Kesler Woodward

Sparks: A Conversation in Poems and Pictures

Through my studio window, I'm watching snow fall on a late September morning. Five inches on the ground and more coming down steadily. We've gone from early autumn, to late autumn, to winter in a couple of weeks. I like that it's so inexorable.

That inexorable rush from season to season, in the boreal forest and in life, is one of the major subjects of a yearlong conversation I've been having with my friend, former Alaska Poet Laureate Peggy Shumaker, through her poems and my paintings.  On September 11 we were able to see all the products of that discourse together for the first time, on the walls of the Alaska Humanities Forum in Anchorage. We are both so grateful to the Forum, its director Nina Kemppel, and its curator Christina Barber for providing this impetus to engage in another collaboration and a beautiful space to show its results.

The opening reception was a wonderful opportunity to share the full scope of the conversation with others, from Peggy's husband Joe and my wife Dorli to scores of writers, artists, and other friends who came out on a Second Friday to help us celebrate.  The Humanities Forum encourages exhibiting artists to do a talk about their work at the opening, and we took full advantage of it. We walked the substantial crowd through an almost hourlong tour of the conversation from its outset--my asking Peggy a year ago to write a poem to get it started--through the many twists and turns the conversation took as I painted in response to each poem and she wrote in response to each painting.

As we told those in attendance that evening, by the end we each were responding not just to the immediately preceding work, but to the entire conversation, and to all sorts of things that were happening in our lives and in those of our families and friends.

There is no way in a blog post to even summarize, much less fully discuss, the thread of that conversation, so we are extraordinarily grateful to Ron Spatz, founder and Executive Editor of Alaska Quarterly Review, that AQR will reproduce all the poems and paintings, as well as our commentary about them, in its 2016 spring issue. The New York Review of Books has called AQR "one of our best, and most imaginative, literary magazines," and the Washington Post Book World has said, "That one of the nation's best literary magazines comes out of Alaska may seem surprising, but so it is." We are deeply honored that our collaboration will not only be featured, but given so much space, in this fine publication, and we are happy that it will enable us to share it with many who won't have an opportunity to see the exhibition.

In the meantime, you can get a little more sense of how we went about this collaboration, and what it meant to us, from the excerpt in the Alaska Humanities Forum's online newsletter of an excellent interview that Forum intern Lillian Maassen conducted with us a few weeks before the opening: "A Conversation with Peggy Shumaker and Kesler Woodward"

And finally, for now, below are images of and brief commentary on my final two paintings in the exhibition.

Darkness in the Path  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas 36" x 24"

I was in my studio, working on the painting that became Darkness in the Path, when I got a call from Peggy saying that she had been diagnosed with cancer. Both her poems and my paintings, up to that point in the conversation, had several times reflected concerns for friends and family who had been ill or injured in various ways, the challenges of growing older, and the uncertainty of life, but this terrible news was much more direct, much more present. We now know that Peggy's cancer was caught early, that the operation to remove it was successful, and that even as she's undergoing followup treatment, her prognosis is excellent. But that day, all we knew was that terrifying diagnosis. 

Shocked, utterly dismayed, and feeling totally helpless, I cleaned my brushes and drove straight across town to Peggy and Joe's condo, just to give them both hugs and to let them know that Dorli and I would be there for them in every way we could. That evening, I returned to this painting, on which, in response to some lines in Peggy's preceding poem, I had begun to create an image of looking down an inviting path in the forest.  But in yet another instance of one of my paintings' taking on a life of its own--veering in a different direction without my conscious control--over the next week a big, dark spruce grew up in the path, my gaze shifted upward, away from the path and toward, then beyond, the dark spruce, and the season in the forest changed from fall to winter.

Firefall (For Eva)  ©Kesler Woodward 2015   acrylic on canvas   36" x 36"

Though Dorli says that as each season comes around in turn, I declare it my favorite, fall really is the season that makes me most grateful, for its bright beauty, and most thoughtful. It has always struck me that the leaves are most beautiful in their last weeks, most brilliant just before dying.

I'd been especially taken this year with the gorgeous fireweed leaves, as they turned red in August, and I had been collecting them on afternoon walks and bringing them back to the studio, admiring not only their brilliance, but the way their torn, battered, stained and broken parts just added to their richness and their beauty. I had been ruminating on how to use them in a painted response to several of Peggy's poems, and to numerous conversations about our mutual friend Eva Saulitis, a gifted writer in Homer, Alaska who has been battling metastatic breast cancer for several years, and is in the final stages of that battle.

Eva has written extensively and exquisitely about that struggle, and just recently about her hard-won acceptance of the fact that it's nearly over. Peggy referenced Eva's travail more than once in her poems, wrote a poem to her and shared it with both Eva and with me, and we acknowledged in several conversations that Eva had entered this conversation. Firefall is about the beauty of Eva's words and spirit as she acknowledges pain and loss, but continues to find and celebrate wonder, delight, and love all around her. It's about how much beauty is possible on the autumn path that we will all all travel, and how glorious even that last fall can be.

