Kesler Woodward

New Work and A Studio Tour

Chant    ©Kesler Woodward 2013    Acrylic on canvas    54" x 84"

Chant is my newest large painting, just completed after a month of adding image after image of slender, colorful trunks to what became a virtual thicket of birch portraits. It's the most complicated single painting of multiple birch portraits I've ever done, and working on it has been an absolute delight. These are just thirty-one of the thousands of beautiful birches that Dorli and I pass on our every-other-day, year-round runs on the forest trails from our home. Like the drawing that I posted an image of on the blog last month, it's an outgrowth of the tiny little card I painted for her in November, with 60 birches for her 60th birthday.  I loved the way those thin trunks created an allover field, the positive spaces of the trunks and the negative spaces between them dancing across the surface.

The other inspiration for this new painting was learning recently about melisma--the musical stretching of a single syllable over a run of many notes. You hear it in Gregorian chant, one syllable of text expanding in florid fashion into fifty or more notes. It occurred to me that that's what my little card with sixty birches was like, and that it would be fun to try the same thing on a much larger and even more intricate scale. As so often, I didn't realize until two weeks of work stretched into three, and then four, what I was getting into when I began.

 

Two-Mile Tree   ©Kesler Woodward 2013   Oil on canvas  20" x 16"

The trails we run on are part of a vast network of hilly, twisting paths through almost entirely unpeopled and unbuilt-upon forest, braiding up and over Skyline Ridge north of Fairbanks and down into the Goldstream Valley for dozens of miles. Most days, we do a favorite out-and-back, six-mile loop, and along the way we pass numerous features that have become markers for us of our progress. Two of those are particularly beautiful birches that Dorli long-ago dubbed the "Two-Mile Tree" and "Two and a Half-Mile Tree," marking their distance from our door. For Valentine's Day this year, I painted her this portrait of her favorite, the Two-Mile Tree.

When I have painted, as recently, a couple of very large works that each take weeks and weeks to complete, I frequently find myself hankering to do something smallish and fun, something that I can complete in a reasonable amount of time. In the same way, when I've been painting thinly, with diaphanous transparent washes of acrylic as I have for some time now, in search of a particular kind of luminosity, I often find myself missing and craving the juicy, sensual materiality of thick oil paint. Two-Mile Tree gave me the opportunity not only to paint a valentine, but to feed those artistic desires. 

 

Finally this month, I want to give you another kind of glimpse of my new studio. An Anchorage collector of my work who drove up this fall to pick up a big painting from the studio made a wonderful little video of the main working space with his iPhone, just standing in the middle and rotating slowly. He suggested I do something of the same sort for the blog, and I've finally gotten around to it. I hope you will enjoy this less-than-a-minute of imagery and narration.

A Few Acres of Snow

A Few Acres of Snow   ©Kesler Woodward 2012   Acrylic on canvas   54" x 84"

I have had a wonderful time working in my new studio for the last couple of months on some of the first works for my show at Beaux Arts des Ameriques Gallery in Montreal next fall.  The gallery, which has represented my work in Montreal for a number of years, has asked me to send my paintings rolled up, unstretched, and they will stretch and frame them prior to the exhibition, so I am taking advantage of the opportunity to do some larger work for my solo show there.  Gallery owner Jacquie Stoneberger came up with the inspired title for the exhibition, A Few Acres of Snow (Quelques Arpents de Neige)--a dismissive reference by the great 18th century French writer Voltaire to not just Canada, but in fact the entire New World.

I love that title for the exhibition and will be making, as always, many paintings of snow and of its frosting of the boreal forest that stretches from my door here in Fairbanks through Montreal, five thousand miles away, and around the circumpolar North.

Snow on the trees in the boreal forest is a theme that I have recurred to over the years, as it's not only one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, but it allows me to make the kind of at once entirely realistic and totally abstract paintings I most love to make.  This new 4 1/2 ft. by 7 ft. painting celebrates the kind of scene I run or ski by on the trails in Interior Alaska day after day in the six-month winter--an allover web of brilliant white covering the forest, illuminated and colored by the low-angled sun on the shortest, but in some ways most beautiful days of the year. 

