Kesler Woodward

Light in the North

Snow in Faerie  ©Kesler Woodward 2023 acrylic on canvas 48" x 60"

I always feel sorry for Alaskans who "snowbird" for the winter to warmer locales, as they miss the most beautiful light of the year. From January into March, especially, the winter light is not only magical as it gently breaks the long night's darkness, but it grows by nearly an hour in extent from week to week. It's glorious.

Winter is the time when the boreal forest here in Interior Alaska is most clearly unique. With abundant sunshine, temperatures reliably well below freezing, and no wind for weeks at a time, powder snow sits undisturbed on every twig and branch in the forest. We had an early snowfall this year which coated the trees with a thick layer of unusually sticky snow that has held fast the downy accumulation of winter. Every woodland vista is a fairyland abstraction of subtly-colored light. 

First Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

There's nothing quite like that first light of dawn on the birches in the forest. The trunks suddenly appear, singly or a few at a time as if stepping, like the individuals they are, from the darkness of night. 

Glory  ©Kesler Woodward 2023 acrylic on canvas  20" x 20"

By mid-February, the dawn light is growing not just brighter, but warmer in hue, and it's chasing away the darkness. Night is in full retreat, and we are reminded that it is shrinking toward the wee hours before disappearing for months, along with the stars.

The Snow and the Stars Come Back in September

The Snow and the Stars Come Back in September  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  acrylic on canvas 24" x 30"

Dorli always says that as each season arrives, I say, "This is my favorite," but right now I'm feeling especially grateful for fall. I do love the 24-hour light of summer in the far north, but after several months of it, I begin to miss the darkness. I'm happy when September comes and brings with it the full reappearance of the stars and the first flakes of falling snow.

Forty-five years after settling in Alaska, I'm no less excited each fall when the first snow arrives. That excitement is something I've painted many times. My big painting of a first autumn snowfall on Smith Lake, a large lake in the woods on the University of Alaska campus, has greeted me and every other visitor to Fairbanks arriving on Alaska Airlines for two decades, and each and every time I deplane, it's a welcome sign for me that I'm truly home.

The setting for this September painting is the much smaller Ballaine Lake, also on the University of Alaska campus. Unlike Smith Lake, it's readily visible alongside Farmer's Loop Road, and I drive by it nearly every day on my way to the university or to town. I note the swift progression of its freezing every fall, and I watch just as attentively as that little lake slowly, reluctantly gives up its ice cover each May. 

The reappearance of the full panoply of stars in September is for me just as welcome, and I love it when the first bright flakes of snow join those little lights in the sky.

Equinox ©Kesler Woodward 2022  acrylic on canvas 20" x 16"

We Alaskans and others in the far north around the world make more note, I think, of the turning points of the year--the equinoxes and solstices--than do most of those who live in latitudes where the changes are less dramatic.

The autumnal equinox is important for me in all sorts of ways. It's the time of the crazy-hard Equinox Marathon we run here each year--the epitome of what we call "Type 2 Fun"--fun in retrospect.  And it marks here in Interior Alaska more clearly than the vernal equinox or either of the solstices a dramatic change of weather and season.

This year, as most, the equinox came at the absolute peak of fall color in the birches and aspens. I've often painted that riot of color, but this painting marks a subtler, yet unmistakable change in the quality of  light. I've tried to capture some of that light on Ballaine Lake, as the world balances on its swivel point in the annual contest between darkness and light.

Vespers ©Kesler Woodward 2022 acrylic on canvas 20" x 20"

As the light grows softer with the change of seasons, it always makes me think of Vespers--the evening service of thanks and praise that along with Lauds (morning prayer) are perhaps the oldest of the traditional hours of prayer in many traditions.

I love the fall...the changing, softening light, the easing from the frenetic pace of the glorious but exhausting northern summer, and the ancipatoon of winter.  

Gifts From the Forest

Gifts from the Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  48" z 60"

I spent more time completing this canvas than any other I've painted in a very long time. When I look back at notes I've made to myself over the years about painting possibilities, there are so many suggesting I spend a season picking up, or just noting, specific objects in the landscape and painting them one by one on a large canvas--a kind of chronicle of time spent in the forest and some of the things I love there. I finally embarked on that task this summer. As I added object after object to this 4 ft. x 5 ft. canvas over the past two months, it filled slowly, and I began to wonder why I had undertaken such a thing. I never, ever work on more than one painting at a time, and so I couldn't think of painting anything else until this one was complete.

