First Snow ©Kesler Woodward 2024 acrylic on canvas 30" x 24"
Forty-five years ago, when I was living in Juneau and was a curator at the Alaska State Museum, I made a big (4 ft. x 6 ft.) painting that is now in the Alaska Contemporary Art Bank, titled It Would Suit Me Fine If It Snowed All the Time. All these years later, I still feel much the same way. Few things make me more excited than the first flurries of fall.
One of my favorite places in Fairbanks (where I've now lived for 43 years) is Smith Lake, a sizable body of water in the 2000-acre arboretum that is part of the University of Alaska campus. I've made paintings of that lake in autumn numerous times, and again this year I found myself celebrating on canvas the first flakes of snow falling on its not-yet-frozen surface. I love the stillness that accompanies this initial harbinger of the half-year winter to come.
Go to Sleep, Darlings, Till the Summer Comes Again ©Kesler Woodward 2024 acrylic on canvas 24" x 30"
Just a couple of weeks after those initial flurries, the ponds and lakes had frozen and winter descended on Interior Alaska in earnest. More than a foot of snow fell at our home in the hills, and on our running snowshoes, we were beginning to pack it down on the endless trails that lead from our back door. I love the way the snow blankets the trees, tucking them in for winter, and I often think of the line by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again," but I'd never used that line as a title. When I finished this painting and asked myself what it was about, something about that last remnant of warm autumn light fading into nightfall on the tucked-in forest made me think, "Oh yes...of course."
Equinox ©Kesler Woodward 2024 acrylic on canvas 36" x 48"
The transition from late summer to winter is fleeting here, barely slowing for an always-too-brief but brilliant fall. The autumnal equinox provides the pivot. Just two weeks before the first snowfall in town, the forest was a blaze of color against the impossibly bright blue, early September sky.
I never know what I'll paint next until I'm about to begin, and I seldom find myself painting "in season," but time seems to move faster and faster for me these days. I think I must have needed to grab this blaze of color as it flew past.