Birches Outside My Studio Windows   ©Kesler Woodward 2012   Pen-and-ink on paper   13" x 28"

One of the notes I most frequently write to myself, and seldom heed, is, “Draw more!”  I’m always so focused on the big backlog of ideas I have for new paintings that I seldom take time to just draw.  But this year, for Dorli’s birthday, I painted her a little card with 60 slender birch trees to celebrate that milestone in her life’s journey.  I was so delighted with it that I decided to make a similar drawing of some of the birches I can see from my studio windows.

This pen-and-ink drawing of twenty-five of those trees was such a joy to work on that I think I will make more, even bigger drawings of the sort.  As always, I don’t know where this path will lead, but that’s what makes it such an adventure.

As we approach Christmas, one of my favorite times of the year, and Dorli and I anticipate the arrival tomorrow here in Fairbanks of my son Eli, his partner Becca, and my wonderful, 15-month old granddaughter Sage for the holidays, I send all my warmest wishes for the season and the new year, and all my thanks to those who follow and support my work.

New Work, New Studio, New Adventures

Paean  ©Kesler Woodward 2012   Acrylic on canvas   48" x 60"

So many new things to catch up on, I hardly know where to start, so I'll begin with what's always the most important thing--my newest painting. Paean is the latest in my ongoing series of large multiple birch portraits. It is a paean, or song of praise, to the beauty of the birches themselves. As always, the title came after the painting. As I sat and looked at this new canvas and asked myself what it was about, the thing that most struck me was how much brighter, bolder, more unabashedly full of life it is than any of the similar works I've done in the last couple of years. It's burgeoning with life, and I think is simply a testament to my optimism, energy, and sense of delight as I settle into a new studio, continue to settle into a new home and new life, and look forward to new adventures.

Paean is the first painting completed in my new studio--a fabulous facility which I had built this summer to my own design, directly behind our house. It sits at the brow of a fairly steep slope down into a beautiful birch forest. I'm almost embarrassed by how nice it is, and worry about doing work good enough to deserve it. But I'm 61 years old and have never had a space designed and built from scratch for me and my work, and I am unreasonably excited about it and am loving working in it.

There are only a couple of windows--one above the desk in my office space, and a larger one on the north wall of the studio. I like to control the light, and there are 11 fixtures, each with four full-spectrum, daylight-balanced 4-foot fluorescent bulbs, as well as two tracks with incandescent spotlights. The windows are more for my view of the boreal forest than for the light.

Since I only work on one painting at a time and am obsessively tidy, the main space can function as both my studio workspace and a gallery of my available works, with a separate office space for writing, research and museum consulting, all my art books, supplies, and racks for paintings. The hillside site allowed for the construction of a sizeable basement storage space for framing and packing materials, shipping crates, boxes of my books and catalogs, and the like.

There is no running water, as the house is only 15 steps away, and a cabin-style 5 gallon jug with spigot provides water for coffee and cleaning brushes--the only real essentials.

I am deeply grateful to the Rasmuson Foundation for my 2012 Artist Fellowship, which provided major support for the building of this new studio. I had committed to the construction before I learned of the fellowship, but it afforded me invaluable financial and moral support for the undertaking. My next big show will be next fall, at Beaux-arts des Amériques, the outstanding gallery which represents my work in Montreal, and I am especially excited to have room to work on large new paintings for that exhibition.  

        

Denali Drama  ©Kesler Woodward 2012  Acrylic on canvas   24" x 36" (image) 25 1/2" x 37 1/2" (framed)

Commissions  Some of the other work I've done during the summer (painting in a tiny room in the basement, listening to the sounds of construction on the new studio) involved commissions, which, to be honest, I hate doing. I'd much rather go to my studio and just paint what I feel like painting on a given day, knowing that the potential audience for anything I produce numbers just over seven billion--everyone in the world--and that all I really is need is one person to love it and want it. When I do a commission, I'm acutely aware that that seven million number narrows to one, or usually two, since they're normally done for a couple, and I am fraught with anxiety over whether they will like it.

