Summer Night ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 36"
It has not been dark here for weeks, and it won't be again until August. The dramatic burgeoning of daylight has nearly reached its annual zenith, and as usual I'm enchanted by the beauty of the summer night. This year even more than most, I've found myself looking up, especially in the evening, at the treetops and the sky. The light of every season here is remarkable, the low angle of the sun at this latitude giving us hours of twilight even in winter, but it is the soft, ethereal light of summer evening, when the sun just ever-so-slightly dips below the horizon at midnight, that seems most wondrous.
I don't usually post images of my paintings in their frames, but I did this one because I so appreciate and want to acknowledge the company that has custom-made all the frames for my paintings for more than 25 years, Metropolitan Picture Framing in Minneapolis. I discovered their frames at a museum conference all those years ago, and I knew that they were what I'd long been seeking--beautifully crafted, elegant "floater" frames that were more than nice enough for display in museums, but clean and simple enough not to distract from the paintings themselves. I order them by phone, and they make the 2 1/2-inch deep frames to my specifications--ash wood, pickled-white finish, black-painted interior, pre-drilled holes for the screws that secure the painting's stretcher. They are shipped in sections, with wedges that enable me to put one together in minutes whenever I need it. For a quarter century, I have called their number and Lea Ann, in the same welcoming voice, has answered, "Hi, Kes. What can we make for you, and when do you need them?" It was a great comfort to me when I received an email just a couple of weeks ago, saying that they'd returned to work from their pandemic shutdown, were all well, and were fully back in business.
The Buried Giant ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 30" x 40"
The Buried Giant is named after a favorite novel of mine by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author best known for his novel The Remains of the Day. As usual for me, the title came after the painting was completed, when the atmosphere in the painting reminded me forcefully of the fog of forgetting which is at the center of that strange story. You'll have to read the wonderful novel to understand the reference, and I hope you will. I will just say that the painting was not intended to be "about" memory and forgetting, much less about that novel, but it seems to me very much in keeping with it, and is perhaps in subconscious response to this strange pandemic time.
Crown ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 20" x 16"
Bare treetops about to leaf out in the lengthening days of spring, imaginary mist, the light of the summer night... I have so little say over what I paint. All I can do is go to my studio each day, begin to work, and see what happens there.
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