Tumult, Quiet, and Welcome Back to the Night and the Stars

Tumult  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

I continue, in the studio, to be almost a pawn of the feelings engendered by this strange time of pandemic and social unrest. I find myself in one painting trying to wrangle on canvas the tumult around and within me, and in the next reaching for the reassuring quiet of forest, land, water, and the light that waxes and wanes inexorably through the changing seasons.

Tumult, unexpectedly, proved to be the most challenging, fraught painting I've undertaken in years. I began it with utmost confidence, intending something quite different from what it became, but the "doomscrolling" (a term I recently learned for reading online one upsetting news story after another) that I had been doing for months seemed to bleed more openly than ever onto this large canvas, and I felt a bit like Jacob wrestling with the Angel, trying to bring it under control. I was on the verge of throwing it away and starting over multiple times, right up until less than twelve hours before it began to fall into place. I hope it captures some of the alternating despair and hope I felt during the weeks I worked on it.

Vespers  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 30"

After the tumult, I must have been praying for calm, as my next painting, Vespers, brought a return to serene skies and the long view to the horizon from the ridge on which we live, framed by the trees whose endlessly varied shapes and personalities never fail to fascinate me.

Welcome ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

Welcome is a salutation to the return of darkness and the stars in August here in Interior Alaska, after months of continuous light. I welcome the burgeoning light each spring, and I love the months of sempiternal daylight in summer, but I am just as delighted by the return of nightfall each autumn, and always surprised the first evening I look up and see the stars again.

Comments

[Kes Woodward]

Thank you so much, Carol. I envy the calm you radiate in your work--the attention to otherwise ordinary places and scenes that you fill with quiet intensity in your canvases. I think you are so right that we are lucky to get to do what we do. There are very few days in my studio that I don't stop and think just that.

[Carol Bryner]

I love all three of these paintings, Kes. I envy your closeness to the nature around you, and I envy all the hours you are able to spend in your studio. Aren't we lucky as artists to be able to put our emotions into our work, but in ways that help us who create them and also help those who find solace in the image. Thanks!!