I painted Denali Drama for a couple from Anchorage who had seen one of my paintings of the mountain on an earlier visit to Denali National Park and wanted something similar. In my anxiety, I did two paintings, one larger than the other, and let them choose which one they wanted. I never paint anything for a commission that I wouldn't choose to paint sooner or later anyway, and it was actually fun. It was especially fun to deliver both paintings for them to see and choose from while they were camping in Denali Park, on my way in for a week's stay in the East Fork Cabin. They chose the larger, and Dorli and I had a brief visit with them at their campsite, all of us trying to keep the paintings upright in a stiff wind, and a better visit with them when they took one of the Park buses to see us in the East Fork Cabin.

Denali Brilliance  ©Kesler Woodward 2012  Acrylic on canvas  16" x 20" (image) 17 1/2" x 21 1/2" (framed)

This was the smaller painting.  They are both views of Denali from Stony Hill, a vantage from which I've painted the mountain a number of times. Dorli and I climbed Stony Dome, the mountain above the viewpoint, on this trip, giving us an even more panoramic view of Denali and countless other peaks. Sooner or later, when the experience of being atop Stony Dome and seeing that view on a perfect August day has settled deep enough in my consciousness that I have something personal to say about it, I'll make one or more paintings about that experience, as well.

Finally--this post is too long, already, but there's so much to catch up on--I completed another small commission for old friends from college that I hadn't seen or heard from in decades.  When I was back at Davidson College in North Carolina this summer for the planting of a tree on campus honoring my late wife Missy as the first woman graduate of that venerable institution, I reconnected with Jon and Betsy Jewett, friends whose wedding we drove to in Texas, from South Carolina, almost forty years ago.  After several catching-up conversations on the last few decades, Jon asked me to do a painting for them, and it was a great pleasure to paint for them this small scene of the James River in Richmond, Virginia, where they live.  Commissions are still fraught with anxiety for me, but they are more palatable when they involve reconnection with old friends or the making of new ones.

James River  ©Kesler Woodward 2012   Acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image) 20" x 17" (framed)

Equinox

Equinox  ©Kesler Woodward  2012  Acylic on canvas  18" x 24"

I haven't been good about posting to my website this summer, but I've been hard at work, as usual. New paintings, including a couple of commissions completed. A lot of time in the wilds, finding inspiration for new images. And painting in a tiny, temporary workspace in our basement in response to that inspiration, while a wonderful new studio I designed has been under construction in the woods out back.  

I'm excited about Equinox for several reasons.  It's an especially complex, richly detailed, and I hope evocative image of the boreal forest in one of its most beautiful seasons. The Interior Alaska fall is as brief as it is dramatic. The leaves start rapidly turning golden in late August, and by late September they are gone.  At the autumnal equinox, the color in both the canopy and the understory is near its height. It's a time when I wander the woods daily in delight, and like the lengthening late winter days of March, is one of the times of the year that I most focus on in my work. 

Equinox is important to me for other reasons, too. It was done in response to a request from Race Director John Estle and the steering committee of the Fairbanks Equinox Marathon for an image to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the running of that remarkable race--widely considered the second hardest marathon in North America (after Pike's Peak). A Fairbanks institution, the 26.2 mile race begins and ends at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, climbing 2000 feet up Ester Dome to a long, undulating out-and-back at the top, followed by a 1/3-mile precipitous descent of a rocky "chute" as it begins its winding way back down.

I am a longtime runner, and an occasional [bad combination of competitive and slow] racer, but unlike thousands of Fairbanksans and runners from throughout Alaska and far beyond, I've never run the Equinox Marathon, so I was deeply honored to be asked to provide a commemorative image for the half-century anniversary of the race.

Many Fairbanks runners will recognize the small, simplified figure on the trail as my companion Dorli McWayne, one of our community's premier runners, who has run the course over almost four decades and is still usually one of the top women finishers.

The Equinox Marathon Committee has produced a very high quality, archival inkjet (giclee) print of the painting in commemoration of the 50th Equinox Marathon. The 16" x 20" image is printed on heavyweight Somerset Velvet paper in a signed and numbered edition of 250. Our friend Margo Klass generously contributed the typography, layout, and design of the print. and all proceeds from its sale will go to the Fairbanks Equinox Marathon. 

