Kesler Woodward

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. 

Twilight

Orison ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 24

In this strange, uneasy time of pandemic and social unrest, I seem to be drawn in my work again and again to the hushed calm of twilight. We are blessed in the Far North with long hours of twilight, not just in summer but in every season of the year.

Here in Fairbanks we have 70 straight days each spring and summer when it doesn't get dark--when it is continuously either broad daylight or "civil twilight." Civil twilight is when the sun is less than 6º below the horizon, and you can still see details and read a newspaper out-of-doors. In the wee hours of the night, dusk and dawn are prolonged as the sun slides briefly just below the horizon and re-emerges soon after. 

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

I find the relative darkness of the deep forest comforting in these long days of bright sunlight, and at this time of year I paint spruces as often, or even more frequently, than the birches and aspens I so love. Individual birches are a continuing wonder to me, but spruces shelter, shade, and provide both a welcome contrast to the brilliance of the day and a more dramatic stage for the sun's rise and fall.

Solstice ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 36"

Even on the winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, when here in Fairbanks we get only 3 hours and 42 minutes of true daylight, and the sun struggles just one and a half degrees above the southern horizon at its zenith, we have almost six and a half hours of combined daylight and civil twilight, and the gloaming is just as beautiful as it is in summer. This is a view of the winter Solstice from the broad Tanana River just outside town, when the brief sun colors the deeply frozen, snow-drifted river and backlights the dramatic bluff overlooking it.

Summer Night

Summer Night ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

It has not been dark here for weeks, and it won't be again until August. The dramatic burgeoning of daylight has nearly reached its annual zenith, and as usual I'm enchanted by the beauty of the summer night. This year even more than most, I've found myself looking up, especially in the evening, at the treetops and the sky. The light of every season here is remarkable, the low angle of the sun at this latitude giving us hours of twilight even in winter, but it is the soft, ethereal light of summer evening, when the sun just ever-so-slightly dips below the horizon at midnight, that seems most wondrous.

I don't usually post images of my paintings in their frames, but I did this one because I so appreciate and want to acknowledge the company that has custom-made all the frames for my paintings for more than 25 years, Metropolitan Picture Framing in Minneapolis. I discovered their frames at a museum conference all those years ago, and I knew that they were what I'd long been seeking--beautifully crafted, elegant "floater" frames that were more than nice enough for display in museums, but clean and simple enough not to distract from the paintings themselves. I order them by phone, and they make the 2 1/2-inch deep frames to my specifications--ash wood, pickled-white finish, black-painted interior, pre-drilled holes for the screws that secure the painting's stretcher. They are shipped in sections, with wedges that enable me to put one together in minutes whenever I need it. For a quarter century, I have called their number and Lea Ann, in the same welcoming voice, has answered, "Hi, Kes. What can we make for you, and when do you need them?" It was a great comfort to me when I received an email just a couple of weeks ago, saying that they'd returned to work from their pandemic shutdown, were all well, and were fully back in business.

The Buried Giant  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 40"

The Buried Giant is named after a favorite novel of mine by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author best known for his novel The Remains of the Day. As usual for me, the title came after the painting was completed, when the atmosphere in the painting reminded me forcefully of the fog of forgetting which is at the center of that strange story. You'll have to read the wonderful novel to understand the reference, and I hope you will. I will just say that the painting was not intended to be "about" memory and forgetting, much less about that novel, but it seems to me very much in keeping with it, and is perhaps in subconscious response to this strange pandemic time.

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

Bare treetops about to leaf out in the lengthening days of spring, imaginary mist, the light of the summer night... I have so little say over what I paint. All I can do is go to my studio each day, begin to work, and see what happens there.  

Painting Through the Pandemic

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

Though I am every day grateful that I have a nice studio to work in, and that I do the kind of work that can be done while sheltering in place, it took me some time to find my way through the worst of the malaise and general weirdness of the current pandemic and settle into making new images.

I could never make paintings about this global crisis itself, and I certainly didn't set out to do so. I almost never know what a given painting of mine is about until I've finished it and sit back and look at it, and the titles always come after. But I firmly believe that everything I do and see shows up in my work, and when I look back on my last several paintings, I see even more than usual the interplay of light and darkness--sometimes contesting and at other times gently but inexorably giving way.

These are smaller paintings than those I was doing through the fall and winter, quieter, less certain, maybe even chastened.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Threshold ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 30" x 40"

 

Liminal

Liminal  ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 48"

In this highly unsettling, deeply fraught time of pandemic, running on snowy trails in the beautiful forest in the returning light of early spring is a tonic. The burgeoning light splits the darkness, and here in the North we are grateful for nearly an hour more of it each week. It is a dramatic, a Liminal time, at the threshold between darkness and light.

Apricity ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

I finally completed Liminal this week, in mid-March--a time of year when despite deep snow and nightly temperatures well below zero, even at first light spring seems just around the corner, and by mid-morning the sun provides warmth that can be felt on our faces. 

The much smaller painting Apricity, by contrast, was painted in January and early February, at a time of year when the sun at this latitude, even at its daily zenith, provides little or no perceptible heat. 

Apricity is "the warmth of the sun in winter." It's a purely visual warmth which reminds us, on days like the one in this scene--when it was 40º below zero on the south bank of the Chena River--that warmth will someday come again.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And one last thing, for now. I've just learned from Makenzie Demmert, TV Producer at KUAC Public Television here in Fairbanks, that Into the Woods With Kes Woodward, the 9-part television series that she produced for KUAC in 2018, is now available for viewing on PBS nationally, through PBS Passport. If you contribute at a modest level to your local Public Television station, you are eligible for PBS Passport, and you can stream any or all of the episodes for free, at this link: Into the Woods with Kes Woodward

You can read more about the series on one of my earlier website posts, at Into the Woods. It was very popular here, but when it was aired in the fall of 2018, and shown again the following year, it was only viewable locally and live, on KUAC-TV. Many Fairbanksans who don't have televisions or who can't receive the local broadcast, as well as people from other parts of Alaska and beyond, asked how they could see it. KUAC developed a 2-disc DVD set of the entire program which is still available through the station, but now it is also available for streaming to anyone who contributes modestly to his or her local Public Television station.