Conjuring Light ©Kesler Woodward 2025 Acrylic on Canvas 30" x 40"
I am thoroughly enjoying winter and looking forward to months more of it, so I am surprised, as I am about this time every year, that the colors in my paintings are becoming dramatically warmer and brighter. These are not the colors I see in the landscape around me, but fantasies...dreams. When I sit across the studio and look at a just-finished painting like this one, wondering what it's about, I realize that some part of me must be longing for color after months of being swaddled in a blanket of white. I think these must be the mountains and trees in winter, dreaming of spring, and so as at this time every year, I find myself in the studio conjuring light.
Invocation ©Kesler Woodward 2024 Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 48"
When I begin a painting like this one, inspired by the glorious view south to the Alaska Range from an overlook just below our home, what I'm focused on is not the distant mountains, but the intricate screen of bare trunks and branches through which I see the light from the south. I always think, "Well, maybe I'll put in a few of those trees," and a week later, I'm still painting them. It's crazy to try to paint that foreground network, "growing" the trees on canvas from scratch to disperse the light, but despite the ridiculous hours day after day, I find it comforting, almost meditative, and deeply satisfying to watch it grow. There's no way to convey the wonder of that light without those trees.
At the Edge of the Light ©Kesler Woodward 2024 Acrylic on Canvas 30" x 24"
The light in deep winter is wan, but the most delicate and beautiful of the year, and there's no place so perfect to see it as on the snow that burdens the branches of the spruce in the forest. The rising light of late morning dawn turns the dollops on the stunted boughs to jewelry, transforming gnarled limbs to faerie. I never tire of this magic.
