Apricity ©Kesler Woodward 2022 acrylic on canvas 36" x 36"
When I posted an image of Apricity on a couple of social media sites the day that I finished it, half a dozen people wrote me to say that they loved it, but that they had to look up the meaning of the word "apricity." I am very fond of old, seldom-now-used words for winter phenomena, and "apricity," a word I've used in painting titles before, is one of my favorites. It's simply the warmth of the sun in winter. I've always taken it to mean either a physical warmth--the way even on a very cold day, you can sometimes feel the sun's warmth on your face or the back of your neck--or a psychological warmth--the way bright sunshine can make you feel a bit warmer, even when it's very cold.
Here in Interior Alaska, any warmth from the sun in December is purely psychological. On the winter solstice, the sun here is only up for three hours and forty-two minutes. It rises almost due south, about 11 a.m., struggles up to about 1.7º above the horizon at its zenith, and drops below again by 2:40 p.m. There's really no physical warmth from it to feel, but its appearance when it crests the mountains of the Alaska Range on our southern horizon, flooding the sky with the most beautiful and brilliant light of the year, warms our hearts and souls. Apricity is a paean of praise to that warming.
Expectation ©Kesler Woodward 2022 acrylic on canvas 20" x 10"
"Expectation" is another word I've used in titles before. I almost never title paintings until they're done, as I never really know what they'll look like until then, and the titles almost always suggest themselves to me when I sit well back from them and look at them. Here, these two principal trees of our part of the boreal forest, birch and spruce, frame the distant, low winter dawn. When I finished this painting and asked myself what it was about, it seemed to me that they were like curtains about to be parted, revealing the light which was just beginning to break through them, illuminating bits of branches from afar.
Hoarlight ©Kesler Woodward 2022 acrylic on canvas 10" x 8"
My other go-to source for titles is poetry. I read a lot of poetry, usually at least a couple of poems every day, and the words and the language in them somehow settle deeply into some part of my mind that springs to life when I'm searching for a title. Hoarlight is not only an arcane word for a kind of light in winter, but is a word I first met in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves." It's a wonderful poem, well-worth finding and reading if you're unfamiliar with it, and worth re-reading if you are.
