Kesler Woodward

Sanctuary

Sanctuary
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on canvas
48" x 60" (image)
49 1/2" x 61 1/2" (framed)

I have been reading a number of things lately by the author Thomas Moore, who in The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life and elsewhere urges us to meditate on places that have the quality of temenos--a Greek term for land marked off as sacred, apart from the everyday, a sanctuary.  I've been thinking about the places I've been that had that quality, that took me out of my ordinary existence and made me aware of the sacred in the everyday. 

College Fjord, in Prince William Sound, Alaska, is one of those places.  I've been there several times, most recently as Expedition Artist on the 2001 Harriman Alaska Expedition, a commemorative and exploratory retracing of the route of the last great exploring expedition to Alaska, the Harriman Expedition of 1899.  The day we sailed into College Fjord was crystal clear, and that extraordinary basin of tidewater glaciers seemed surreal in the dawn light.  I remember it like this...not just filled with drama, clarity, and light, but magically transformed, transcendent.

Middle Passage

Middle Passage
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on canvas
36" x 48" (image)
37 1/2" x 49 1/2" (framed)

March in the North is about promise, but also about longing.  The light in the forest is practically golden, compared to the wan hues of deep winter.  It's sunny nearly every day this time of year in Interior Alaska, and even though the snow lies deep on the ground and undisturbed on every branch, through the window it looks warm, like spring.

But the first step outside reveals a different reality. The cold still takes my breath away. It was 30 to 40 degrees below zero nearly every morning the past two weeks, and the air, for all its benign countenance, still has its winter bite.  The warmth I see through my windows is an illusion, a chimera, a product of my longing as much as my perception. It's beautiful--in some ways made even more so by knowing that it can't last, that it's a fleeting beauty poised on the balance point of winter and spring. The winter is never so beautiful as in this moment when it's dying, and the warmth of the coming summer is never more welcome than it is in my March craving for it.