In the Forest of Long Awaiting ©Kesler Woodward 2025 acrylic on canvas 60" x 48"
For nearly half a century I have made paintings of trees. As my work is quite realistic from a distance but very abstract up close, I've always said that I make "big abstract paintings that happen to look like trees." In a very real sense, though, trees have long stood in for people in my work--in their individuality, their strength, their vulnerability, the way they hold themselves, and the way much of what has happened in their lives is written in their features.
I never know what my next painting will be about until it's done, but as I look back on my work of the last few months, I see that it's been less about individual trees and more about the forest. I don't know what that's about. Perhaps I will have a better sense of what it means when I look up from working again in a couple of months and see what I've done.
In the Forest of Long Awaiting is a large (5 ft. x 4 ft.) painting about the endless woods as ecosystem and metaphor. This is the great boreal forest that circles the globe, and it beckons us at our back door. We walk and run on roadless paths through this woodland in every season and weather, and it is the source of my work.
Into the Woods ©Kesler Woodward 2025 acrylic on canvas 40" x 30"
When I pass between these two trees, an aspen and a birch, my feet tread a well-worn path, but when I look around me I am no longer looking at the forest, but am in it. Six months of snow and another two of leafless late fall and early spring have afforded me views of the rising and falling land beneath the trees, but in late spring, summer, and the too-brief, glorious fall, the woods around me are not a vista but a tapestry.
Midjourney ©Kesler Woodward 2025 acrylic on canvas 30" x 24"
In every season I am looking for the light. We won't have darkness again until September. Even then the diminishing daylight and the lengthening twilight will find their way through the forest, but right now, at Midjourney, the sun gleams brightly, and it calls at every hour through the densest leaves.
The big new painting and several other recent ones have gone, but the half-dozen canvases on this wall in my studio speak to the current role of the forest itself in my work. All but one of these paintings are from the last few months. I'll stop and look again in the fall and think about what I've done between now and then.
