying to capture in flickering, transparent glazes some of not just its fluidity, but its exuberance--the way it hurries headlong toward the sea. 

I seldom know what I'll paint next until I go to the studio and actually begin working on a new canvas, and it's often only after I'm done that I understand what called me to undertake a particular image. Surely the fact that every lake, stream, and river here in Interior Alaska has been frozen hard for almost five months, and will be for two months more, had something to do with my dreaming of flowing water. But also, even though it's still midwinter cold, February is a time of the year here when the burgeoning of daylight, 7 minutes per day, seems to be hurtling us toward spring. I think as much as anything else, this is a painting about feeling that excited rush.

Winter Bright  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Oil on Canvas  36" x 36"

The luminous colors and brilliant whites of winter are also rendered in transparent glazes--in this case oil glazes--in my new painting Winter Bright. It has been an especially radiant winter here, and the morning sun breaking in the forest turns the aspen and birch trunks, fleetingly, into molten gold amid the downy snow and the darkness of the tangled woods. 

Dorli and I run every other morning, all year-round, on endless trails that begin at our back door, and in winter our runs invariably include the dawn, and the magical light that it brings. It's often hard for me to take the hour and a half or so away from time in my studio, but I reassure myself that time in the forest is as much a part of my work as time with my brush in hand. 

                  

Dayspring, Late August, Lambent  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10" each

Whether large or small, every painting of mine is as much about a particular moment as it is about trees, mountains, or water. In these three small paintings, completed over the past few weeks, I've tried to remember and to capture not so much what those places look like, as how it felt to me to be there, at those moments of the season and times of the day.

Many Alaskans will immediately recognize the mountain Denali looming above the ridge in one of these small paintings, but I've called it Late August because what it's about for me is not so much that spectacular peak, as about the very specific way that color is changing on the foreground ridge in the...well, headlong...rush in late August toward another fall.  

 

Oils

Colors in the Snow ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Oil on canvas  30" x 40"

I go back and forth between painting in oils and painting in acrylics. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Acrylics dry too fast, so are hard to blend evenly. They are too bright, and have to be knocked down in intensity as they come out of the tube, if you want to make them look rich and full. But they are crisp and brilliant, and if something goes wrong, after 15 minutes they're dry, and you get another chance.

Oils dry too slowly, so if you impatiently try to change things, they get muddy. But they are rich, full, and juicy as they come out of the tube. They feel good, smell good, and if you're patient, you can fiddle with them at leisure. I work with one or the other for a year, two years, or more at a time, before changing back to the other. For the last several years, I've painted mostly in acrylics, exploring the opportunities they afford to build layers of transparent brilliance. But with the dawn of a new year, I've returned to oils, reveling in their lush, sensual texture and richness.

January Morning ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Oil on canvas 20" x 16"

In each of my three new paintings, I've handled the oils in very different ways. Colors in the Snow was painted slowly, delicately, sparingly, scrubbing the oils onto the surface without any use of white paint, allowing the white of the canvas to both stand for the purest white of snow and lighten all the other colors as needed. It's a nearly all-white snow scene that's illumined by the myriad, subtle colors of winter. 

In the smaller canvas January Morning, I took advantage of thicker, creamier pigments to do wet-into-wet blending, trying to capture some of the intricacies of early morning light as it breaks through the woods and spills onto the foreground snow. And in Graces, I gave in entirely to the sensuality of oils, making unabashed portraits of the beautiful bodies of two of the gorgeous birches that adorn the boreal forest near my home.

Graces  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Oil on canvas  30" x 40"

I think because I didn't grow up making art, but came to it late, in college, and painted entirely abstractly--non-representationally--for years before turning to representation, the way I approach image-making is somewhat unusual. Most artists paint lots of different subjects, but paint them all in similar ways. By contrast I paint similar subjects year after year--light in the North, trees and the boreal forest, the mountains and rivers of the circumpolar landscape--but I paint those subjects, over time, in very different ways. I make images of the things I love, but I love exploring the myriad possibilities of paint just as much. That's why when people who aren't familiar with my work ask me what I paint, I tell them, "I make big abstract paintings that happen to look like birch trees."

Winter Light

Wintergreen  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  16" x 20" 

The shortest days of the year--just 3 hours and 41 minutes today, on the Winter Solstice--feature the most beautiful light of the year. Dorli and I run every other day, all year round, on the endless trails that lead from our back door. We set out this time of year about 10 a.m, almost an hour before dawn, and the light that breaks and rises in the forest as we run is extraordinary.