Those who have long followed my work know that I don't make prints of my paintings, so this is a unique opportunity to obtain a beautifully printed image of one of them, as well as to support this important Fairbanks event. The Committee is selling the prints for $125 each. Locals can reserve one now at Goldstream Sports in Fairbanks, or purchase and pick one up at bib pickup for the race on September 13 or 14 at the Pumphouse Restaurant. They will also be available at the Equinox Awards Banquet following the race on September 15. Others interested can send an email message to John Estle, Equinox Marathon Race Director, at sportalaska@gci.net, with "Equinox Art Print" in the subject heading.

A number of people have asked already about the original painting. I almost never keep my own paintings, as I'm always more interested in the next one than the last one, but I'm keeping this one for myself. 

Travel and Work

I've just returned from a weeklong artist residency on Orcas Island, Washington. My stay in the beautiful Kangaroo House Bed and Breakfast there was the prize for being chosen 2012 Artist of the Year by Artsmith,  an Eastsound, Washington-based arts organization that provides residencies, literary events, and exhibition, performance, and publishing opportunities for artists and writers. 

The week exploring relatively remote, sprawling, lake- and mountain-filled Orcas Island from this peaceful, comfortable base was both restful and energizing, and will lead, in time, to new work. I am deeply grateful to Jill McCabe Johnson, Director of Artsmith, and to her and her husband Charles for their great breakfasts, warm welcome, and care during the week on Orcas.

As always when I travel, especially to new locales, I tried on Orcas to focus on being in the place, getting to know it, rather than making images of it. I try as hard as I can not to even think about what kind of images I might make, but instead give the place itself my full attention, explore it as fully as possible. I sometimes do sketches, and I do take photographs for future reference, so that when the time comes I will get the shape of things exactly right, but I don't try to do work about the place while I'm there.

I know from past experience that if I work from life, I will spend a lot of time responding to the landscape's prettiest, most superficially attractive aspects, and that it is much better for me to give all my attention to the place itself. I pay attention to what it looks like, of course--its weather, its light, its topography--but just as much or more to what it makes me think about, how it relates to what I've been reading, how it feels to be there. I am ultimately, always, trying to make work about what it felt like to be in a place, more than what that place looked like.

Weeks or months, perhaps as much as a year from now, I'll go up to my studio one morning, and I'll realize that the experience of being on Orcas Island has trickled down into my consciousness deeply enough that I have something more personal to say about it than, "Isn't this a pretty place?"  Then I'll marshall my images, and more importantly my memories, and I'll try to distill on canvas or paper something that gets at that feeling. I have no idea what those images will be. The only thing I know is that they won't look anything like the photos I took this month of that pretty place.

 

 

I tend to think that unless I'm in my studio, painting, then I'm not at work, so it's important to remind myself that both getting out every day into the great boreal forest that surrounds my home and traveling to new places are parts of my work as well.  In the last year, I've spent time in many other parts of Alaska, and in North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, and Arizona, and images have come from or will come from all of them.

On my studio wall, in drawers and sketchbooks and elsewhere, are lots of images from past travels--oil pastels and paintings on paper from riverbanks near Fairbanks to Denali National Park in Alaska, Congaree National Park in South Carolina, a bridled titmouse at Patagonia Lake in Arizona, and many more. These are not currently framed and hanging in galleries, and most don't even appear on the "Available Works" section of this website, but they are an essential part of the weird, idiosyncratic way in which I seem to need to work.

So, for example, I have made two trips to Juneau in the last year--more than 600 miles from Fairbanks and a world away in climate and ecosytem. I taught a weeklong workshop there last June, and I went back down in November for the opening of our Boreal Birch exhibit at the Alaska State Museum.

The June trip afforded me the opportunity to get out with artists from the Plein Rein group of plein-air painters into some of my favorite landscapes anywhere. I didn't paint while I was there, but focused on my teaching and on being in that wonderful place with those terrific people. Many months later, well into winter, I made images based on that experience--not the images I would have guessed I would make, when I was there, but of moments and places that seemed to need to be painted when the time came.

Three of those images--a raven sitting on rocks below the tidal waterfall at Amalga Harbor, silvery light off the water filtering through the Southeast Alaska rainforest, and Mendenhall Glacier, which I hadn't painted since I lived there more than 30 years ago--have just this month migrated from my studio wall to my framer, on their way to the Juneau City Museum.