  

Dreaming of Color

 

Promise  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  acrylic on canvas  36" x 24" (image)

It seems as if almost every year about this time--nearing the end of a long, white, interior Alaska winter--I'm surprised to find myself completing a painting full of brilliant color.  It's never premeditated. I just look with some surprise at the almost-finished, bright canvas I've been working on for days or weeks and say to myself, "Aha! I must be starved for color!"

Sometimes the images are fantasies. I imagine the great mountain Denali's dreaming of riotous color in the depths of its long, white winter sleep. Or I picture the steep, south-facing ground of the woods below the West Ridge on the University of Alaska campus flowing with bright hues, instead of still-white snow.

Others years, like this one, I must be musing subconsciously on the remembered brilliance of late summer and early fall in the interior Alaska forest as I pick up my brush and start a new painting. I'm not certain, beyond that, where these paintings come from, but even though March is my favorite time of year in the North--the snow still deep and pristine and the light burgeoning in strength and length--I'm always bemused and delighted to find a bright new canvas coming to life in the studio.

 

      

Merlin Birches #1, #2, #3, #4    ©Kesler Woodward 2014   Oil on canvas    20" x 10" and 10" x 8" (unframed)

I shuttle back and forth between making quite large and quite small paintings, between working in oils and in acrylics, between thick, juicy paint and thin veils of transparent color. When I finish a big, complicated painting like last month's Illumination, its glowing hues painstakingly built from layer after layer of delicate acrylic washes, I so often want to do something small, immediate, direct, and I want to revel in the sensuous textures of oils. At times like these, I often turn to smaller birch portraits, which provide me not only those pleasures, but the opportunity and challenge of making yet another portrait of yet another tree without copying my own work.

The hardest thing for any serious artist to do, I think, is to avoid making copies--and eventually parodies--of his or her own work. The task for me in every new birch portrait is to respond to the individual tree, to paint it in individual light, as if I were looking closely at a birch tree for the first time. If I'm not in a frame of mind that allows me to do that, I paint something else. There are individual trees in my yard (as these), on the trails we run, and in other parts of the forest I love, that I have painted many times, but I hope, and would like to think, that each new portrait is just that--a portrait of an individual, and never a generic birch.

Last but not least this month, I want to share with you my excitement about a new collaboration. My friend and distinguished Alaskan writer John Morgan's book-length poem, River of Light: A Conversation with Kabir, is just out in a beautiful volume that is the latest in the Alaska Literary Series, an imprint of the University of Alaska Press.

The cover of River of Light features my 36" x 48" painting River Sky, and a dozen of my other images in a variety of media punctuate John's deeply reflective 68-page poem. It is the ruminative tale of a long raft trip he and I and a small group of other artists and writers took in 2003, down Alaska's mighty Copper River from Chitina in the Interior to Cordova on the coast, and about the internal conversation that John carried on with a mystic, 15th century Muslim/Hindu poet along the way.

Reading this beautiful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking poem today as it courses its way through the pages of this volume is as close as you can get to having been with us on that voyage, and to being inside John's head as he ruminates on his memory of it more than a decade later. I am honored to have been able to add my images to that journey.

Boreal Birch

On July 1, an exhibition that two other Fairbanks artists, a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist and I have been working on together for more than three years opened at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska. Boreal Birch: Art and Science in the Northern Forest includes 20 of my paintings, 26 of Barry McWayne's black-and-white photographs, and 15 of Margo Klass's constructions, as well as a number of her small, handmade books--all about birch trees and the boreal forest. Accompanying our images are wall texts developed by Kimberley Maher, a PhD student at UAF whose research is all about birch trees. Kimberley not only challenged us with questions about our work and new information about birches over the three years we worked on this project, but developed curricular materials for use in grades K-12 in the schools in conjunction with the exhibit.

This very large show will be on view at the Pratt Museum in Homer through October 2. It travels to the Alaska State Museum in Juneau for November, December, and early January, and will come to Fairbanks, filling all the gallery spaces at Well Street Art Gallery, in February of 2012.  

It was a delight to work on this collaborative effort. The four of us met regularly, comparing work in progress, talking about birches and the northern forest, and influencing one another. We visited one another's studios. We went with Kimberley into the woods to tap birches for sap and take cores from trunks, and we peppered her with questions about the physiology of the birches themselves.

Barry McWayne, whose untimely death ended his direct participation last August, was the only artist I know who has devoted as much time, thought, and imagery to birch trees as I have. Working in two entirely different mediums, we shared similar visions of the individuality of the birches' trunks, the moods and atmosphere of the forest, and what we both called the "pelts" of the birches themselves. He and I had talked for more than two decades about doing a show of birch images together. Fortunately, Barry had already taken and printed many photographs in preparation for this exhibit, and we were able to use a large number of them, along with some of his earlier birch images, to represent him and his vision fully in the show.

