Kesler Woodward

Renaming a Painting - "Deep Enough for Ivorybills"

I've decided to change the name of my recent painting, which I called "Spring in the Forest," to "Deep Enough for Ivorybills." The news announced this week that researchers from Cornell University have confirmed sightings of ivorybill woodpeckers, long thought to have been extinct, in the Big Woods of Arkansas has lightened my step more than anything in a long time. I'd known vaguely about ivorybills for years, but really became fascinated with them after reading a wonderful essay by a late friend, the Georgia writer Jim Kilgo, called "Deep Enough for Ivorybills.” I heard him read from the essay years ago, about his love of woods and swamps deep enough to afford the possibility of their harboring a remnant population of the birds, which had last been seen in the United States in 1944.

Jim looked for ivorybills in such places from time to time, from his childhood, and never got to see one. He died of cancer just a couple of years ago, and the first thing I thought of when I heard the report and my heart leapt up at the discovery was how happy he would have been to know these magnificent birds still live.

This painting, of course, is not of a cypress swamp in the lowcountry South where ivorybills lived, and evidently survive. It’s rainforest in the Pacific Northwest, but the trees with their feet in the water, the wet, rich fecundity of the habitat, and the feeling that it’s a place where wild things can still thrive, makes me think it’s “Deep Enough for Ivorybills.” So that’s the new name, in honor of the birds, but even more in honor of a dear friend who was not only a fine writer, but a wonderful man with whom I didn’t get to spend nearly enough time.

Jim’s essay is still in print, in a collection of his essays by the same name. It is available from University of Georgia Press.

Jim Orvik - Paintings of Katmai

Mt. Katmai Caldera
©Jim Orvik
Acrylic on polyfiber
32" x 66"

Surely there have been few images made of Alaska's Katmai National Park more striking than Jim Orvik's new paintings of that eerie, spectacular landscape. Jim is a Fairbanks painter who has, in the years since his retirement from the University of Alaska Psychology Department in 1988, become one of the state's best landscape painters. Mt. Katmai Caldera is one of a series of paintings he has completed since he was part of a six-day field trip led by UAF Professor of Volcanology John Eichleberger to Katmai National Park.

After several years of fertile experimentation in the early 1990's with mixed mediums, widely divergent approaches to making paintings and sculptural objects, and both representational and non-representational imagery, Jim has settled in the last several years primarily into making photo-realistic acrylic paintings of the Alaska landscape. He brings to those paintings, however, both the wideranging command of paint that he developed in his years of experimentation and a highly personal, idiosyncratic way of looking at a natural scene. Though the paintings incorporate rich detail and careful observation, a close examination of their surfaces reveals his great delight in the physical substance of the paint itself. Equally interesting is the fact that his scenes often derive from unusual, dramatic, occasionally disorienting vantage points. These are accurate, highly focused views, but they are also deeply personal evocations of his response to place.

Unable to give up experimentation and the use of mixed mediums entirely, Jim has in recent years also done work that incorporates found botanical material in depictions of botanical imagery, work that he calls "Alaska Botanicals." He showed a number of these inventive, highly original, but as always carefully crafted works at Alaska House Gallery in 2003.

The collection of Katmai paintings, along with other new work, will be seen next April in Jim's solo show at the Alaska State Museum.

Mt. Griggs via Knife Creek
©Jim Orvik
Acrylic on polyfiber
48" x 36"

New Kesler Woodward Painting

Spring in the Forest
©Kesler Woodward 2005
Watercolor
20 1/2" x 28" (image)

Mark Fejes - New Works

"Standing"
©Mark Fejes 2005
Lifesized, 33" x 20"
Artifact Steel

I know this is supposed to be "Painting" in the North, but some of the most intriguing works I've seen recently are new abstract/figurative sculptures by Fairbanks artist Mark Fejes. "Standing," seen here, is one of the most overtly figurative of the works, which all make references to the human body, but some of which may be just as easily seen as organic abstractions. In the last several months, Mark has made at least nine striking pieces in what is shaping up to be a long and evolving series of works. Early sculptures in the series were wall-mounted, but more recent pieces like "Standing" have come off the wall onto pedestals, and the "backs" of the forms as interesting as their "fronts."

"Back" view of "Standing"

Mark hammers the sculptures by hand from deeply pitted steel left over from abandoned pipe that had been used to move water for early gold mining in Alaska. He recovered the pipe from a nearly buried, overgrown stack of material. Excavating it, he says, ..."was almost like harvesting an indigenous material. Its distressed character was hard-earned from a brutal life, and I consider it a kind of buried treasure." The rich surfaces of the sculptures are not true patinas, but iron oxides that develop on the surface of the steel, which he encourages after fabrication with vinegar and water.

