Kesler Woodward

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 have captured my imagination for a long time, and I've wanted to make a painting in response to them, but it's taken me this long to compose one. 

As the best translator of Basho's work, Sam Hamill 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, but 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 place that Dorli and I explored yet again this fall, and 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.

 

New Work and an Upcoming Exhibition

If you're in Anchorage on Friday, June 1, I hope you'll come say hello at the opening of a solo exhibition of my work at Georgia Blue Gallery. Thirteen of my  new paintings will be on view that evening, and for the remainder of the month of June.

Chorus ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 36"

Chorus is testimony to my ongoing fascination with bright, warm color in the white of winter. As I worked on it for many days, I completely forgot, at one point, what season I was painting. I told Dorli one day that the new painting in my studio was starting to come together, and when she asked what season it was, without thinking I replied, "It's a brilliant fall scene," before remembering that it was actually about the chorus of light that transfigures the boreal forest when the sun rises in winter, and I look directly into its glow.

I have more paintings than usual in my studio right now, as I'm about to ship the thirteen newest ones to Anchorage for my show at Georgia Blue Gallery next month. I welcomed a trio of friends visiting from Anchorage to my studio yesterday, and one of them said, "I usually don't like winter paintings, especially this time of year, as they're so cold, but although almost every painting in your studio is a winter scene, they are all full of such warm light." Many of our friends complain bitterly this time of year about the long winters, and the snow that lingers through April, so I'm always glad that both Dorli and I love the winters--however long--at least as much as the summers. I guess for both of us, it's because this, rather than cold and dark,  is the way it looks to us as we run on the snowy trails at first light for almost seven full months of the year.

 

Taiga Trail ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 16"

One of the things I do like about late spring is the way the shadows of the trees deepen so dramatically in density and definition in the stronger light. Anyone who has spent years in this forest, paying attention to the light that changes not just month by month, but day by day, might well recognize that despite the still deep, unbroken snow on this trail, these are the shadows of spring, not winter.

 

Rampant  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 24"

Rampant speaks to my seemingly endless fascination with the individuality of birch trunks, my occasional need to break away from the intricate and tightly-controlled way I've been working and indulge myself in thick, juicy paint, and the way my paintings take on a life of their own as I work on them. This canvas began life as a smooth, almost flesh-pink torso, but without much warning turned inexorably into this far wilder, rawer, scarred-but-proud, still-rampant figure. 

Small Pleasures of Spring

9 studies, each 6" x 4 1/2"  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic or pen & ink on Arches watercolor paper

These are not true "studies" or "sketches," as they are not preparatory works for larger paintings or drawings. They are just recent little expressions of my delight in a particularly beautiful spring here in the North. As I write today, in the last week of April, the woods behind our house are still deep with snow, but the warm spring sun is digging deep wells around every tree in the forest. Late snowfalls have fleetingly flocked the branches of aspens and birches in our back yard, before melting away. I'm recalling our wonderful hikes in Patagonia this January, and I'm looking forward to the snowless trails of the coming summer.

Birches and Bark

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

As much as I love late winter, especially the burgeoning light on the still-pristine, still-deepening snow cover of March, after six months of living in a nearly all-white landscape, I'm always surprised to find brighter, deeper color appearing my paintings. The birches never look more opulent than they do outside my studio windows in the glorious light of March, and as I've worked on new "portraits" of them over the last month, I've also noticed that the green of a still-distant summer has started appearing behind them in my paintings.

 

Shining ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  30" x 12"

The deep green woods that are the setting for Opulent began sidling into the field of view in the painting I completed just before it.

After months of making paintings in which I was looking directly into the low winter sun, in Shining I was content to let the higher, brighter sun of spring illuminate the trunk of a slender birch, backed by a dark spruce on the hillside below my studio. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pilgrimage ©Kesler Woodward 2018 birchbark on canvas  48" x 48"

And something completely different...

Last fall, I was invited to participate in an exhibition to open this spring which would include a panoply of works of art and craft made by local artists and artisans from parts of a single large, locally harvested birch tree. I was given a small strip of beautiful bark from the tree with which to work. It sat on a table in my studio for months, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.  

In the end, I made this piece for the show--a spiral, which I started at the center of a 48" x 48" canvas and created by attaching thin sections of the bark, carefully peeled and torn from the strip I'd been given. Two straight-pins hold each fragment in place, pushed through the bark and into and through the tight canvas.

I had no idea how many of these small pieces it would take to complete the spiral, which I initially thought of as something like a Catholic rosary--a string of 59 prayer beads. But when I reached 59 pieces of bark, I was a long, long way from filling the canvas. When I reached 108--the number of a Mala string of Buddhist prayer beads--I was still only a third of the way there. I simply continued, peeling thin layers, tearing them into similar-sized, slightly irregular pieces, and pinning them on--wondering as I worked whether I would have enough bark for the growing spiral to fill the canvas.

It took days to complete, but contructing it was curiously meditative and satisfying. When I reached the edges of the canvas, I had just enough bark left to add a few final fragments in the corners, like arriving wayfarers that hadn't yet joined the pilgrimage. I counted the delicate little pieces, each a bit different. 300 in the spiral, and 29 more waiting in the wings to join.

A Brief Passion

Epiphany  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas   30" x 40"

I never know what I'm going to paint until I'm in the studio painting it, and the title almost invariably comes after, when I sit and look at the finished canvas and ask myself, "Now what was that about?" So it's with some interest that I find myself, in the new year, still making paintings about the passionate light of the midwinter dawn.

I started working on Epiphany in early December, before my family came to visit for two weeks over Christmas, and then Dorli and I spent the first weeks of the new year at the other end of the world, hiking in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. On our return, the light was subtly different from when we left, and I spent another week finishing it in the studio, changing the shapes of the shadows and the hues in the beams of dawn.

I call all these paintings with the winter sun blasting through the forest my "epiphany" paintings, as they reference a time right around Epiphany (January 6), and they are about the way the winter sun, which barely creeps above the horizon at this time of year in the North, breaks so brightly into the dark world. Returning from Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, at the end of the third week in January, we were happy to be home to this glorious light.

A Brief Passion  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

The sun is even bigger, almost overwhelming the forest, in the much smaller painting A Brief Passion. As I worked on this little canvas, the bright spot of light with which I began grew and grew, until it threatened to obliterate the woods themselves.

I think it's about the passionate intensity with which the sun, in the midst of its brief acquaintance with the horizon, bursts on a winter morning into and through the forest. This little canvas might capture that fleeting magic more clearly than any other painting I've done so far. 

Small Wonders

Last Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Winter seems to arrive later and later here in Interior Alaska, where three decades ago I could usually ski out my back door on my birthday in early October, and the Chena River reliably froze solid in the third week of that month. This year we narrowly escaped having a snowless Halloween for the first time in seventy years. But our beautiful, downy snow is finally here, not only covering the trails, but sitting atop every twig and surface, brightening even the night.

The four small paintings I've completed since my last post are testaments to my anticipation of winter before it came in earnest, and to my ongoing exploration of the mysteries of winter light now that it has arrived. Dreaming of Winter was painted before the first sticking snowfall, when I was engaged in exactly that reverie. Last Light, Gleam, and Glint are ruminations on the subtle but real differences among first light of morning, last light of evening, and the early winter sun's occlusion by beautiful birches at the entrance to the woods.

           

Left - Glint  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

Right - Gleam  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

In both Glint and Gleam, I was determined to have it both ways--beautiful birches up very close, staring us in our faces, with just enough space around them to suggest the particular winter light.

Dreaming of Winter  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"