Wayfinding ©Kesler Woodward 2025 Oil pastel on paper 28" x 32"
I have for years had a note on the wall of my studio admonishing myself to "Draw More!" but it's been years since I heeded it. A month ago I decided a good place to start would be with some little pen-and-ink birch portraits, and over the course of a couple of weeks I had a great time doing a number of them. I loved just noodling their forms and textures into life with a fine-tipped pen on beautiful white paper, teasing out their so-individual forms without the distraction of hue. It was pure pleasure, starting each one knowing that it wouldn't be weeks of work to finish, and I think I could have happily continued to make them for months.
Birch Portraits ©Kesler Woodward 2025 Pen and ink on paper 9" x 6" each
When I've finished several small works, however, I invariably become eager to tackle something bigger-- a more ambitious image I can pursue and lose myself in for days or weeks, not knowing exactly where it will lead.
The Forest at My Door ©Kesler Woodward 2025 Pen and ink on paper 20" x 28"
These are the woods that beckon from our living room windows--the forest whose endless trails we run on all year round from our back door. I know this view so well, and responding to it with the same pen I'd used to do the little birch portraits seemed such a simple, only slightly more complicated task. It was after a couple of days of drawing, only a tiny portion of the image worked-up, that I began to realize the commitment I'd made. From there, it was just a matter of settling into the almost zen-like process of representing dense forest with tiny lines for days without trying to depict more than a few individual leaves.
My drawings, like my paintings, are very realistic from a distance and very abstract up close. This one took a long time, but I loved every minute of it, and after finishing it I could have done another, and another...
But of course I began to imagine entering the woods, with color, and as I've so often done since my very first months of making art in college well over a half-century ago (four little completely abstract oil pastels at that time, in response to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets), I turned to oil pastels.
I have a trove of oil pastels. Boxes and boxes of every kind, from the cheapest ones on the market--eight basic colors, affordable for school children--through a panoply of brands of wider color ranges and differing character, to magnificent sets of hundreds of French Sennelier oil pastels that are so soft and sensual that every stroke with them is like a caress. I sometimes employ my entire arsenal of brands and types in a single drawing, choosing firmer ones for crisper parts, softer ones for others, furiously layering and layering, but this drawing is all done deliberately, softly, with those fine Senneliers. The creamy white of the paper shines throughout, between the strokes. It's been some time since I used oil pastels, and I'd almost forgotten what a pleasure it is to explore the forest with them.