These are far from botanical illustrations. The images here are recognizable renditions of individual leaves, cones, catkins, bark, shoots, twigs, clusters of needles, and more, but they are meant to be evocations of the aspects of those things that intrigue me, not illustrations of them. I exaggerate color, emphasize things I'm interested in, and gloss over other features. I take lots of liberties that an illustrator would never allow. These are simply my personal responses to some of the gifts of the forest this summer.

Not everything depicted here is indigenous to Alaska. I have for more than a year spent time every week in a magical research plot of trees from throughout the circumpolar north, located in the midst of the 2000-acre woods of the University of Alaska campus. In this little 2-acre compound grow two kinds of birches from Finland, pines and spruce and fir and larches from Russia, Scandinavia, and northern Canada, and other species that don't occur in our Interior Alaska forests. The differences in the leaves and bark of Downy Birch,  European Silver Birch, and our Alaska Birch are subtle, just as those trees' responses to this climate and environment are different, but those differences intrigue me.

Trees in Alaska, as elsewhere, are under attack by a host of predators, many of which are aided in their predations by a warming climate. Evidence is on display in these images of the work of not only our familiar Aspen Leaf Miners, which have turned many of our aspen groves from green to gray every summer for years, but also the more recent work of Birch Leaf Miners, which have been dulling the summer green and fall yellow of the birches as they have sweept through our community more recently. Spruce Bud Blight, which I just learned about from a State Forester I took into the Exotic Tree Plantation last week, I now recognize when it appears on the tips of White Spruces, preventing the further growth of every branch it infests.

But there are pure marvels as well...the beautiful, red-violet "flowers" that are the emerging female cones of the Siberian Larches, which make these deciduous conifers look like they're in bloom for about a week each spring. The different-shaped leaves on different parts of an individual highbush cranberry plant. The quite different needles of Norway Spruce and White Spruce, and the changing appearance of a cluster of White Spruce cones between when I picked it up from the ground and when it opened and dropped its seeds, drying on the windowsill of my studio.

I don't think you need to recognize these species to appreciate this painting. But I hope that seeing it, you will be as delighted as I have been all summer by the diversity and wonder of these gifts from the boreal forest.

My exhibition opening this Friday, July 1, in Anchorage at Georgia Blue Gallery!

Treeline  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

A couple of weeks ago, Dorli and I loaded 13 of my recent paintings in our van and drove them down to Anchorage for my exhibition that will open at Georgia Blue Gallery this Friday, July 1. If you're in Anchorage this week, please stop by the gallery and say hello during the opening reception Friday, from 5-7 p.m.

Treeline is the newest and largest painting in the exhibition, at 4 ft. x 5 ft.  The gallery space is not huge, so the other paintings range from several 3 ft. x 4 ft.  and 3 ft. square canvases, down to a couple of 16" x 20" ones and one 20" x 10".

Treeline is not a scene, but a kind of "group portrait" of some of the individual trees I love growing here, pretty close to the treeline in both latitude and altitude. It was inspired in part by reading a terrific recent book called The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, by Ben Rawlence. It has entire chapters on the fate around the circumpolar north of some of the trees I most love--white spruce and black spruce, downy birch, Siberian larch, Scots pine, and more--and some of the consequences of climate change reflected in their spread or retrenchment, and the lives of those who live in and around them.

Below are just a couple of the thirteen paintings that will be in the exhibition at Georgia Blue Gallery, 3555 Arctic Blvd. in Anchorage. Images of and information on all of the paintings are in past posts on this site, and in my "Available Works" album at the top of the right-hand column of this page. 

Our granddaughter is visiting for a couple of weeks in Fairbanks, so I will only be flying down for the opening reception on Friday afternoon and back that evening, but I'd love to see you if you're in Anchorage and are able to drop by the gallery reception from 5-7 p.m.

