Bounty ©Kesler Woodward 2019 acrylic on canvas 36" x 48"
When I've just completed a painting, I never know until I get to my studio the following day what I will feel called upon to tackle next. Bounty--a paean to cold, free-flowing water rushing over rocks in an unnamed but very specific Alaska stream--is typical of my most fluid, loosest kind of painting. It's all transparent glazes, the white of the canvas signifying froth, and I'd like to think it makes the viewer's eyes dart as mercurially as my brush did for days, teasing the freshet's structure out of the canvas.
I am so caught up in the challenges of each painting until it's done that I seldom think about what might come next, but if I had wondered, I'd have probably imagined I'd work next on something similar.
Instead, what followed were several drawings--pen and ink, sharp black lines on beautiful, creamy white heavyweight paper--as linear and sharp as the painting I'd just finished was loose and liquid. I very seldom make finished drawings, but I was inspired by having recently seen the drawings of two Alaska artist friends--Norm Campbell and Elizabeth Eero Irving --whose work is very different from one another, and from mine, but both of whose work I very much admire.
A Dooryard Birch ©Kesler Woodward 2019 pen and ink on paper 13" x 8" (image) 15" x 10" (paper)
Of course my drawings, for all their black-and-white crispness, are the same mix of representation and abstraction as the rest of my work. From across the room, they are birch trunks--portraits of birches just outside my studio door. But up close, they are all nested marks, surfaces built of a myriad pen strokes, in which I want you to get as lost as I frequently am, when I'm working on them.
Sentinel ©Kesler Woodward 2019 pen and ink on paper 13" x 8" (image) 15" x 10" (paper)
North Window ©Kesler Woodward 2019 pen and ink on paper 20" x 28" (image) 22" x 30" (paper)
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