Genesis

Genesis  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

For more than half a century when I've walked in the woods, I've rearranged random landscape elements into patterns. Long before I made my first real painting, or ever gave art a second thought, I regularly picked up rocks and leaves and sorted them by color, leaving circles or other patterns on the forest floor. I didn't think of it as making art.  I just felt a need to impose little bits of order on the chaos.

Forty years ago, my MFA thesis exhibition included on the floor of the gallery large arrangements of rocks with quartz dikes in them, the bright white lines in the different-sized rocks carefully touching edges to form continuous circles and squares.  The paintings and prints and drawings in that exhibition reflected on that impulse to impose order where none is apparent. There was a 5' x 7' painting of a starry night sky in which I carefully plotted the positions and relative brightness of hundreds of stars as they appear in the real night, on which I imposed constellations that the ancients "found" in that random arrangement of stars, and new ones I made up.

I continued for years after to make patterns on the forest floor, whenever and wherever I went, still not really thinking of it as art, but finding it deeply satisfying. When the British artist Andy Goldsworthy came to worldwide prominence some years later, doing everything I'd done and far more, far better, and much more elaborately, and photographing the results beautifully, I loved his work, but seeing it in books and magazines everywhere spoiled my enjoyment of making such arrangements myself, and I quit doing it altogether for a long time.

[23 years ago I made this 4 1/2'  x 6 1/2' oil painting, now in the collection of the Anchorage Museum, of an arrangement of lichen-covered rocks that I assembled and left on the shore of Hudson Bay during a long kayak trip in the Canadian Arctic. It's called A Circle of Rocks in the Arctic.]

Every few years, though, I give in to the impulse, because I can't help myself. One recent fall, I noticed a number of atypically bright red aspen leaves on the trail, randomly scattered throughout the yellow, brown, gray, and still-green fallen foliage. Those red leaves simply needed, in my mind, to be gathered into a solid circle. 

I love to paint leaves almost as much as I love painting trees, so when I began thinking again, just over a month ago, about my need to impose order, I started making Genesis, another big painting of such an arrangement, knowing it would take me a very long time and drive me crazy. It did, and it did...but it was worth it, in the end, to see my memory of the little circle of red leaves I'd left in the woods come to life, "writ large," on a ridiculously complicated canvas.

I really do believe the impulse to find patterns and impose order is one of our most basic human traits, and so I think it's no wonder we imagine God's having felt the same need, in the beginning, giving into it, and spending seven days creating order out of chaos.

A Pillar of Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

In all of my work, I try to capture memories of moments...to make images that reflect not so much on what places look like, but how it felt for me to be in them, at particular moments in time.

One afternoon this winter, Dorli and I were walking our dog Sigi along the ridge in our neighborhood that overlooks the Alaska Range, and thanks to the ice crystals and strange optics of our subarctic atmosphere, there was the most amazing pillar of light beneath the low sun. The sun seemed to be balanced atop it, and the column of light was mostly obscured by the forest, but broke through in a few small openings. It was fleeting, magical, and in this painting, done a couple of months later, I tried to capture a little of what it felt like to be at that very particular place, time, temperature, and light. 

Comments

[Kes Woodward]

Thank you so much, Carol. And I think you're so right, that some of us want to create order out of chaos and others want to create chaos out of order--or at least question the order. Similar impulses, I think, but different perspectives and predilections. Thanks so much for your kind words.

[Carol Crump Bryner]

A nice surprise tonight to see this post. I always love reading about the genesis of your paintings. It's interesting to think about the artists who want to create order out of chaos and the artists who seem to want to create chaos in their art. Although I do think that any art making is a process of ordering thoughts and materials.
I love your huge and complicated canvas, and I especially love "A Pillar of Light." I'm glad you keep painting. You inspire me. Enjoy your wonderful northern summer!