Be Still and Wait ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  36" square

 

A Gentle Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 20"

All the Light in the Boreal Forest

All the Light in the Boreal Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

It's light late into the evening already, this spring, and the boreal forest glows in that late light. The tops of the trees catch the last of the sun's rays as the forest floor begins to darken. The treetops suddenly, briefly blaze and then quietly begin to soften and subside into the not-quite-dark of the spring night.

Here, in that late light, are some of the trees I love---the most ubiquitous trees of the Interior Alaska forest--white spruce, aspen, and birch.

Whispering Tree  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  40" x 16"

For forty-five years I have painted birches more than any other kind of tree, and more often than any other subject. In 2005, Red Hen Press of Los Angeles published Blaze - a beautiful 160-page volume featuring  thirty years of my paintings of birches, juxtaposed with poems by my friend, Alaska Poet Laureate Peggy Shumaker.

I made paintings in response to Peggy's poems, she made poems in response to my paintings, and we selected other, wholly independent images and poems from past decades that we felt could speak to one another. Even today when I open that volume, seeing my work in conversation with her poems makes me see my own paintings in new ways.

Very few people, even those who know my work well, notice that I paint aspens almost as often birches.

Whispering Tree is a tall aspen whose crown I admire almost daily in different lights as I make the short, 15-stride walk between our back door and my studio.

The Celts and other ancient peoples called the aspen the "whispering tree," as its leaves tremble in even the slightest breeze. They told tales of how the fluttering leaves helped the wind speak to the ancestors, make connections between this world and the next, and bring gifts of inspiration and poetry.

Every tree of the boreal forest abounds with myth and mystery in the old stories. Every year I learn more of those stories, and though I don't illustrate them, I can't help but think some of those tales creep into every painting I make. 

         

Three April Drawings - Studio Window, Lodgepoles, and Trail to the Forest - Pen and ink on Rives BFK paper. 13" x 9" each. Unframed.

I don't draw often. A note to myself on the studio wall says, "Draw More!" but I very seldom make time to do it. As soon as I finish one painting, I'm eager to begin the next. But a few weeks ago, I decided I just wanted to take a break and draw for a few days, and I so enjoyed simply responding with pen on good paper to the views from my studio windows and to some of the less-familiar trees I'm getting to know in the "Exotic Tree Plantation" that's part of the University of Alaska arboretum.

Studio Window is, as the title suggests, the view from the big north window of my studio, of just a few aspens on the steep slope below, casting sharp shadows on the still-pristine snow, still 3-feet deep in early April. 

Lodgepoles was a fun drawing because only someone really into trees and looking very hard would notice, from this vantage point, that they are lodgepole pines planted in an experimental plot, and not the white spruces that are everywhere here.

And Trail to the Forest, drawn with a finer-tipped pen, is a view of a birch and an aspen from the west window in my studio, at the very beginning of the endless trails that we and several of our friends run on three times every week, all year-round.  

It's been sunny every day here for a month. The sap is rising in the birches, and I'm tapping a few of them to make syrup. Happy spring!

It Was Both Light and Dark

It Was Both Light and Dark  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

The light keeps changing in my most recent paintings. It breaks in rich hues over a dark horizon in one, suffuses the sky with glory in another, and is eerie in a third. I'm not sure what this is all about.

The trees of the northern forest are, as always, the foreground and setting for these new paintings, but even more than most of my work, they are about the light. I don't set out to make paintings about mood, about the state of the world, or even my own state of mind in these fraught times, so I'm puzzled when I finish a painting and regard it, wondering what it has to say to me, and what it might say to others. 

Vault of Heaven  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

For the past two years I've made paintings about twilight--trees and the forest as they emerge or begin to disappear at every stage of dawn and dusk, and sometimes as they glow softly in the night. The liminal hues have almost invariably been muted, and I didn't intend Vault of Heaven to be that different. Somehow, the color got away from me, as I built the sky with layer after layer of transparent washes, and I was shocked by the resulting atmosphere's sensual brilliance. I thought hard about softening it, muting it, but I couldn't bring myself to give it up.

Sentinel  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on panel  20" x 16"  

Sentinel is much more muted. It presents a similar scene, but a very different mood. Its eerie light, as well as its composition, may have something to do with my having started it just a couple of days after the invasion of Ukraine, but that wasn't my conscious intention. 

