A Midwinter Dream ©Kesler Woodward 2025 Acrylic on Canvas 30" x 40"
We are well past Imbolc, the ancient name for the midpoint between Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, and the days are rapidly lengthening, but I am still having fever dreams of color. I've been dreaming lately about some of my favorite views in Denali National Park, and when I went to the studio to try to make a painting about one of them a few weeks ago, the image that emerged on my canvas was this one--a very familiar place illumined by an almost surreal light.
I am amazed again and again by how little command I have of what I decide to paint. I never know until I am about to begin, and once underway, I never know where I will arrive. When people I've known for years but haven't seen for some time ask me, "Are you still painting a lot?" I always glibly answer, "All day, every day!" It's very nearly true, and I think it's that element of surprise with every canvas that makes me happy and keeps me at it.
Watchers ©Kesler Woodward 2025 Acrylic on Canvas 20" x 16"
I may be dreaming in technicolor, but as the days grow longer, the real winter light itself becomes almost as fey. The enchantment is most pronounced at dawn and dusk, and it is most striking to me when the rising light strikes the evergreens that stand like stolid sentinels in the mostly birch and aspen forest. At the ground it is still night--not yet even twilight--but among the dark boughs of the spruces, bright spots and shafts of warm color suddenly appear. Flickering ever-so-briefly and then gone, to me they are better than Christmas tree lights.
Winter in the Arboretum ©Kesler Woodward 2025 Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 30"
This, too, is true winter light. Almost every week for several years I have visited a little 2-acre experimental planting of trees from throughout the circumpolar north, located in the middle of the 2000-acre University of Alaska campus woods. I visited this plot for the first time 44 years ago, when the trees were saplings and forest scientists were actively studying how these species from other parts of the far north would grow in our climate and soils. This fenced test garden, called on campus the "Exotic Tree Plantation," has long been abandoned, but I go in every week to see how those specimens have fared in the decades since they were being studied. My goal is to get to know every tree.
Unlike in the spring, fall, and throughout much of the summer, little changes visibly in this plot from week to week in winter. I note only the steadily deepening snow and the occasional fallen limb or treetop, broken by snow load and infrequent wind. These fully mature trees from northern Canada, Siberia, and Scandinavia continue, more than a half century after their planting, to slumber through the winter and wake with the spring. All winter I walk around and among them on my snowshoes, admiring them in the changing light.
