Smith Lake Morning ©Kesler Woodward 2018 Acrylic on Canvas 20" x 10"
When I'm about to start a new painting, the first decision I have to make involves scale. I like to work on canvases that are quite large--big enough that it seems you could step into them--or quite small--small enough that you want to walk very close to them and enter their more intimate worlds.
When I've just finished a large painting...or as this summer, several large ones in a row that each took a month or more to complete...I often myself working on small paintings--canvases that I can begin with an end in sight. Each of the three small new paintings I've completed in as many weeks derives from a different impulse, a different inspiration.
Fall is my favorite time of year, and many autumns I find myself on the shore of Smith Lake--a fairly large and very beautiful pond in the 2000-acre arboretum of fields and boreal forest that is part of the University of Alaska campus. This has been the mildest, and one of the brightest and sunniest, autumns in memory here, and for the first time ever, I've put aside my impatience for snow to arrive and have let myself fully enjoy the lingering fall. Smith Lake Morning is a paean of thanks for that beautiful body of water, and for this glorious season.
Sunset Peak ©Kesler Woodward 2018 Acrylic on Canvas 10" x 20"
Another perennial place of inspiration for me is Denali National Park, which I have visited and painted for forty years, and in which I've spent time every year, in all seasons, since I was the park's first Artist-in-Residence 16 years ago. In addition to time nearly every year in the East Fork Cabin, 43 miles into the park, I've spent a week every-other-year as a Special Emphasis Speaker at Camp Denali and North Face Lodge.
Camp Denali is an extraordinary ecotourist lodge, an inholding deep within the park, near the very end of the sole, 90-mile-long Park Road. It is a Northern Rivendell--a haven of rustic comfort, pleasure, and delight in the wilderness of Denali. Its hospitality is legendary, the naturalist guides who take guests on daylong explorations of that wilderness are remarkable, and the place attracts guests from all over the world who are as interesting as the gracious owners and the unfailingly attentive, welcoming staff. It is a perfect place, and it's always a privilege for me to get to spend a week there hiking and visiting with guests during the day and giving talks in the evenings about the key role artists played in the rise of the conservation movement in America, the establishment of nearly all of our earliest National Parks, and the way artists continue to depict and interpret this and other National Parks today.
Sunset Peak is the latest of many paintings I've made of a portion of one of my favorite views in Denali Park--the vista looking south from Eielson Visitor Center, 63 miles into the park, across Gorge Creek to Sunset Peak and the Sunrise and Sunset Glaciers. As always, I'm interested in making paintings not so much about what a place looks like, but how it felt to me to be there, at a particular time of day and time of year. Like all of my work, whether painting the forest, the mountains, or the sea, it's more about light than about topography.
In the Park - Study for Sunset Peak ©Kesler Woodward 2018 Oil Pastel on Paper 9" x 13" (image)
I seldom make on-site studies for my paintings, but in this case I did...in a way...as earlier this summer I worked on this little oil pastel painting for the cameras of a BBC film crew who were interviewing me about artists in Denali, the Denali Artist-in-Residence program, and my own work for an episode that will air next year about the Alaska Railroad. Comparing it with the studio painting Sunset Peak provides a glimpse of the substantial difference between the way I work from life, and the more distilled vision I strive for in the studio.
Hope Begins in the Dark ©Kesler Woodward 2018 Acrylic on Canvas 20" x 10"
And finally, for now, a very different image...one looking toward the winter light that I so love. As I've said on this site before, I seldom know what a painting of mine is really "about" until I've finished it. I knew in this painting that I wanted just a tiny glimpse of the brave-but-wan winter sun peeking through the dense branches of the winter forest. But I got carried away with the branches, having fun constructing and tangling them in the narrow space of this small canvas, and as the painting neared completion, I realized it was darker than I'd anticipated it would be, and the light of the winter sun even more tentative than I'd expected.
As so often, when I sat down across the room from the finished painting and asked myself, "Now what was that about?" the answer came to me. In the dark days following the sudden passing of my dear late wife Missy, more than eight years ago, I saved on the wall next to my desk a passage from writer Anne Lamott: "Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work, and you don't give up."
My dear wife Dorli has brought light brilliantly back into my life, and I hadn't thought about that passage in years, but when I looked at this painting, I thought it captured some of its essence. Though unbidden, it's what the painting is about.
