Kesler Woodward

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.

 

New Paintings for a New Year

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

A longtime friend visiting our home a couple of weeks ago, seeing paintings of mine from at least four decades on the walls, asked me about the "evolution" of my style. I laughed and told him that I don't think my style "evolves," so much as "meanders." I have consciously tried to avoid adopting a set style or technique. I'm always wandering among different ways of working I've developed over the years, in an effort not just to say, but to discover for myself, what it meant to me to be in a particular place, at a particular time, in specific weather and light.

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

Tapestry--a view of one of my favorite places in Denali National Park--and Hope--the low Northern sun bursting through the boreal forest--are images of a sort that I've made many times, but I haven't tackled them in this way way for years. I've been painting for some time primarily in thin veils of transparent color, chasing a kind of luminosity that only transparent paint on canvas can provide. But for these new scenes, I wanted denser, richer paint and less literally natural color. I turned to a strange, highly idiosyncratic way of working that I developed almost two decades ago--laying in the image loosely in strikingly unrealistic, bright colors, and then building up layer after thick layer of contrasting hues on top, each layer covering most, but not all, of the layer beneath. The result is a thickly textured surface that is flecked with bits of the mostly-buried contrasting hues throughout. The colors move toward the natural as I work, but they never become literal. They remain carriers of content, of feeling, rather than description. 

It is an odd way of working...a bit like painting in the dark...as I try layers of color almost arbitrarily to see what effect each will have in combination with the layer before. It takes three, four, or five times as long as just painting the scene, and it is disheartening, and looks ghastly, for days at a time. When it works, though, a day finally comes when it suddenly "gels," almost without warning, and the result is an image that captures much of what I felt I wanted to, but didn't know how to, say. They are maddening paintings to make, but some of my favorites over the years.

I almost never take in-progress snapshots of my work, but I did this time, as I worked on Tapestry. I hope you'll enjoy seeing the way this painting looked over the almost three weeks it took me to complete. You can click on each of the six images below to see the in-progress painting at a larger scale.

  

  

Last Big Painting for 2019

Snow Country ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 60"

There will be drawings, and perhaps even another small painting, in the few weeks remaining in 2019, but Snow Country will be my last big painting of the year. It's a view of Mount Dan Beard from the Sheldon Hut, a tiny cabin perched on a 200 ft-high rock outcropping at 5000 ft elevation on the Ruth Glacier in the Alaska Range. Dorli and I spent 5 days there with two friends, several years ago, and it was easily the most spectacular place I've ever been. Just seven miles from the summit of Denali, it is a world of perpetual whiteness, punctuated only by rock outcroppings too steep for the snow to ever cover completely.

Painting this fairly large canvas was, despite the looseness of the brushstrokes themselves, an incredibly slow, deliberate process. As always, I wanted the scene to be very realistic from a distance and completely abstract, altogether painterly, up close. But rock outcroppings are already so abstract in form that unlike trees, forests, or other subjects that are replete with immediately recognizable silhouettes, capturing the crenellations, snow slides, cornices, and drifts while keeping the paint lively--not just descriptive--was an exacting balancing act. Even more than usual, I had to keep walking away from the canvas to see exactly where I was in the scene, approach and attack a small section of rock, snow, and shadow quickly and freely, make myself stop and walk away to get my bearings again, and re-engage to tease out just a bit more representational form. It was a patient dance of stop and start--slow, almost meditative--and it was especially satisfying to see this very specific, highly distinctive mountain's form emerge on the canvas bit by bit, day after day. 

Replenishment

Replenishment  ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 60"

I'm not certain why I've been painting mountains, glaciers, and falling snow for the last month, rather than birch trees and boreal forest. I've been reading and thinking a lot about climate change, and about how the coastal glaciers I began visiting more than four decades ago have almost all shrunk dramatically in that time, but I didn't go to my studio and decide to make paintings about climate change. It's hard--for me at least--to work that way without simply illustrating an idea. I'd much rather discover, after I've made a painting and asked myself what it was about, that I had something to say about it.

I've painted mountains and glaciers for decades, but it's been some time since I turned to them as subject matter, so when I finished this painting, I sat and looked at it from across the studio and asked myself, as usual, "So what was that about?" The snow arrived very late this year here in Fairbanks, as it has for several years now, and I'm sure that the falling snow in these paintings came in response to my perennial eagerness for it. But when I cast about for a title, Replenishment came to mind immediately, and I thought, wryly, that Alaska's glaciers must be longing for it at least as much as I have been.

As soon as it was done, I prepared another large (4 ft. x 5 ft.) canvas and tackled another glacier that I know well, imagining that it, too, must be dreaming of the snow and cold that enabled it to grow and spill from mountaintop to sea, and which it needs, in its season, to continue to thrive.

Glacier Dreams  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

Since my last post, and before making these big mountain, glacier, falling snow paintings, I finished the half-dozen new pen and ink drawings I set out to make of some of my favorite birches in our own yard. I'll get around to having them framed individually, eventually, but for now I'm enjoying having them push-pinned as a group on the painting wall in my studio, where they catch my eye with delight daily, as I paint.  

Six new pen-and-ink birch portraits on the wall in my studio. For titles, sizes, and individual images, click on the Available Works Album at the top of the right-hand column above and then on any of the individual thumbnails.