Will There Be Singing?

Clair de Lune  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Dorli named this one--Clair de Lune. Winter moonlight falling on two beautiful aspens near the small, freestanding deck next to my studio. We had the deck built late last summer, to make possible socially distanced visiting with friends around a little propane fire pit during the winter. We gather there for coffee and treats with friends three days each week, after running six miles on the trails together. During this long winter (as I write, we've had 183 straight days without the temperature's rising to 40º F) we've gathered with those and other friends at times in the darkness, and we have watched the light of the moon fall gently on these trunks in the soft, deep snow.

Enchantment  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  acrylic on board  20" x 16"

Another moonlit scene, neighborhood spruces backlit by the not-yet-risen lunar orb. I've been painting twilight all this past year, trying to catch the falling and rising light of the sun, and I have been pondering off and on how I might want to paint the night. The light of the moon is so different from even the gentlest, not-yet-risen or just-fallen light of the sun. It has for me a different kind of enchantment.

Will There Be Singing?  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

"In the dark times will there also be singing?" the great German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht asked, in the introduction to a collection of poems  he composed in exile in Denmark in the late 1930s. "Yes," he answered, "there will be singing. About the dark times." For Brecht,  an outspoken critic of Hitler, with a Jewish wife, the times in which he composed the Svendborg Poems were far darker than our own time of pandemic and social discord.

I hadn't thought of those lines for years, but when I finished this painting and asked myself what the dancing and singing clouds and light above the tumult were about, the poet's determined words rose to my recollection, and I had to shake my head and smile as I said them aloud.

Comments

[Kesler Woodward]

Thank you, Carol, for your kind words and for taking the time to comment. I couldn't agree more about the value of art at such a time, or the delight at being able to gather again, in even a limited way. Take care, and thanks.

[Carol Bryner]

This is such a lovely post. It certainly has been a long dark slog, but art has been a huge distraction and comfort for many of us. And gathering with friends in whatever way is possible. And now we are getting back together in small groups and it's pretty wonderful. I do love the light in these paintings. Thanks for sharing them, Kes.