Thick and Thin, Tight and Loose

Deep Summer Birch ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  60" x 48" 

Many artists paint diverse subjects, but paint all of them in much the same way. I seem to do just the opposite. I paint trees and woods, rivers and streams, mountains, skies, and above all, light, but the subject of almost all my work is my response to place--how it feels, or felt, to me to be in a very particular place at a very specific time of year, time of day, and quality of light. What changes most dramatically is not what I paint, but how I paint it. For several years now, I've been using thin, transparent layers of paint to try to achieve a certain kind of luminosity that's not possible with thicker, opaque color. When I began doing that 5 or 6 years ago, it was something new to me, and it opened up whole new ways to highlight different aspects of the things I love to paint.

Gradually, too, my paintings have become tighter, more controlled. I begin each painting by laying in an image loosely, thinly, all-over, but lately I've been going in with fine brushes after, "excavating" more and more detail...both representational detail and more abstract, but clearly defined areas of shape and color. 

There is much more I want to explore with those thin, transparent layers, and I'm sure I will return to them, but when I went to work one day a few weeks ago, I found myself missing and craving the kind of thick, juicy paint and sensual surfaces and textures I employed in years past.  

A Cat  Sage Lang-Woodward 2016 acrylic on canvas board  9" x 12"

Also, sitting on a counter in my studio, where I see it every day, is this wonderful little painting my 5 year-old granddaughter Sage gave me for Christmas last year. It's the only work by another artist in my studio, and every time I look at it, I think, "Have I lost my ability to be so bold, confident, and expressive as that?" With Sage's Cat as inspiration, I launched into painting Deep Summer Birch, a big, bold image of a particularly beautiful birch just outside my studio window, and the dense, almost dark summer woods beyond it. I loved pushing the thick, juicy paint around and blending it wet-into-wet again. 

It remains a mystery to me that I have so little control over what I paint, or how I paint it. All I can do is show up in my studio every day and go to work, and so that's what I do. When I finished Deep Summer Birch, I wondered what I might do next. 

Winter's Web  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas 48" x 60"

Winter's Web followed. It usually takes me a long time for the experience of seeing something to settle deeply enough in my consciousness that I know what I want to say about it, so Dorli teases me that I'm always making paintings out-of-season--winter scenes in summer, fall ones in spring. She was surprised that with Deep Summer Birch, I'd actually painted a summer scene in July.

With Winter's Web, I returned to my out-of-season norm. The intricate frosting of deep, soft snow that bedecks every branch and twig in winter here is a continual source of wonder for me, and the kind of wet-into-wet, lush paint I'm currently excited about employing seemed perfect for capturing the way bits of bright color in the winter forest are reflected in the nearly all-white woods. Painting Winter's Web had me recollecting the beauty of winter's cold, even as it reached 90º one day here in Fairbanks while I worked on it.

Comments

[Carol Crump Bryner]

I love the lushness of these paintings. I haven't painted for several months, but seeing these makes me want to pick up my brush!