Kesler Woodward

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. 

After the Storm

After the Storm  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

The liminal hours of dawn and dusk that have filled my paintings for the last year and a half continue to dominate my canvases. I never set out to work in series. Invariably, I have an idea, make a painting based on it, and in the course of painting in response to it, think about other ways I might approach it. When I'm done with that painting, I start work on the related idea, and while working on it, the same thing happens again. And again. And again. Six months or a year later, I look up and around at the walls of my studio and realize I have produced a series.

This has happened over and over again, for decades. People often ask me how I know when a series is over, and I can only say that it's when doing one painting doesn't bring up one, or two, or three related ideas for the next.  When I start to wonder how else I might elaborate on a series, it's time to move on. Fortunately, by that time some new notion has excited me. I've never had to wait for ideas, and there has never been enough time to tackle them all.

Light in the Clouds  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

In all of these paintings for the last eighteen months, the skies have gone in last--after and on top of the trees, water, hills, and sometimes distant mountains. The skies develop through many, many layers of thin, transparent washes, not only describing the time of day and the weather, but suffusing the landscape elements with that atmosphere. I never know until the painting is done exactly what those conditions will be, what time of day it will be, or what kind of mood will result. Dorli is almost the only one who sees my work in progress (and even she seldom), and she is often shocked by how different the painting is each time she sees it, before I declare it done.

Aerie  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

Aerie is a specific place--the overlook below our home high in the hills, with the town of Fairbanks and Tanana River Valley in the distance and the Alaska Range looming on the distant horizon. Here, I was after a very specific quality of light--that time of evening when the sky is still light, but it's dark enough that the lights of the city are beginning to come on below. I've admired this view countless times, but never sought to paint it before. It continually amazes me that in the place I live and the things I see every day and think I know, there are always new ways to see it again.

 

Will There Be Singing?

Clair de Lune  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Dorli named this one--Clair de Lune. Winter moonlight falling on two beautiful aspens near the small, freestanding deck next to my studio. We had the deck built late last summer, to make possible socially distanced visiting with friends around a little propane fire pit during the winter. We gather there for coffee and treats with friends three days each week, after running six miles on the trails together. During this long winter (as I write, we've had 183 straight days without the temperature's rising to 40º F) we've gathered with those and other friends at times in the darkness, and we have watched the light of the moon fall gently on these trunks in the soft, deep snow.

Enchantment  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  acrylic on board  20" x 16"

Another moonlit scene, neighborhood spruces backlit by the not-yet-risen lunar orb. I've been painting twilight all this past year, trying to catch the falling and rising light of the sun, and I have been pondering off and on how I might want to paint the night. The light of the moon is so different from even the gentlest, not-yet-risen or just-fallen light of the sun. It has for me a different kind of enchantment.

Will There Be Singing?  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

"In the dark times will there also be singing?" the great German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht asked, in the introduction to a collection of poems  he composed in exile in Denmark in the late 1930s. "Yes," he answered, "there will be singing. About the dark times." For Brecht,  an outspoken critic of Hitler, with a Jewish wife, the times in which he composed the Svendborg Poems were far darker than our own time of pandemic and social discord.

I hadn't thought of those lines for years, but when I finished this painting and asked myself what the dancing and singing clouds and light above the tumult were about, the poet's determined words rose to my recollection, and I had to shake my head and smile as I said them aloud.

Light in the North

Stillnesss- Smith Lake Summer Night  ©Kesler Woodward 2021    Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 40"

Many of my recent paintings feature the brief, luminous light of winter, but this time of year, as the days lengthen by the better part of an hour each week, I often find myself thinking about the light at the opposite pole of the seasons. The midnight light of summer is every bit as magical as the midday sunrises and sunsets of deep winter, and as so often, I'm painting out of recollection, and out of season.

Night Lights   ©Kesler Woodward 2021   Acrylic on Canvas   48" x 60"

Smith Lake is a beautiful body of water that is part of a 2000-acre arboretum on the University of Alaska campus, and the light on it in various seasons is one of my favorite subjects. We watch migrating waterfowl by the thousands congregate on it in spring, we ski over it in winter, and we run around it in summer. I like the the scruffy, determined black spruce that cling to life at its edges, the way the clouds after midnight are reflected in its surface, and the view across it to Ester Dome, which we run from campus to the top of and back each fall in the Equinox Marathon. 

A Thin Place   ©Kesler Woodward 2021   Acrylic on Canvas   24" x 30"

I'm dreaming of summer a bit, but I guess I'm not yet done with late winter night. Each new painting of this slightly eerie, liminal light seems to take on a life of its own as I work, independent of my initial desires. I paint the skies, the atmosphere, the light in these paintings last--after the landscape features have taken shape, so that the landscape will be bathed in and illuminated by the light, inseparable from it. So often, the skies and the light change what I thought the painting was about altogether, and things like this rift between heaven and earth occur.

