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Spring Waters
Kesler Woodward 2005
Oil on canvas
40" x 30"
I'm always a little overwhelmed by the released energy of spring, as the snowpack melts and even small rivers fill with cascades that sweep whole tree trunks into and across their rocky routes toward the sea. On bright days like this one, light filters through the dense leaves of overhanging trees in the coastal forest, spotlighting patches of water and moss in the deep ravines.
The Doge's First Potlatch
©Daniel DeRoux
Oil on canvas
48" x 84"
I was in Juneau, Alaska last weekend, to attend and give a talk at the opening of A Northern Adventure: The Art of Fred Machetanz--a retrospective exhibition of the work of one of Alaska's most beloved historical painters, which I organized for the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and which has been traveling in Alaska and beyond for the last year. It was wonderful to be back in Juneau, and to spend some time at the Alaska State Museum, where I was a curator between 1977 and 1981.
It was also wonderful to visit old Juneau friends, among them one of the first artists I met in Alaska, who almost thirty years later is still one of the best. Dan DeRoux's paintings never cease to amaze me. They are the product of perhaps the most fertile painterly imagination I've ever known. Mixing portraits of friends, hommages to and take-offs of work by Alaskan masters, and settings borrowed from the paintings of European masters from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, Dan's paintings delight one's senses, wits, and sometimes even one's conscience. Often funny, always beautifully executed, and unfailingly original, they are never just clever one-liners. Beyond their easy, accessible wit, they reward slow, thoughtful examination and rumination with not only a wealth of subtle detail, but with insightful commentary on the iconic work of artists in Alaska and the world, as well as on the human condition.
If you don't already know and love Dan's work, or even if you do, go to his website at www.danielderoux.com, where there are lots of his images to be seen. Click on them to enlarge them, read their titles, and ask yourself what these remarkable paintings have to say. The work of no other Alaska artist, I think, is both more accessible and more rewarding.
Moonlight, Alaska Forest
©Kesler Woodward
Watercolor
28" x 20 1/2"
2005
It's funny, how I can never tell what I'm going to paint until I start. Missy suggested a couple of months ago that I do a night scene. I was intrigued by the idea, but was focused on other things and could no more have done such an image on demand than fly to the moon, so I put it out of my mind. I painted the images seen in earlier posts, of a waterfall in the North Cascade Mountains, wetland forest in the spring, and other scenes. Then just last week, I went to work in the studio and found myself painting this scene of the Interior Alaska forest in moonlight.
All I can seem to do is make myself go to work. What comes of the working is, in an odd way, impossible for me to anticipate until the moment I begin. I seldom decide to do a series of paintings on a subject. I just work away, and one day I look up and I have a studio full of work that has to do with twilight, reflections in the water, snow in the boreal forest, or explorations of remembered or experienced landscapes in a new [for me] medium like watercolor.
North Cascades
© Kesler Woodward
Watercolor
20 1/2" x 28"
2005
Double-entendre, of course. The waterfall is a cascade, but it is also located in the North Cascades, just after the opening of the beautiful North Cascades Highway, the northernmost major connection between western Washington and eastern Washington, which is closed by heavy snows during the winter.
Eagle's Nest Forest
©Kesler Woodward 2005
Watercolor
28" x 20 1/2" (image)
The area where we live, on Fidalgo Island just outside LaConner, Washington, is called "Eagle's Nest." It's an appropriate name, as there are not only eagles nesting in the area, but they may be seen soaring about and sitting watchfully in the tops of trees every day. The view in this new painting is of the forest just below our house, which is perched on a high bluff overlooking Skagit Bay and the north end of Whidbey Island. The tree in the foreground is a wonderfully twisted madrona that leans out toward the light and the water against a forest backdrop of other madronas, alders, and Douglas firs.