Mark, son of the important Alaskan painter Claire Fejes, grew up in Fairbanks and works out of his own building, which houses his studio, gallery, and workspaces for other artists at the corner of Well and Good streets in Fairbanks. You can see other works in this new series, as well as earlier works by Mark, at his website: www.markfejes.com

Keeping Up with Contemporary Art in Alaska

It’s hard enough to keep up with what’s going on in contemporary art in Alaska when you live there. In the course of several years of living in Juneau and 24 years of living in Fairbanks, I kept up with what was going on the in the larger Alaskan art community by involving myself in that statewide community—serving on local, regional, and state arts councils, going to conferences, visiting galleries and museums and other artists’ studios when I traveled,…every way I could, firsthand. But on a week-to-week basis, I also kept up through reading at first both Anchorage papers—the Anchorage Times and the Anchorage Daily News, and after the demise of the Times—which had some terrific arts writers in the 1970s and early 1980s—just the Daily News. Every Sunday at least, and often other days, I would buy the Anchorage paper and not only read, but cut out and file articles about Alaskan art and artists.

I’d also subscribe to newsletters, pick up catalogs and brochures and handouts in galleries, save articles from airline inflight magazines, and everything else I could find. After almost three decades in Alaska, I have 5 file cabinets full of files on more than 4000 artists who have worked in Alaska or other parts of the circumpolar North. Now that we’ve moved Outside, the prospect of those files’ getting more and more dated and out of touch with current reality is a very unattractive one for me. How can I avoid it?

Well, I will be back in Alaska regularly and will probably go to as many exhibitions and meetings in Anchorage and Juneau as I did in the years I lived in Fairbanks, so I’ll still have plenty of ongoiong, firsthand experience. But thanks to the wonders of the internet, I and others living outside Anchorage can also keep up on a weekly, even daily basis remarkably well. I thought I’d share here a few ways that we can all better keep up with what’s going on in Alaskan art. These are just the sources that come most immediately to mind, and I’m sure as soon as I post this, I’ll think of half a dozen more.

The source I still find most fruitful is the Anchorage Daily News. A wide variety of writers, from Mike Dunham, whose articles on the arts in Alaska I have appreciated for years, to relative newcomers like Mark Baechtel, who seems to me to have brought new energy and a fresh look at the visual arts community to the newspaper’s pages, not only write reviews, but raise and discuss contemporary issues in the arts community. Dawnell Smith’s regular reviews, as well as pieces by articulate, insightful artists in the community profile artists and issues. Just in the last month, prominent photographer Hal Gage and artist/critic/writer Wanda Seamster have contributed excellent, thought-provoking pieces. I still miss Wanda’s Vizual Dog publication, which featured some of the most provocative, thoughtful, original writing on contemporary arts issues we’ve ever had in Alaska.

I check for arts articles in the Daily News almost every day, at www.adn.com, and if I miss a few days when I’m traveling and don’t have internet access, I go when I return to www.adn.com/life/arts, and the arts articles from the last month or so are available online in their entirety, even including their accompanying photos.

It’s possible to get a few other articles from the online versions of the newspapers in Alaska’s smaller communities, but they are not nearly so frequent, are often not included in the online versions of the paper, and even when they are, they are not often archived, or are not available for viewing without paying hefty fees for archived articles. I read art articles in the Juneau Empire, for instance, but I have to remember to look for them on Friday, when they appear. And it seems to me a great shame that the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner doesn’t, so far as I have been able to find, include arts articles from their Thursday arts page among the selected articles in their online edition at all.

Another source available outside Anchorage via the internet is Don Ricker’s ArtSceneAK. Don’s online publication, viewable at www.artsceneak.com, is a very personal, highly idiosyncratic monthly look at current exhibitions, arts community developments, and issues. I often disagree with his take on things, but I am always eager to read each new issue, and I appreciate enormously not only the time and energy he puts into it, but the boldness with which he takes on every issue.

As far as I know, those are the primary online periodical sources. The Alaska State Council on the Arts has an excellent website at www.educ.state.ak.us/aksca, including electronic access to the guidelines and applications for all its grants programs, news and opportunities, access to its newsletter, and much more, but it doesn’t feature reviews or discuss issues and events as they happen. That’s not its function.

