A Birch at Her Tryst ©Kesler Woodward 2023 Acrylic on canvas 36" x 48"
The calendar says it's fall, but it has been winter in Interior Alaska for a month and half. We've been running on snowy trails in the forest for six weeks, and our hours of daylight are rapidly diminishing, but we are entering the season with the most beautiful light of the year. In A Birch at Her Tryst, the already low, late October sun still has enough power to blast its way through the trees as it rises, and it still casts sharp shadows on the blankets of snow. I wasn't thinking, as I painted it, about the Scottish poet Sorley MacLean's most famous poem, "Hallaig," as translated by Seamus Heaney, but when I sat and looked at it after, I thought that beautiful birch in our yard must be trysting with the morning light.
Matins ©Kesler Woodward 2023 Acrylic on canvas 20" x 16"
Dorli and I make note of where, exactly, the sun rises in the waning weeks of the year. We watch it come up farther and farther south each day until the winter solstice, when it will rise just a few degrees east of due south. We want to know precisely where and when it will break the horizon, as on clear days when we're out on the trails at sunrise, we and the friends who run with us will be looking at that spot for the momentary, altogether magical "green flash." We never see that phenomenon until December, when the rising sun peeks above the crisp, clear peaks of the Alaska Range one hundred miles south of us. But we watch for the sun morning after morning throughout the fall, marveling at the color that rises before it, even when there's just a sliver of light between the horizon and a low bank of clouds in sky. It's our way of observing the canonical hour of Matins, as we wait for the dawn and the hour of Lauds.
Forest of Gold ©Kesler Woodward 2023 Acrylic on canvas 20" x 20"
There are crystalline days in the Interior Alaska winter when the blue of the sky is like this--stretching from horizon to horizon like a taut tarp--featureless, without depth. There are minutes on those days when molten golden light somehow spills from that cold blue sky, gilding the tops of the snow-laden trees before reaching the ground. Moments before, it's twilight. Moments after, it's day. I love those few moments between.