We feel sorry for our "snowbirding" friends who migrate to the desert Southwest in winter, pursuing longer days and warmer sunshine. The bright, fleeting light, and the ethereal colors of peach, violet, and even wintergreen that it awakens in the woods, are unlike the hues of any other season in the North.

Threshold ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36" 

Narrow Road to the Interior

Travelers  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

 "The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat or in old age, leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." Thus begins the great 17th Century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho's best known work, Narrow Journey to the Interior, a journal of prose and haiku recounting his journey through the far northern provinces of Japan. 

Though Basho began his journey in the spring, for some years since my writer friend Frank Soos introduced me to it, I have read his account each fall. Those opening lines captured my imagination, and I've wanted to make a painting in response to them, but it's taken me this long to compose one. 

As Sam Hamill, the best translator of Basho's work, says, Narrow Road to the Interior is much more than a travel journal, and Basho completely redefined both haiku and the form which combines short prose passages with haiku, called haibun.

Though my closest artistic alliances are with writers, I've only occasionally made paintings in response to specific written works. This one has been preying on my mind for some time, though. Finally, this fall, I felt that I was ready to tackle it, and it was a monthlong struggle, finding a way to turn it to my own devices. I'm happy to have found a way, within my own artistic vision, to respond to it.

Gorge Creek  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

Travelers, a large 4' x 5' canvas, follows several smaller works that I've posted about earlier, and one other new one that I've completed since my last post. Gorge Creek is another tribute to one of my favorite places in Denali National Park, a valley that Dorli and I explored yet again this fall. We were turned aside from our intended route by bears descending to the drainage we were ascending. We retreated deliberately, but immediately, reminded that we were the visitors in their place, and that there were plenty of other places to explore.

Different Inspirations

Smith Lake Morning  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

When I'm about to start a new painting, the first decision I have to make involves scale. I like to work on canvases that are quite large--big enough that it seems you could step into them--or quite small--small enough that you want to walk very close to them and enter their more intimate worlds.

When I've just finished a large painting...or as this summer, several large ones in a row that each took a month or more to complete...I often myself working on small paintings--canvases that I can begin with an end in sight. Each of the three small new paintings I've completed in as many weeks derives from a different impulse, a different inspiration.

Fall is my favorite time of year, and many autumns I find myself on the shore of Smith Lake--a fairly large and very beautiful pond in the 2000-acre arboretum of fields and boreal forest that is part of the University of Alaska campus. This has been the mildest, and one of the brightest and sunniest, autumns in memory here, and for the first time ever, I've put aside my impatience for snow to arrive and have let myself fully enjoy the lingering fall. Smith Lake Morning is a paean of thanks for that beautiful body of water, and for this glorious season. 

 

 

Sunset Peak  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  10" x 20"

Another perennial place of inspiration for me is Denali National Park, which I have visited and painted for forty years, and in which I've spent time every year, in all seasons, since I was the park's first Artist-in-Residence 16 years ago. In addition to time nearly every year in the East Fork Cabin, 43 miles into the park, I've spent a week every-other-year as a Special Emphasis Speaker at Camp Denali and North Face Lodge.

Camp Denali is an extraordinary ecotourist lodge, an inholding deep within the park, near the very end of the sole, 90-mile-long Park Road. It is a Northern Rivendell--a haven of rustic comfort, pleasure, and delight in the wilderness of Denali. Its hospitality is legendary, the naturalist guides who take guests on daylong explorations of that wilderness are remarkable, and the place attracts guests from all over the world who are as interesting as the gracious owners and the unfailingly attentive, welcoming staff. It is a perfect place, and it's always a privilege for me to get to spend a week there hiking and visiting with guests during the day and giving talks in the evenings about the key role artists played in the rise of the conservation movement in America, the establishment of nearly all of our earliest National Parks, and the way artists continue to depict and interpret this and other National Parks today.

Sunset Peak is the latest of many paintings I've made of a portion of one of my favorite views in Denali Park--the vista looking south from Eielson Visitor Center, 63 miles into the park, across Gorge Creek to Sunset Peak and the Sunrise and Sunset Glaciers. As always, I'm interested in making paintings not so much about what a place looks like, but how it felt to me to be there, at a particular time of day and time of year. Like all of my work, whether painting the forest, the mountains, or the sea, it's more about light than about topography.