Sentinel is painted on a cradled wood panel of a sort that I enjoy using from time to time. These archivally primed panels are very smooth, with none of the "tooth" of woven canvas. I like to have a surface that "talks back" to me a bit as I paint, so I almost invariably find myself roughing it up, and in this small painting, I worked the sky extensively, layering and scraping it repeatedly. The process resulted in a different kind of illumination in the pre-dawn sky--distant lights seen through darkness.

New Paintings in a New Year

Be Still and Wait  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

I love the winter, and 45 years after moving to Alaska, I have yet to see it start snowing and wish it would stop. But about this time every winter, I look at the most recent paintings I've made and realize that I must be craving color. As I've said many times on this site, I never know what I'll paint next until I actually begin a new painting, but I can't help  noticing the burgeoning light, the open water, and the rich, brilliant colors that have once again found their way into my January and early February paintings.

As usual, I didn't really know what Be Still and Wait was about until it was done. But as soon as I'd finished it and sat across the studio looking at it, lines from "East Coker," one of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" came immediately to mind, and the title arrived fully formed. I've made paintings inspired by those poems for more than half a century, and it seems there may be more to come.

The Woods in Winter Dream About Spring  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 20"

The colors in The Woods in Winter Dream About Spring are even brighter, and less literally real. This is a scene at the heart of the 2-acre study compound of trees from throughout the circumpolar North, planted by researchers at the University of Alaska almost 60 years ago, that I have been avidly exploring and getting to know for the last year. Granted access to that compound last spring, 40 years after seeing it for the first time, when the trees were just saplings, I am visiting it every week, trying to get to know every tree.

It's as much a delight to be in that exotic boreal garden on my snowshoes, making new paths in more than 3 feet of utterly pristine, unbroken snow, as it was to see two varieties of birches from Finland leaf out in spring and two kinds of larches from Siberia turn golden and drop their needles in the fall. I was in that garden last week, and it occurred to me that perhaps the spruces at the heart of it are craving color as I am, dreaming in their slumber about the riot of spring, summer, and fall. 

Tomorrow to Fresh Woods  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas 24" x 24"

Tomorrow to Fresh Woods is, for me, about not just the beauty of bare branches against the sky in the twilight, but about looking ahead to light, on the other side of anxious times and loss. Its title comes from one of the last lines of  English poet John Milton's famous 17th pastoral elegy "Lycidas." 

My wish is for more light, for all of us, in the new year!

Summer Night

Summer Night ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

It has not been dark here for weeks, and it won't be again until August. The dramatic burgeoning of daylight has nearly reached its annual zenith, and as usual I'm enchanted by the beauty of the summer night. This year even more than most, I've found myself looking up, especially in the evening, at the treetops and the sky. The light of every season here is remarkable, the low angle of the sun at this latitude giving us hours of twilight even in winter, but it is the soft, ethereal light of summer evening, when the sun just ever-so-slightly dips below the horizon at midnight, that seems most wondrous.

I don't usually post images of my paintings in their frames, but I did this one because I so appreciate and want to acknowledge the company that has custom-made all the frames for my paintings for more than 25 years, Metropolitan Picture Framing in Minneapolis. I discovered their frames at a museum conference all those years ago, and I knew that they were what I'd long been seeking--beautifully crafted, elegant "floater" frames that were more than nice enough for display in museums, but clean and simple enough not to distract from the paintings themselves. I order them by phone, and they make the 2 1/2-inch deep frames to my specifications--ash wood, pickled-white finish, black-painted interior, pre-drilled holes for the screws that secure the painting's stretcher. They are shipped in sections, with wedges that enable me to put one together in minutes whenever I need it. For a quarter century, I have called their number and Lea Ann, in the same welcoming voice, has answered, "Hi, Kes. What can we make for you, and when do you need them?" It was a great comfort to me when I received an email just a couple of weeks ago, saying that they'd returned to work from their pandemic shutdown, were all well, and were fully back in business.

The Buried Giant  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 40"

The Buried Giant is named after a favorite novel of mine by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author best known for his novel The Remains of the Day. As usual for me, the title came after the painting was completed, when the atmosphere in the painting reminded me forcefully of the fog of forgetting which is at the center of that strange story. You'll have to read the wonderful novel to understand the reference, and I hope you will. I will just say that the painting was not intended to be "about" memory and forgetting, much less about that novel, but it seems to me very much in keeping with it, and is perhaps in subconscious response to this strange pandemic time.

