Expectation ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 60"
From May through early August here, it doesn't get dark. I enjoy the months of continuous light, but when fall arrives I welcome back the night. It sneaks up on me, surprising me every year when for the first time I go out in the late evening and can see stars. I look first for Cassiopeia, a favorite constellation, find various individual stars in their familiar places, and by late August, it's dark enough very late in the evening that I can see the Pleiades.
Often in October I'm still painting in response to the brief riot of fall color that has passed, as the leaves in the canopy and in the undergrowth went bright, tumbled, and quickly faded. But all this year I've been more caught up in the daily dance between light and darkness, and every painting seems to turn into a chronicle of that chase.
Expectation is in part about the intricate tracery of treetops against the sky, something I regard with relish each time I walk the few steps between my studio and my house. I've painted these treetops for years now, in every season--in their verdant summer foliage, in their fall brilliance, and covered with the soft, light snow of our clear, cold, mostly windless winter. This year, though, I've been drawn as well to the bare branches of late spring and late autumn. I like the way the darkness and light rise and fall in turn around them, each morning and evening, and I have been trying to capture some of that choreography.
Promise ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 16" x 20"
Promise is, I think, about the burgeoning light of late winter, which turns treetop branches that have been laden with snow for six months suddenly bright with the colors of sunrise. This winter Dorli and I on three mornings caught the "Green Flash" of the rising sun from the trail as we ran, in the instant before it broke the horizon.
Snow Like the Stars ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 36"
I love falling snow at any time, but I have always been especially fascinated when it falls out of a seemingly clear sky--wafting down from a high, often unseen passing cloud. I've painted that many times, enjoying the odd juxtaposition of bright light and shadow with falling snow. I think Snow Like the Stars is the first time, though, that I've made a painting about that phenomenon at night. Welcoming the reappearance of the stars in the sky this autumn, I made this painting about the way on an almost perfectly clear night, falling snowflakes can look so much like the stars that it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
