The Snow and the Stars at Denali in September ©Kesler Woodward 2023 Acrylic on canvas 48" x 60"
I almost never make paintings about my most recent experiences, or about places that I've just visited. It typically takes me a long time--months or even years--for my experience of being in a place to settle into my consciousness deeply enough that I feel like I have something personal to say about it. So I was surprised to find myself starting this large canvas as soon as I returned from yet another wonderful stay at what is perhaps my favorite place in the world--Camp Denali--an extraordinary wilderness lodge within the western boundary of Denali National Park. I have been giving a week of talks there every other year for a quarter century to their guests and staff.
Dorli and I hiked each day of this last week of Camp Denali's season with their guests and their amazing naturalist guides. The tundra was ablaze with color, and the snow crept steadily down the mountains, reaching the park road. We hiked one day to a high valley in several inches of still-falling snow, and another day on the gravel bar of the McKinley River, within a few miles of the foot of Denali itself.
The Snow and the Stars at Denali in September is a distillation of that experience, with wonderful people in a uniquely beautiful place. I love September, when the stars come back after a summer of continuous light and as night falls it's hard to tell them from the first flurries of the coming winter.
Numinous ©Kesler Woodward 2023 Acrylic on canvas 20" x 20"
This much smaller painting also came in the afterglow--so to speak--of an even more recent experience. I made the 720-mile round-trip drive to Anchorage and back last week to deliver The Snow and the Stars at Denali in September to the couple who purchased it. I left home before dawn on icy roads in freezing fog, wondering why I hadn't just crated and shipped that big painting. But the roads and the sky cleared, and it became one of the most beautiful drives I've ever made in almost half a century of traveling that highway. Fresh snow covered every mountain peak right down to the road most of the way. It was brilliantly sunny every daylight mile of the 14-hour trip, and as the light faded at road level on the way home, it lingered on the peaks of the higher mountains of the Range. It was numinous.
Veil of Morning ©Kesler Woodward 2023 Acrylic on canvas 30" x 40"
I had just finished Veil of Morning the night before we left for Camp Denali. It is a paean to a particular quality of light that sometimes appears at morning or evening in the summer hours here, its exact hour shifting as the length of our days expands and contracts with the seasons. It is fleeting, most wondrous in the late spring and early fall when it enkindles the trees' bare branches, and it always feels like a gift when I catch it.