Crown ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 16"

Bare treetops about to leaf out in the lengthening days of spring, imaginary mist, the light of the summer night... I have so little say over what I paint. All I can do is go to my studio each day, begin to work, and see what happens there.  

Liminal

Liminal  ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 48"

In this highly unsettling, deeply fraught time of pandemic, running on snowy trails in the beautiful forest in the returning light of early spring is a tonic. The burgeoning light splits the darkness, and here in the North we are grateful for nearly an hour more of it each week. It is a dramatic, a Liminal time, at the threshold between darkness and light.

Apricity ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

I finally completed Liminal this week, in mid-March--a time of year when despite deep snow and nightly temperatures well below zero, even at first light spring seems just around the corner, and by mid-morning the sun provides warmth that can be felt on our faces. 

The much smaller painting Apricity, by contrast, was painted in January and early February, at a time of year when the sun at this latitude, even at its daily zenith, provides little or no perceptible heat. 

Apricity is "the warmth of the sun in winter." It's a purely visual warmth which reminds us, on days like the one in this scene--when it was 40º below zero on the south bank of the Chena River--that warmth will someday come again.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And one last thing, for now. I've just learned from Makenzie Demmert, TV Producer at KUAC Public Television here in Fairbanks, that Into the Woods With Kes Woodward, the 9-part television series that she produced for KUAC in 2018, is now available for viewing on PBS nationally, through PBS Passport. If you contribute at a modest level to your local Public Television station, you are eligible for PBS Passport, and you can stream any or all of the episodes for free, at this link: Into the Woods with Kes Woodward

You can read more about the series on one of my earlier website posts, at Into the Woods. It was very popular here, but when it was aired in the fall of 2018, and shown again the following year, it was only viewable locally and live, on KUAC-TV. Many Fairbanksans who don't have televisions or who can't receive the local broadcast, as well as people from other parts of Alaska and beyond, asked how they could see it. KUAC developed a 2-disc DVD set of the entire program which is still available through the station, but now it is also available for streaming to anyone who contributes modestly to his or her local Public Television station.

 

New Paintings for a New Year

Tapestry ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

A longtime friend visiting our home a couple of weeks ago, seeing paintings of mine from at least four decades on the walls, asked me about the "evolution" of my style. I laughed and told him that I don't think my style "evolves," so much as "meanders." I have consciously tried to avoid adopting a set style or technique. I'm always wandering among different ways of working I've developed over the years, in an effort not just to say, but to discover for myself, what it meant to me to be in a particular place, at a particular time, in specific weather and light.

Hope ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  16" x 20"

Tapestry--a view of one of my favorite places in Denali National Park--and Hope--the low Northern sun bursting through the boreal forest--are images of a sort that I've made many times, but I haven't tackled them in this way way for years. I've been painting for some time primarily in thin veils of transparent color, chasing a kind of luminosity that only transparent paint on canvas can provide. But for these new scenes, I wanted denser, richer paint and less literally natural color. I turned to a strange, highly idiosyncratic way of working that I developed almost two decades ago--laying in the image loosely in strikingly unrealistic, bright colors, and then building up layer after thick layer of contrasting hues on top, each layer covering most, but not all, of the layer beneath. The result is a thickly textured surface that is flecked with bits of the mostly-buried contrasting hues throughout. The colors move toward the natural as I work, but they never become literal. They remain carriers of content, of feeling, rather than description. 

It is an odd way of working...a bit like painting in the dark...as I try layers of color almost arbitrarily to see what effect each will have in combination with the layer before. It takes three, four, or five times as long as just painting the scene, and it is disheartening, and looks ghastly, for days at a time. When it works, though, a day finally comes when it suddenly "gels," almost without warning, and the result is an image that captures much of what I felt I wanted to, but didn't know how to, say. They are maddening paintings to make, but some of my favorites over the years.

I almost never take in-progress snapshots of my work, but I did this time, as I worked on Tapestry. I hope you'll enjoy seeing the way this painting looked over the almost three weeks it took me to complete. You can click on each of the six images below to see the in-progress painting at a larger scale.