Kesler Woodward

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. 

Cloths of Heaven  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Oil pastel on canvas  48" x 60"

Cloths of Heaven is a large (4 ft. x 5 ft.) canvas, done all in oil pastels. This is a crazy thing to do, which I suspected when I began, but I couldn't help myself. I love working with oil pastels, but they are made for working on paper, and it's aggravating, at best, to deal with framing and shipping very large works on paper, so I thought it was worth trying on a large, stretched canvas. I am completely delighted with the outcome, but I had no idea how long it would take to work up the textured surface of that much canvas to my satisfaction, or how many, many sticks of my beautiful, soft, Sennelier French oil pastels it would consume. I am glad to have done it, and I love the deep, oily, sensuous surface of a hundred colors buried in and bleeding through the dense white that like the snow, tries to cover all, but I can't imagine doing it again.

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.

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.

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!