Much the same is true of the excellent websites of the Anchorage Museum and University of Alaska Museum, though they and the Alaska State Museum, in Juneau, provide access to information on exhibitions and a look—to varying extents--at works in their collections. Another day, I’ll talk about the way a couple of those museums are making extensive portions of their visual art collections available for viewing online.

The Alaska State Museum website does provide a truly wonderful feature—online views of some of their solo exhibitions and other temporary exhibits, including links to artists’ websites, essays on the work, and more. If you haven’t taken a look at their site, at , take a few minutes and go there. It’s terrific.

Then there’s the Museums Alaska website (www.museumsalaska.org), which has links to the websites of most other Alaska museums. And…well, already I can think of more, but that’s enough for today. I would be delighted to hear from anyone about other online newsletters, periodicals, and sources of any kind to keep up from afar, and I’ll pass them along on this site.

Kes Woodward
[email protected]
www.keslerwoodward.com

New Kesler Woodward Painting

Colors of Winter
©Kesler Woodward 2005
Watercolor
20 1/2" x 28" (image)

Watercolors?! Anyone who knows my work will be surprised to see watercolors here among the new paintings. What's that about? Well, shortly after we moved down here, we were visiting with a dear friend who is a collector of Alaskan historical paintings, including several extraordinary 19th century Theodore Richardson watercolors. He asked me whether I ever did watercolors, and when I told him I never had, he asked why not? In the course of answering him, I realized that the reason wasn't that I thought of them as less serious than oils, despite my years of joking with watercolorist friends that that was the case. The real reason was that I was scared of them, of the fact that you have to always work from light to dark, can't cover over mistakes, can't just put something down and keep messing with it until it's right, and I wasn't at all sure I could do them successfully.

As soon as I admitted that, of course, I had to try, and since then I've done a number of them and am having a ball with the medium. It helped to realize that those same qualities of using the white of the paper for lightness, having to put marks down and leave them alone, and working primarily from light to dark, were just as true of most of the oil pastels on paper I've done for years, and that the oil and acrylic glaze paintings I've done on canvas, primarily of water scenes, are done in exactly the same way as watercolors--just on canvas and on a larger scale.

So that's the story. Look for more to come, and for more large oil glaze on canvas works similar to the images here.

An Introduction

After almost 28 years in Alaska, my wife Missy and I moved to LaConner, Washington in January, 2005 to join our longtime friend Len Braarud as partners in Braarud Fine Art – now Braarud/Woodward Fine Art. (www.braarudfineart.com)  We are private dealers, selling fine old American paintings, done primarily between the Civil War and World War II, and primarily from Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the West.

Though I work on special projects, meet with clients, and talk with Missy and Len every day about paintings we are buying and selling, I mostly spend my days painting, in my studio or out in the landscape.  I also continue to organize exhibitions, do consulting work for museums and corporate art collections, write books and articles about the art of Alaska and the circumpolar North, and serve on the boards of arts organizations in Alaska and the West. 

My peripatetic friend Len Edgerly, a poet living in Denver when he isn’t traveling,  with whom I have served on the board of trustees of the Western States Arts Federation for a number of years, has been introducing me to blogs and the “blogosphere” with increasing fervor and delight for the last couple of years.  (See www.lenedgerly.blogspot.com, or the latest chronicle of his travels, this time with his wife Darlene to France and a two-month French immersion course, at www.lenchronicles.blogspot.com) Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and I have had to jump in. 

So…I’m hoping here not only to show examples of my own work, but to talk about the art of Alaska and the North, both historical and contemporary, that has fascinated me for almost three decades and continues to intrigue me today.  I want to talk about Sydney Laurence (see www.sydneylaurence.com) , Eustace Ziegler (see www.eustaceziegler.com), and the other great historical painters of Alaska that I’ve studied and written and lectured about for years, but also about contemporary art of Alaska and the North that interests me.  I have no idea how much time I’ll have for this, or where it will lead, but I’m hoping to post new material regularly enough that those who love the art of the North as I do will want to come back often, look, read, and respond to the images I post and what I have to say.

Alaska art

Kesler Woodward - New Paintings

Madronas
©2005 Kesler Woodward
Watercolor 9.5" x 6" (image)

Eagle's Nest Beach
©2005 Kesler Woodward
Watercolor 6" x 9.5" (image)

Kesler Woodward - New Paintings

Oil on canvas 24" x 36"

Mt. Brooks - Denali Park
©Kesler Woodward 2005