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