Headlong ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 48"
It has been some time since I've painted rushing water, and I had a great time tackling that ephemeral imagery again in my new painting Headlong. Much of the cascading water of a stream like this one is as white as snow, and I love trying to capture in flickering, transparent glazes some of not just its fluidity, but its exuberance--the way it hurries headlong toward the sea.
I seldom know what I'll paint next until I go to the studio and actually begin working on a new canvas, and it's often only after I'm done that I understand what called me to undertake a particular image. Surely the fact that every lake, stream, and river here in Interior Alaska has been frozen hard for almost five months, and will be for two months more, had something to do with my dreaming of flowing water. But also, even though it's still midwinter cold, February is a time of the year here when the burgeoning of daylight, 7 minutes per day, seems to be hurtling us toward spring. I think as much as anything else, this is a painting about feeling that excited rush.
Winter Bright ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Oil on Canvas 36" x 36"
The luminous colors and brilliant whites of winter are also rendered in transparent glazes--in this case oil glazes--in my new painting Winter Bright. It has been an especially radiant winter here, and the morning sun breaking in the forest turns the aspen and birch trunks, fleetingly, into molten gold amid the downy snow and the darkness of the tangled woods.
Dorli and I run every other morning, all year-round, on endless trails that begin at our back door, and in winter our runs invariably include the dawn, and the magical light that it brings. It's often hard for me to take the hour and a half or so away from time in my studio, but I reassure myself that time in the forest is as much a part of my work as time with my brush in hand.
Dayspring, Late August, Lambent ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 20" x 10" each
Whether large or small, every painting of mine is as much about a particular moment as it is about trees, mountains, or water. In these three small paintings, completed over the past few weeks, I've tried to remember and to capture not so much what those places look like, as how it felt to me to be there, at those moments of the season and times of the day.
Many Alaskans will immediately recognize the mountain Denali looming above the ridge in one of these small paintings, but I've called it Late August because what it's about for me is not so much that spectacular peak, as about the very specific way that color is changing on the foreground ridge in the...well, headlong...rush in late August toward another fall.
Comments