Birches and Bark

Opulent ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

As much as I love late winter, especially the burgeoning light on the still-pristine, still-deepening snow cover of March, after six months of living in a nearly all-white landscape, I'm always surprised to find brighter, deeper color appearing my paintings. The birches never look more opulent than they do outside my studio windows in the glorious light of March, and as I've worked on new "portraits" of them over the last month, I've also noticed that the green of a still-distant summer has started appearing behind them in my paintings.

 

Shining ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  30" x 12"

The deep green woods that are the setting for Opulent began sidling into the field of view in the painting I completed just before it.

After months of making paintings in which I was looking directly into the low winter sun, in Shining I was content to let the higher, brighter sun of spring illuminate the trunk of a slender birch, backed by a dark spruce on the hillside below my studio. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pilgrimage ©Kesler Woodward 2018 birchbark on canvas  48" x 48"

And something completely different...

Last fall, I was invited to participate in an exhibition to open this spring which would include a panoply of works of art and craft made by local artists and artisans from parts of a single large, locally harvested birch tree. I was given a small strip of beautiful bark from the tree with which to work. It sat on a table in my studio for months, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.  

In the end, I made this piece for the show--a spiral, which I started at the center of a 48" x 48" canvas and created by attaching thin sections of the bark, carefully peeled and torn from the strip I'd been given. Two straight-pins hold each fragment in place, pushed through the bark and into and through the tight canvas.

I had no idea how many of these small pieces it would take to complete the spiral, which I initially thought of as something like a Catholic rosary--a string of 59 prayer beads. But when I reached 59 pieces of bark, I was a long, long way from filling the canvas. When I reached 108--the number of a Mala string of Buddhist prayer beads--I was still only a third of the way there. I simply continued, peeling thin layers, tearing them into similar-sized, slightly irregular pieces, and pinning them on--wondering as I worked whether I would have enough bark for the growing spiral to fill the canvas.

It took days to complete, but contructing it was curiously meditative and satisfying. When I reached the edges of the canvas, I had just enough bark left to add a few final fragments in the corners, like arriving wayfarers that hadn't yet joined the pilgrimage. I counted the delicate little pieces, each a bit different. 300 in the spiral, and 29 more waiting in the wings to join.

Comments

[Carol Crump Bryner]

I love the way you filled up the canvas with the birch bark. It's very soothing. Like slowly unwrapping a present.