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Paintings will almost certainly come from the November trip, as well, but I don't know when. All I can do is go to my studio and work. What happens there, what I need to paint, only reveals itself to me in its own time.

New Year, New Work, New Shows, News

Light in the North  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   acrylic on paper   20" x 28" (image) 30" x 37" (frame)

It's a new year, but the pace of the last few months is the same. On January 6, I opened the third exhibition of my work in three months, at the Blue Heron Art Gallery, run by the Vashon Arts Alliance on Vashon Island, Washington. On February 3, the big Boreal Birch traveling exhibition of my paintings, Barry McWayne's photographs, and Margo Klass's constructions arrives from the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, where it's been since early November, and opens at Well Street Art Gallery here in Fairbanks.

My exhibit on Vashon Island, a short ferry ride from downtown Seattle, was with noted Pacific Northwest photographer Paul Bannick, whose extraordinary photographs of birds in their habitats have won national awards, were shown recently at the Burke Museum in Seattle, and are featured in his own beautiful book The Owl and the Woodpecker. The show opened on January 6, and on January 8, Paul and I gave a talk about our work to a sold-out crowd. We had a fun conversation about how we work, moderated by Mike Feinstein, who with his wife Gerry organizes an annual lecture series with visiting artists, writers and others for the Vashon Arts Alliance. 

One of the great pleasures of the Vashon exhibition was seeing at the opening and talk many old friends who have settled in the Pacific Northwest--friends who came from all around the Seattle area and as far as Portland. It was especially meaningful that my son Eli and his family--Becca and their daughter Sage--who live in Seattle, were able to come. It was a pure delight to get to carry Sage--my now 4-month old granddaughter--around to look at each of my paintings at her first art opening.

I have resisted, with some difficulty, imposing pictures of my beautiful granddaughter on readers of my blog, but her appearance at my opening gives me an excuse to share my delight in the company of her and her wonderful parents.

It also gives me an opportunity to more formally introduce my companion Dorli McWayne, whom a few attentive readers have already noted my mentioning in posts in the past few months. Dorli and I have known each other for more than 30 years, but until the death of her husband, my close friend Barry McWayne, just two weeks after the death of my wife Missy, I knew her only as his wife, and we had literally never had a substantive conversation.  In the year and a half since the almost simultaneous, sudden and unexpected losses of our beloved partners, we have--with equal parts surprise and joy--found each other, and we are enjoying beginning work on the puzzle of melding two large households and two extraordinarily busy lives.

 Madrones  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image) 20" x 17" (frame) 

For the Vashon Island exhibition, I included several images from the Pacific Northwest, from the colorful madrone trees which I have long admired and have painted often before to scenes from the Skagit River Valley and the North Cascades.

The new Alaska images in the show are all about light. I talked, in my presentation at the Vashon Arts Alliance, about how lucky we are in this part of the far North to have, even in the depths of winter, hours each day of the kind of twilight that people of all cultures and places find magical. In the high latitudes, the sun wheels around the sky at a shallower angle than in more southerly lands, and both nightfall and daybreak are preceded and followed, year-round, by growing or lingering, ever-changing crepuscular light.

As we once again this year pass by Epiphany in deep cold and begin to hurtle toward the equinox and on toward constant day, I am grateful for new light in the North.

December Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   acrylic on paper   6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)   17" x 20" (frame) 

 

New Work, Small Pleasures, and a Personal Collection

Sunlight Snowfall   ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas   48" x 60" (image)

Yesterday I rented a big U-Haul truck to take 50 paintings and drawings to The Annex Gallery, just three or four miles from my home in Fairbanks. My solo exhibition, Kesler Woodward: New Work, Small Pleasures, and a Personal Collection will open at the gallery this Friday, December 2, and run through December 24. 

The Annex, founded and directed for the last seven years by my friend and fellow Fairbanks painter Nancy Burnham, is one of the larger commercial galleries in Alaska, and perhaps the most beautiful, with pristine, 14' high white walls, excellent lighting, and a single, simple, open space.  I didn't know, when Nancy invited me to show a year and a half ago--and she almost certainly didn't either--that it would be the last show for the gallery. After seven great years of exhibiting adventurous work in a wide range of styles and mediums, she is closing the gallery at the end of December to focus on her own painting.

