It Was Both Light and Dark ©Kesler Woodward 2022 Acrylic on canvas 36" x 48"
The light keeps changing in my most recent paintings. It breaks in rich hues over a dark horizon in one, suffuses the sky with glory in another, and is eerie in a third. I'm not sure what this is all about.
The trees of the northern forest are, as always, the foreground and setting for these new paintings, but even more than most of my work, they are about the light. I don't set out to make paintings about mood, about the state of the world, or even my own state of mind in these fraught times, so I'm puzzled when I finish a painting and regard it, wondering what it has to say to me, and what it might say to others.
Vault of Heaven ©Kesler Woodward 2022 Acrylic on canvas 36" x 48"
For the past two years I've made paintings about twilight--trees and the forest as they emerge or begin to disappear at every stage of dawn and dusk, and sometimes as they glow softly in the night. The liminal hues have almost invariably been muted, and I didn't intend Vault of Heaven to be that different. Somehow, the color got away from me, as I built the sky with layer after layer of transparent washes, and I was shocked by the resulting atmosphere's sensual brilliance. I thought hard about softening it, muting it, but I couldn't bring myself to give it up.
Sentinel ©Kesler Woodward 2022 Acrylic on panel 20" x 16"
Sentinel is much more muted. It presents a similar scene, but a very different mood. Its eerie light, as well as its composition, may have something to do with my having started it just a couple of days after the invasion of Ukraine, but that wasn't my conscious intention.
Sentinel is painted on a cradled wood panel of a sort that I enjoy using from time to time. These archivally primed panels are very smooth, with none of the "tooth" of woven canvas. I like to have a surface that "talks back" to me a bit as I paint, so I almost invariably find myself roughing it up, and in this small painting, I worked the sky extensively, layering and scraping it repeatedly. The process resulted in a different kind of illumination in the pre-dawn sky--distant lights seen through darkness.