Night Muse   ©Kesler Woodward 2021   Acrylic on canvas   24" x 30"

The moon is dim here almost half the year, in the continuous light of late spring, summer, and early fall, so I appreciate it all the more in winter. I watch it wax and wane with great delight, and when I travel, I notice how the features on its surface reorient, turning like a clock with my changing latitude.

A New Year, New Paintings, and a New Exhibition

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

After a very successful solo exhibit at Well Street Gallery here in Fairbanks in December, I am excited to be working on the last few paintings for my next exhibition, which will be at Stremmel Gallery in Reno, Nevada from March 13 through April 10. On my artist's page at the Stremmel Gallery website are images of twelve of the paintings that will be in the exhibition, including the five new canvases featured in this post. 

Almost all of the paintings that will be in the Reno exhibition were completed in the past year, so they were done during a worldwide pandemic and at a time of great social unrest in our country and the world. Most depict the liminal time between darkness and light, but here in the North, we have hours of lingering, luminous twilight in every season, and this year I have been especially grateful for the magic of those long hours of dusk and dawn. I haven't set out to make paintings about the state of the world, and I wouldn't know how to do so if I tried, but the extraordinary light of Alaska has served as comfort and inspiration for me throughout this strange time. It has become more than ever a kind of metaphor for hope in a time of uncertainty.

Rising  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

Fog and mist have been more frequent than usual throughout every season, these last couple of years in Interior Alaska, and I've marveled at the way mist can swiftly draw a soft curtain over this stark landscape. I like the way the low sun first breaks through and then gently lifts the veil, and I'm always heartened with its rising.

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

I go to my studio each morning and I paint, but the news of the world doesn't go unnoticed, and without conscious intent, the skies in my paintings seem to have reflected my reactions to both gathering darkness and reawakened light in the world beyond--to gathering storms and to prospects for peace. I was just beginning work on Auguries on the morning of January 6, and I completed  Inauguration on January 20.

Inauguration  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 16"

 

Faerie  ©Kesler Woodward 2021 Acrylic on Canvas 20" x 16"

And I've read even more poetry than usual this past year, savoring old favorites and finding, saving, and occasionally memorizing all or parts of new poems that have spoken to me during this time. Among my old passions, I've found myself re-reading a lot of William Butler Yeats, and several of my new paintings have come, I think, out of pondering his reflections on a world in turmoil, the power of legend, commitment to place, and the cyclical nature of history and life.

Newest Paintings and A Big December Exhibition

A big exhibition of 29 of my recent paintings will open at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks this Friday, December 4, with a carefully controlled COVID-19-conscious reception from 5-8 p.m. The gallery requires all visitors to be masked, only allows a handful of viewers to be in the quite large spaces at one time, and visitors enter through a front door and exit through a rear door, both monitored by staff. I will be on hand, masked and socially distanced, to greet visitors and talk with them about my work.

This is my first local exhibition in several years, and none of these paintings have been exhibited in Fairbanks before now. Most of the works in the exhibition are from 2020, were completed during the pandemic and the social unrest which have gripped our nation and the world throughout this year, and I think were strongly influenced by this unprecedented time.

The paintings range in size from 8 x 10 inches to 4 x 5 feet, and many focus on the time between darkness and light, on the hours of twilight and dawn, on clear skies becoming occluded and on cloudy skies brightened by the sun. 

Trees and the boreal forest feature prominently, of course, but in this exhibition there are more spruces than birches. Rushing water courses across some canvases. Leaves burst in May from bare branches, and some tumble to the ground, still green, before the onset of fall. The trunks of birches dream of summer through the long winter snows, and the bare crowns of aspens reach toward the sky for light in the very late fall and the very early spring.

I go to my studio each morning and go to work, and I never know what my paintings will be about until they are done. I sit and look at a finished canvas, ask myself, "Now what was that about?" and a title floats to mind. It always seems so clear, after the fact.

I have written briefly on this website about most of the paintings that are in the exhibition, but there are several new ones since the last post.

            
Leaning In     ©Kesler Woodward 2020    36" x 36"              Favorite  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  20" x 10"

Leaning In is a reminder to myself and others that despite preoccupations with all sort of things in the wide world, I'll probably never quit painting birch portraits, and Favorite is the trunk of a tree I've long loved and have painted many times.

 

Scion  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  20" x 10"     Nightfall  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  24" x 30"

Scion is a venerable white spruce in our neighborhood, towering over the lesser trees below the garden, and Nightfall features another impressive spruce, foregrounding the Tanana Valley and the peaks of the Alaska Range beyond.

If you are in Fairbanks in December, I hope you can make a trip to Well Street Art Gallery to see the exhibition, and if you're far from Interior Alaska, I hope you'll enjoy getting these glimpses of the show.