As the title indicates, the exhibition will feature a lot of new work. Along with most of the paintings I've posted images of recently here, there are a number of even newer ones, among them Sunlight Snowfall, a 4' x 5' view of snow falling on a bright, sunny day in the birch forest outside my studio window. This is the kind of simple but magical thing I've loved for years to notice, watch, and paint--the sun's casting strong shadows on the forest floor even as a passing cloud in another part of the sky fills the air with flakes of snow.  

Little Birch Portraits  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   oil on canvas   10" x 8" each

Also in the exhibition will be a number of small new works, among them seven very small (10" x 8") oil paintings of individual birch trunks--Little Birch Portraits. I regularly go back and forth from quite large paintings to very small ones, from acrylics to oils, from paintings with very thin surfaces built with layers of wash and glaze to very thick paintings with gestural brushstokes filling the canvas.

I have been doing thin acrylic paintings for much of the last couple of years, using transparent washes and glazes in an effort to achieve a certain kind of luminosity in the larger images of birch trunks, or to depict wide-ranging sorts of snowfall. So it's probably not surprising that one day a month ago, I realized I was missing the feel of applying thick, juicy oil paint, and in the course of just a couple of weeks I joyously painted these seven small birch portraits.

Chatanika Freezeup  ©Kesler Woodward 1987   acrylic on canvas   60" x 84"

The third aspect of this exhibition is work from my personal collection. I decided to take advantage of having the large, beautiful space of The Annex to include some works that I have held onto for myself, over the years--things that have been shown once or twice or not at all and have lived on the walls of my home for anywhere from years to decades.

Almost all the paintings I have done in the past thirty-five years have gone away. My dear, late wife Missy had the option of choosing for herself any painting I did, before it went on the market, and she exercised that option with great restraint. Those few paintings, perhaps a dozen in number, will remain in my family's collection for my son Eli and his family and are not in the exhibition. But she regularly urged me, in the last twenty-five of our forty years together, especially, to retain further examples for myself, not letting all of any series of works go away. That was--and still is--strange for me, as I'm always much more interested in the next painting than the last one.  I'm completely wrapped up in each painting until it's done, and then focused entirely on the new painting I'm starting.  I never have had a hard time letting paintings go, and have been eager to have the ones that are done go out into the world.

So...along with the many new works in this exhibition, I have included a few of those I have retained for myself from various bodies of work. These include two large (5' x 7') paintings from a series I did in 1986-87, of rivers and lakes in the Fairbanks area with the surrounding landscape reflected in the water.  Chatanika Freezeup (above) and Chatanika Breakup, another 5' x 7' canvas, have lived on the walls of my home for almost a quarter century.

Tracy Arm  ©Kesler Woodward 2001  oil pastel on paper  28" x 42" (image) 

It also includes other, mostly smaller works that I have retained from my initial summer as Denali National Park's first Artist-in-Residence, in 2002, and my stint as Expedition Artist for the Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced, a 2001 Smith College-sponsored expedition retracing the route of the last great exploring expedition to Alaska, in 1899. That 30-day expedition along the Alaska coast from south of Ketchikan, through the Aleutians and the Bering Sea, to the Bering Strait and three stops on the coast of Siberia, was for me the trip of a lifetime. 

This part of the current exhibition is by no means a retrospective. It is neither comprehensive nor systematic, but a personal collection of things that I have retained, often serendipitously, for myself over the years. I am hoping that the inclusion of these few works will provide context for the many new paintings in the exhibition, and that visitors to the exhibition will enjoy catching a few glimpses of some of the work that led to the images I am doing today.

Old Growth Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2001  oil on panel   5" x 7" (image)

Denali from Eielson  ©Kesler Woodward 2002  pen and ink  3" x 7" (image)

Fall and Winter

Liberty Falls  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas  36" x 48" (image)

The snow has arrived in Interior Alaska, and so I'm not only remembering wanting it to come, but looking back to the days just before it began drifting down. Liberty Falls is just off the road to Chitina, Alaska, almost seven hours' drive south of Fairbanks--a place I've gone most summers for the past 30 years to harvest salmon to fill my freezer for the coming winter.  Nearing Chitina and access to the mighty Copper River, I'm usually gripped by fishing fever and can't make myself stop to admire Liberty Falls, but I have managed it often enough to paint it several times over the years.