 In the Park - Study for Sunset Peak  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Oil Pastel on Paper  9" x 13" (image)

I seldom make on-site studies for my paintings, but in this case I did...in a way...as earlier this summer I worked on this little oil pastel painting for the cameras of a BBC film crew who were interviewing me about artists in Denali, the Denali Artist-in-Residence program, and my own work for an episode that will air next year about the Alaska Railroad. Comparing it with the studio painting Sunset Peak provides a glimpse of the substantial difference between the way I work from life, and the more distilled vision I strive for in the studio.

Hope Begins in the Dark  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

And finally, for now, a very different image...one looking toward the winter light that I so love. As I've said on this site before, I seldom know what a painting of mine is really "about" until I've finished it. I knew in this painting that I wanted just a tiny glimpse of the brave-but-wan winter sun peeking through the dense branches of the winter forest. But I got carried away with the branches, having fun constructing and tangling them in the narrow space of this small canvas, and as the painting neared completion, I realized it was darker than I'd anticipated it would be, and the light of the winter sun even more tentative than I'd expected. 

As so often, when I sat down across the room from the finished painting and asked myself, "Now what was that about?" the answer came to me. In the dark days following the sudden passing of my dear late wife Missy, more than eight years ago, I saved on the wall next to my desk a passage from writer Anne Lamott: "Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work, and you don't give up." 

My dear wife Dorli has brought light brilliantly back into my life, and I hadn't thought about that passage in years, but when I looked at this painting, I thought it captured some of its essence. Though unbidden, it's what the painting is about.

Into the Night, Into the Woods

Falling  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

It's just a few days after the Autumnal Equinox, and here in Interior Alaska we are rapidly losing daylight, six or seven minutes each day, heading toward winter. I love the fall--the leaves of the boreal forest turning brilliant yellow before filling the air and fluttering to the ground like big, golden snowflakes, just a week or two later. I love the bright red berries and the rich carpet of multicolored flora on the forest floor. I love that night returns, and with it the aurora and the stars.

The sweep of the seasons here is dramatic, and never more so than in the fall. It's always a poignant, reflective time of year for me. I like that the seasons are so inexorable, and I love the snow and the cold and the brilliant white of winter, with its subtler, almost unearthly hues. But it always strikes me as ironic that the leaves are never so brilliant as in the moments before they die, darken, and turn to dust. I love those brilliant leaves, like those of the fireweed in this big new painting, gloriously brightening before falling into the winter night.

I've spent my summer not just painting, but doing something far outside my comfort zone as well--being filmed by KUAC-TV, our local public television station, for an 8-part television series. Into the Woods, with Kes Woodward is the brainchild of KUAC-TV producer Makenzie (Mak) Landry, who with her crew made a brief mini-documentary about me in 2017, when the station used one of my paintings for its annual fundraising poster. Following that effort, Mak almost immediately began to suggest to me ideas for a larger, more ambitious series about art, based on things I'd said about what it takes to be an artist. This spring, we settled on exploring my insistence that being an artist has nothing to do with talent, but everything to do with passion, commitment, hard work, and the courage to undertake the "hero's journey" of confronting, over and over, the daunting challenge of each new blank canvas. 

We found three diverse individuals who made the mistake of telling me that they admired artists, and thought making art was an attractive idea, but had "no talent," and we invited them to undertake that hero's journey this summer--to be artists, and to make art. All three accepted eagerly. Mak and her crew filmed my taking them into my studio, and into the literal and metaphorical woods, and for eight weeks they made art, culminating in a resoundingly successful First Friday exhibition of their work this month in downtown Fairbanks. Into the Woods is the chronicle of that adventure, which I hope and believe is one on which they will continue. I also hope that it poses for viewers important questions and ideas about making art and being an artist.

The series, which Mak has brilliantly produced, debuted last Saturday, and it will continue on KUAC-TV for the next 7 weeks. It is not stream-able, and unless it is picked up by Alaska Public Media or some other outlet, it will only be viewable on broadcast public television in Fairbanks and Interior Alaska, but if you live here and can see the broadcast, I hope you will check it out.

You can read more about the program in a recent Fairbanks Daily Newsminer article  or in this news release from KUAC. Below are images from the announcement of the show at this month's First Friday exhibition of work by the three artists.

