Kesler Woodward

Gaining Daylight

Morning Light
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on canvas
20" x 16" (image)
21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed)

It's less than a month after the winter solstice, and early this week it was 42ºF below zero here in Fairbanks, but the light is growing.  We've already gained more than an hour and a half of daylight, and for the first time, this morning, I noticed the difference without looking for it.  Still a long way to climb out of the dark, but we've begun, and I find myself in the studio wanting to celebrate it.

Texture

Approaching Denali
©Kesler Woodward 2008

Sharp-eyed visitors to this site might have noticed that the last painting, Approaching Denali, (see the January 7 post below) was done in oil, while most of my recent work has been done in acrylic.  I go back and forth between the two, working in one or the other for up to a couple of years at a time.  The results are remarkably alike, given how different it is to work in the two mediums.  When I see older paintings of mine, I sometimes have a hard time telling which medium I used, myself.  Last year, I was in a museum that had on exhibit two of the largest paintings of mine they own, and the one done in acrylic was labeled "oil," and the one done in oil labeled "acrylic." The process of working, however, is very different.  Acrylic dries too quickly, and oil dries too slowly. When I paint in acrylic, I'm always trying to take advantage of its fast drying time, which is a boon when doing images of the sort I've done for the last year and a half, in which I work in many layers. 

Detail: Approaching Denali

I'm not sure why I decided, when starting Approaching Denali, that I wanted to do it in oil.  I think I just wanted to see if I could excavate the surface the way I'd been doing in acrylic. I was able to do so, and I think the resulting surface is at least as rich and dense as those of the acrylics, but it required even more time and patience than the many-layered acrylic canvases of a similar sort. 

If there is a difference in result, it's very subtle, and I was curious, when I completed that painting, whether someone seeing an image of it on the computer would find its texture different from that of the recent acrylics.  So I asked my friend David Policansky, a scientist with the National Research Council in Washington, D.C., who I thought would be an especially keen and dispassionate observer, whether he could tell a difference.  His response surprised and a little dismayed me.  He said that he not only couldn't tell the difference, but that none of the paintings appeared onscreen to have any pronounced texture.  He's a collector of my work, and has seen a lot of it, so he knows that it does, but he couldn't tell anything about the texture from the image on the web, at all.

Detail: Approaching Denali

That response prompted me to do something I've thought about doing for some time--take some detail photographs of a painting's surface, in raking light, to try to give viewers of my works on the web a sense of what their surface is really like. I think the several detail views of Approaching Denali seen here make it clearer.  In fact, the raking light and tight detail exaggerate the surface incident somewhat.  The paintings themselves, even when seen from inches away, are not quite as craggy as what you see here...but there is a lot going on with their surfaces.  Anyone who has seen my work in person knows that.  It's a large part of the "completely abstract up close, completely representational from far away" dichotomy/transition/mystery I'm always after, and which I've talked about often.   But if you've never seen my work firsthand, my friend David's perception of the images on the web makes me think you may be surprised to see these detail views.  I hope, either way, it's interesting and illuminating.

(Remember that if you click on any of the images on this site, you can see them at a much larger size.)

Details:  Approaching Denali

Dreaming about Denali

Approaching Denali
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Oil on canvas
36" x 48" (image)
37 1/2" x 49 1/2" (framed)

Each winter, especially in the darkest part of the season, I seem to begin dreaming of more color, and dreaming of Denali. I go back to small images like the one below, done in response to particular views of the mountain from different places, at different times of day and in varying weather, and I mine those images and my recollections of them.

I think only someone who has spent a lot of time in Denali National Park would even recognize this as Mt. McKinley.  It's not a traditional view of the massif, which is so often depicted from the south, near Talkeetna, or from the north, near Wonder Lake.  It's not even exactly the same view I've painted numerous times, from Stony Hill, looking west.  Instead, it's a view of the mountain as it just begins to appear over the shoulder of Highway Pass, along the Park Road.  The mountain itself is mostly hidden by one tail end of the pass, and clouds are rapidly moving in, already beginning to break up its distinctive silhouette. I'm racing to get to see it before it disappears.

This is the great advantage of having time in the Park, of going back again and again--not only seeing, but learning to enjoy the mountain not just from the "best" vantage points, and on "perfect" days, but in many of its moods and weathers. This year I'm hoping, and planning, to go in during the winter--to spend some time in the vicinity of this view and others while the land is still locked in winter white.  In the meantime, I remember what it was like the last time I was there, and I crave the intensity of color that I miss during these short, dark days of December and January.

Clouds at Denali
©Kesler Woodward 2007
Acrylic on paper
6.5" x 9.5" (image)