This year, thanks to my broken, dislocated shoulder, I didn't make it to Chitina to perch precariously on rocks above the nearly half-mile wide torrent of the Copper, sweeping a 3' diameter net on the end of a 10' long pole through eddies of opaque, silt-laden water for hours, sometimes days, in search of sockeyes, silvers, or the occasional king salmon. But just before Labor Day, Dorli and I drove past the Liberty Falls campground on our way to McCarthy--a long 60 miles on a road rough even by Alaska standards, past Chitina. We took a few minutes to stop at  the falls, camped nearby, and on the way back through a couple of days later, hiked up onto and around some of the ridges in the area. 

I've painted falling, fast-running water off and on over the years and never tire of trying to capture a little of its magic.  It's always hard to restrain my impulse to paint the water itself, to let the rocks, the vegetation, and the sticks and logs brought down by the torrent channel the brilliant white of the canvas and the little bits of flashing, flying color and darkness, the way they do the water itself.

 Merlin's Woods  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas  20" x 16" (image)

The fall in Interior Alaska is breaktakingly brief, but always beautiful, and this year it was especially spectacular. I love the brilliant color of the variously yellow leaves on the birches and aspens, set against the dark, blue-green, almost blackness of the spruces, but even more magical for me is the bright red understory of the boreal forest. When it looked like this, just weeks ago, I was dreaming of snow. Now that I'm able to ski out my back door and onto the trails, I can revel contentedly in the memory of that brilliance.

Gorge Creek Snowfall  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas  16" x 20" (image)

Just before the snow started falling here, I completed this small painting of another autumn squall in Denali National Park. Gorge Creek Snowfall is almost a smaller version of the 4' x 5' canvas Harbinger that I completed this summer and posted an image of  in July. It's the same kind of day, the same time of year, the same kind of sudden snow swirling through the bright autumn landscape, just turning my gaze slightly to the left and down, into the dramatic cleft of Gorge Creek. 

Thinking About Snow

Near Teklanika  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   Acrylic on canvas   16" x 20" (image)

It's still fall here in Fairbanks, one of the most beautiful I can remember, but looking around the studio at my most recent paintings, I see that I'm dreaming of snow. It's something of a mystery to me that I never seem to know, until I stop working and look around at what I've done, exactly what I'm thinking about. I just go up to the studio and work, and I'm as surpised as anyone else to see what comes of it.

Near Teklanika is an image of one of my favorite places in Denali National Park--a quiet little pool just off the road near Teklanika campground. Every time I've drive by it, I fantasize about building a cabin next to it and living there, year-round, watching the seasons come and go. I've often stopped the car, gotten out, and clambered through the woods and tundra to walk all around it, lost in reverie. Once, just a few years ago there, I listened to a magical chorus of a whole family of kestrels calling back and forth to each other from the tops of separate trees.

 Smith Lake September   ©Kesler Woodward 2011  Acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image)

Smith Lake, in the middle of the 2000-acre arboretum on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, is a much larger body of water, less than two miles from my home. It's a place I've gone to watch the gathering of swans, the change of the seasons, and some of the first snow flurries of the year, for thirty years. I've painted it in every season, but especially in fall. One year, I had an entire exhibition of paintings I did of objects I picked up in a single walk down to the lake's edge from the Geophysical Institute on the university's West Ridge.

I'll remember this tiny little painting for a long time, as I painted it with my right arm in a high-tech sling, recovering from surgery on my shoulder after a bad fall tripping on a tree root while running on the trails in Fairbanks in July. It was as big as I could work at the time, with my painting arm lashed closely to my chest, on the back side of an ergonomic pillow. It was sheer stubborness that made me go to the studio and work anyway, and even such a tiny painting left me aching at the end of every day. I'm out of the sling now, rapidly regaining range of motion and strength, able to work on any size painting I want, and grateful for the remarkable skills of Anchorage surgeon Robert Gieringer, who put my thoroughly torn up shoulder back together.