 

 

Darkness and Light

Expectation ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

From May through early August here, it doesn't get dark. I enjoy the months of continuous light, but when fall arrives I welcome back the night. It sneaks up on me, surprising me every year when for the first time I go out in the late evening and can see stars. I look first for Cassiopeia, a favorite constellation, find various individual stars in their familiar places, and by late August, it's dark enough very late in the evening that I can see the Pleiades.

Often in October I'm still painting in response to the brief riot of fall color that has passed, as the leaves in the canopy and in the undergrowth went bright, tumbled, and quickly faded. But all this year I've been more caught up in the daily dance between light and darkness, and every painting seems to turn into a chronicle of that chase.

Expectation is in part about the intricate tracery of treetops against the sky, something I regard with relish each time I walk the few steps between my studio and my house. I've painted these treetops for years now, in every season--in their verdant summer foliage, in their fall brilliance, and covered with the soft, light snow of our clear, cold, mostly windless winter. This  year, though, I've been drawn as well to the bare branches of late spring and late autumn. I like the way the darkness and light rise and fall in turn around them, each morning and evening, and I have been trying to capture some of that choreography. 

Promise  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  16" x 20"

Promise is, I think, about the burgeoning light of late winter, which turns treetop branches that have been laden with snow for six months suddenly bright with the colors of sunrise. This winter Dorli and I on three mornings caught the "Green Flash" of the rising sun from the trail as we ran, in the instant before it broke the horizon. 

Snow Like the Stars  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 36" 

I love falling snow at any time, but I have always been especially fascinated when it falls out of a seemingly clear sky--wafting down from a high, often unseen passing cloud.  I've painted that many times, enjoying the odd juxtaposition of bright light and shadow with falling snow. I think Snow Like the Stars is the first time, though, that I've made a painting about that phenomenon at night. Welcoming the reappearance of the stars in the sky this autumn, I made this painting about the way on an almost perfectly clear night, falling snowflakes can look so much like the stars that it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Tumult, Quiet, and Welcome Back to the Night and the Stars

Tumult  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

I continue, in the studio, to be almost a pawn of the feelings engendered by this strange time of pandemic and social unrest. I find myself in one painting trying to wrangle on canvas the tumult around and within me, and in the next reaching for the reassuring quiet of forest, land, water, and the light that waxes and wanes inexorably through the changing seasons.

Tumult, unexpectedly, proved to be the most challenging, fraught painting I've undertaken in years. I began it with utmost confidence, intending something quite different from what it became, but the "doomscrolling" (a term I recently learned for reading online one upsetting news story after another) that I had been doing for months seemed to bleed more openly than ever onto this large canvas, and I felt a bit like Jacob wrestling with the Angel, trying to bring it under control. I was on the verge of throwing it away and starting over multiple times, right up until less than twelve hours before it began to fall into place. I hope it captures some of the alternating despair and hope I felt during the weeks I worked on it.

Vespers  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 30"

After the tumult, I must have been praying for calm, as my next painting, Vespers, brought a return to serene skies and the long view to the horizon from the ridge on which we live, framed by the trees whose endlessly varied shapes and personalities never fail to fascinate me.

Welcome ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

Welcome is a salutation to the return of darkness and the stars in August here in Interior Alaska, after months of continuous light. I welcome the burgeoning light each spring, and I love the months of sempiternal daylight in summer, but I am just as delighted by the return of nightfall each autumn, and always surprised the first evening I look up and see the stars again.

Painting Large and Painting Small

     

     

Four small canvases, ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 10" x 8" each

Top row - Glimmer (left) and Beckon (right)

Bottom row - Smith Lake Light (left) and Chena Ridge Light (right)

I make paintings that range in size from 5 x 7 inches to 5 x 7 feet, and I prefer to work either quite large or quite small. Anything about 4 x 5 feet or larger feels big enough to walk into, and canvases 16 x 20 inches or smaller require standing close, which makes the rest of the world disappear and affords much the same illusion. I've learned in recent years to find ways to work between those sizes, but it's harder for me.

Each day I go to my studio and work, and when I finish a painting, the choice of what I want to work on next is based in part on aesthetics and partly on desire. When I've finished a large painting that I've worked on for many weeks, I find myself wanting to tackle something on a scale at which I can see light at the end of the tunnel more quickly. And when I've just finished, as now, several small paintings in a row, I'm invariably eager to take on something large. 

The recent paintings I've been doing have all been about twilight, dusk, dawn--the liminal spaces between day and night--and I've enjoyed exploring ways to capture some of the magical light that develops and lingers through those long hours here in the North. I've found that easier to do on somewhat larger canvases, but it was a fascinating challenge to me to try to make it work on the four tiny, 10" x 8" canvases I've completed in the last few weeks.

Fun...and I'm happy with them...but now I'm ready to paint something big.