Epiphany ©Kesler Woodward 2018 acrylic on canvas 30" x 40"
I never know what I'm going to paint until I'm in the studio painting it, and the title almost invariably comes after, when I sit and look at the finished canvas and ask myself, "Now what was that about?" So it's with some interest that I find myself, in the new year, still making paintings about the passionate light of the midwinter dawn.
I started working on Epiphany in early December, before my family came to visit for two weeks over Christmas, and then Dorli and I spent the first weeks of the new year at the other end of the world, hiking in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. On our return, the light was subtly different from when we left, and I spent another week finishing it in the studio, changing the shapes of the shadows and the hues in the beams of dawn.
I call all these paintings with the winter sun blasting through the forest my "epiphany" paintings, as they reference a time right around Epiphany (January 6), and they are about the way the winter sun, which barely creeps above the horizon at this time of year in the North, breaks so brightly into the dark world. Returning from Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, at the end of the third week in January, we were happy to be home to this glorious light.
A Brief Passion ©Kesler Woodward 2018 acrylic on canvas 20" x 16"
The sun is even bigger, almost overwhelming the forest, in the much smaller painting A Brief Passion. As I worked on this little canvas, the bright spot of light with which I began grew and grew, until it threatened to obliterate the woods themselves.
I think it's about the passionate intensity with which the sun, in the midst of its brief acquaintance with the horizon, bursts on a winter morning into and through the forest. This little canvas might capture that fleeting magic more clearly than any other painting I've done so far.
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