Childs Glacier   ©Kesler Woodward 2011   Acrylic on board   8" x 10" (image)

Another of the small paintings I did while recuperating from the surgery. I was thinking about snow, about how soft it is as it falls, and how miraculous it is that if it keeps falling for thousands of years, consolidates, and flows slowly down from the mountains, it can create such a magnificent mass of ice as the Childs Glacier, which flows into and breaks up in the mighty Copper River near Cordova, Alaska.  I made a weeklong raft trip on the Copper several years ago, 100 miles from Chitina to Cordova, in the company of several other artists and writers, and we floated past this extraordinary terminus, calving giant icebergs into the cold, silty waters of the Copper River.

I love the fall. It's never long enough here in Interior Alaska, and I'm not by any means eager for it to be over. I know winter will be here soon enough, and that it will be six months long. But I'm dreaming of snow, and excited at the prospect of seeing it start falling. 

Plein Rein

I spent a fabulous nine days in early June in Juneau, Alaska.  In addition to seeing old friends, visiting the 13 ft. diameter wooden yurt that Missy and I lived in back in the 1970's, and running on trails that have been greatly improved since those days, I juried a show for the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council, gave two public talks, and did three radio interviews. But the real focus of the trip was two 3-day workshops I taught at the invitation of a hardy bunch of terrific painters who work out of doors in all weathers year-round in Juneau, who call themselves "Plein Rein."  Cristine Crooks, who organized the workshops, and who with her husband Dean Guaneli put me up in their beautiful home on the Gastineau Channel in Douglas, limited the enrollment in each to 13 participants, and almost all of the artists took part in both sessions.

I did a similar stint with the Plein Rein painters in 2007, with many of the same artists, so I knew it would be fun and that I would be impressed with their energy, ambition, and their work itself, but it was even more of a delight to be back with them than I'd anticipated.  We worked each day in gorgeous locations all over the limited Juneau road system, from Auke Bay Recreation Area to Amalga Harbor, Eagle Beach, Auke Lake, Eaglecrest, and Fish Creek--some of my favorite places anywhere.

As four years ago, I was impressed by the group's willingness to embrace the crazy things I asked them to do--all aimed at getting them out of their comfort zones as plein-air painters, keep them from relying on techniques and approaches they already knew and were comfortable with doing, and think about making work in new and different ways. 

I seldom do workshops, since I retired to paint full time eleven years ago, after two decades of teaching painting at the University of Alaska. The outdoor painting classes I do teach are, I always say only half-jokingly, "anti plein-air painting workshops."  I work out of doors myself often, and I think that painting from life is important for a landscape painter, but what I emphasize in my infrequent classes is almost the opposite of what most plein-air painting workshops preach. Instead of tips and tricks for getting things down quickly, recognizably, with everything comfortably in its place, I try to get artists to think about what they want to say. Not so much "What does it look like here?" or "Isn't this place pretty?" but "What do I want to say about this place?"  "What does this place mean to me?" "What does it feel like to be here?" I emphasize making art, not pictures, and insist on treating the participants in my workshops as serious artists, not as weekend painters.  

That's easy with this group, as they are not only dedicated, but an adventurous lot, not just in terms of weather, but in terms of their art.  It's a delight to work with so many artists who are eager to try something new, confident enough to get outside their comfort zones, and dedicated enough that I know they will take from whatever experience I provide what's useful to them, incorporate it in their ever-growing toolbox, and continue making original work of their own.

As I said in 2007 after the workshop, it was a treat in every way.  I learned as much from them as they did from me, and I feel like a lucky guy to get to do things like this and call it work. 

 

 

The wooden yurt in which Missy and I lived, 17 miles north of Juneau, in the 1970s.  Still in the same spot, it's now  a storage shed in the backyard of a suburban Juneau home, but then it was not only a little less mossy, but was nestled in four acres of pristine woods. We hauled in our water on a picturesque trail that wound through the forest, then up a giant spruce tree that had been felled perpendicular to the steep slope, with steps cut into it to ascend.  When we found it again a few years ago, I was sad to see it so forlorn and disheveled.  Missy simply harrumphed, "Huh...just about the way I remember it!"