Kesler Woodward

All the Light in the Boreal Forest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Was Both Light and Dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Paintings in a New Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trees and Twilight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arboretum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.