 

A BIG New Oil Pastel

Summer Night  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  oil pastel on paper 36" x 60"

I love working with oil pastels. The first real work of art I ever made was done in oil pastels. I came to art late--as a sophomore in college. I dropped in on a painting class my future wife Missy was taking, working outdoors on the beautiful Davidson College campus. The remarkable artist-teacher who became my mentor, Herb Jackson, noted my interest and gave me a set of Cray-Pas oil pastels and a large sheet of paper affixed to a drawing board, and he suggested I make art with them. It changed my life. I sat on the ground that day and made a loose, painterly image of...trees....the magnificent, ancient oaks that adorned the stately campus lawn.

Iceberg, Hubbard Glacier ©Kesler Woodward 2002  oil pastel on paper  27" x 39"

I've used oil pastels regularly ever since. When I moved from the Southeast Alaska rainforest of Juneau to the dry Alaskan Interior of Fairbanks 37 years ago, I went into the woods with my oil pastels to explore what I had to say about the boreal forest. When I was Expedition Artist for a voyage in 2001, retracing the last great exploring expedition to Alaska--the Harriman Expedition of 1899--I took oil pastels to explore the seas, glaciers, beaches, forests, and mountains that an extraordinary group of scientists, writers and I stopped and visited along the Alaska and Siberia coasts for 30 days. I made small oil pastels on that trip, and big oil pastel paintings in the studio when I came home. I've also done a number of big, 4-times life-size portraits of some of my dearest friends and family, and of a few others, in oil pastels as well.

I never know until I go into the studio to start a new painting what I will do next, but a couple of weeks ago I decided I wanted to do a REALLY BIG oil pastel, so I got out the roll of beautiful, heavyweight archival paper I recently purchased for just such a purpose, stretched a 3 ft. by 5 ft. piece of it on the painting wall in my studio, and went to work. I seldom paint the summer forest, generally preferring the  ephemeral light of winter, but this summer I've been very attuned to the just-as-magic subarctic summer light on the treetops in the late evening, and I decided to tackle this view of it just outside my studio door.

I had no idea, when I started, how complicated and time-consuming trying to capture the light on the trunks and the dense summer leaves that so inspired me would be. At that scale, it became a marathon of tiny, layered marks and built-up surfaces. I may not make another large oil pastel for years, and may never make another one this big, but it was worth it.

 

 

Below, a few of some of my other large (but not nearly so large as this one) oil pastels from the "Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced":

Glacier Portrait (Glacier Bay)   ©Kesler Woodward 2002   oil pastel on paper    27" x 39" 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exit Glacier, near Seward ©Kesler Woodward 2002  oil pastel on paper  27" x 39"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knight Island Forest ©Kesler Woodward 2002  oil pastel on paper  27" x 39"

 

Large and Small

This is the main painting wall in my studio, with a number of new, very small paintings on it, a few larger, older works, and the big new painting which I just finished yesterday that I've titled Bhaskara's Birchbark.  

Bhaskara was an eminent 12th century Hindu mathematician in India. The geometric design within the square in the center of the canvas is my favorite visual proof of the Pythagorean Theorem--an incredibly elegant, simple diagram that deftly proves one of geometry's most fundamental tenets. It's a proof that Paul Erdos, the most important mathematician of the late 20th century, would undoubtedly have said was in "The Book"--the compendium he imagined God keeps of all the most beautiful mathematical proofs. Legend has it that Bhaskara drew the diagram and rather than explain it, simply wrote beneath it, "BEHOLD!"

I was a math nerd long before I was an art nerd, and I've always loved geometric proofs. I have no idea whether I'll do more paintings of this sort, but it was great fun to work on this big one.

Bhaskara's Birchbark  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  60" x 48"

Four April Paintings - Top to bottom - Spring Trail, Snow Wells, Spring Shadows, April Trail ©Kesler Woodward 2018  10" x 8" each

A contrast in every way to the big, bold Bhaskara's Birchbark are these four small, brand-new paintings of scenes that caught my eye and interest on the trail behind our house this April. Dorli and I run on this path at least three times each week when we're in town, all year-round. The April shadows sharply and clearly define the snow path that by April we've been packing with our running feet for the six or more months of winter, and on all sides, the birches and aspens have melted "wells" around them, from the heat captured by the trunks from the still-low, but ever-brightening sun of spring.