Margo Klass has delighted in birch trees for years as well, incorporating images of them in her work long before she came to Alaska in the last decade.  Her exquisitely crafted, three-dimensional, magical and mysterious altarpiece-like boxes and handmade books combine natural elements from parts of the trees themselves with found objects related only visually or metaphorically to the trees and the forest--all of them transformed by juxtaposition and artistic alchemy.

In the last several years, I have been involved in several collaborative projects with other artists and writers, and the experience each time has been energizing, broadening, and surprising. From a very large scale public art project for the Anchorage International Airport on which I worked with Anchorage sculptor Sheila Wyne and Franz Mayer of Munich Studio in Germany, to two collaborative projects with Alaska's current State Writer Peggy Shumaker and several with Alaska writer Frank Soos, each project has led me to think differently about my own work, posed new challenges for me, and opened up new directions.  I like working alone in my studio, and would never want to change that basic way of life, but these collaborations have been rich leavening for both my life and my work, and I'm looking forward to more of them in the future.

Kimberley, Margo and her husband Frank Soos, who wrote the essay for the brochure we produced about the exhibition, Barry's widow Dorli McWayne, who allowed us to use his images and helped me mat and frame them, and I worked together on the installation in the beautiful exhibition space at the Pratt Museum, with great support from the museum's staff.  We were even more pleased with the results of our collaboration than we had hoped or imagined. If you can make it to Homer, Alaska, this summer, we think the exhibit is one you will enjoy. The following are the dates for the show at its various venues:

Pratt Museum - Homer, Alaska - July 1-October 2, 2011

Alaska State Museum - Juneau, Alaska - November 4, 2011 - January 14, 2012

Well Street Art Company - Fairbanks, Alaska - February 3-26, 2012

Birchbark

Chapters in Birchbark, Forty Pages at a Time   ©Kesler Woodward 2011   Two panels, each 20" x 16"   Birchbark, copper and steel nails on wood

A fascinating exhibit is on view at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks this month. Betula Neoalaskana: Celebrating One Tree includes a number of art works of all kinds made from a single birch tree from the boreal forest here, and more than a dozen artists' "books"made from parts of other birches in the area.

The One Tree idea originated in Cheshire, England in 1998, when a community of artists and artisans made an astonishing variety of products from artwork to furniture, all from a single local oak. Jan Dawe of the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, a longtime admirer of Alaska Paper Birch (Betula neoalaskana), started a project of the same sort with a single birch felled at Cache Creek in 2009. OneTree Alaska has grown to include art, science and education, and projects in many local schools, as well as the works in the current exhibit at Well Street.

The handmade artists' books portion of the show, art works of all kinds using serial imagery and made from parts of seventeen other trees recently felled near Fairbanks, was inspired and organized by my friend and fellow Fairbanks artist Margo Klass. Margo's well known artist books and assemblages have been shown in galleries and museums for many years, the last half dozen in solo and group exhibitions throughout Alaska, and she has taught classes regularly in bookbinding and related techniques here and throughout the country (see margoklass.com).

Chapters in Birchbark, Forty Pages at a Time  is my personal contribution to the exhibition. As I say in my brief statement for the show, birches and the boreal forest have been my trademark images for more than three decades, and I have made hundreds of paintings and drawings and prints of individual birch trees, but I have only made a handful of images from the bark of the trees themselves. 

Chapters in Birchbark is made from a large piece of bark from a birch identified by the scientists who are studying the trees--which had been felled for other purposes--as NR7 (Nenana Ridge 7).  Jan Dawe has told me that NR7 was the second oldest of the trees on the site, based on coring and counting of its growth rings, and quite possibly one of the oldest birches in Alaska.  It is very, very old for a birch tree, predating the U.S. Civil War by  a couple of decades. I have never worked with bark as old and thick as the piece from which this artwork is made--a strip almost 4 feet high and more than two feet wide, which curled almost immediately after peeling into a very tight, strong, 6-inch diameter roll.

As in previous pieces of this sort I have made, I painstakingly unrolled this bark and forced it flat again by attaching it to a sturdy wooden backing with a patterned arrangement of nails. I then added cutout pieces from the same piece of bark, or cut away layers of the surface, to create the images. 

Birch Panels 1-4: For Barry McWayne  ©2011 Margo Klass and Kesler Woodward

In the same exhibition is another artists' book that Margo Klass and I made in honor of our dear, late friend Barry McWayne.  A close friend of mine for more than 30 years, with whom I had worked, traveled, and celebrated many life events, Barry was one of Alaska's best and most widely admired artist photographers when he died unexpectedly last summer. He and Margo and I had been working for almost two years toward an exhibition of our artwork, all about birches, which will open this summer at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska, and travel to the Alaska State Museum in Juneau this fall and Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks next February.  As our statement about the piece for the current exhibit explains:

"Before his sudden death last summer Barry McWayne came to Jan Dawe’s house to select birch material for his One Tree project. He walked up and down the row of bark samples looking for the piece with the most interesting formations and variations. He settled on NR8, a pre-Civil War tree, oldest of the Nenana Ridge group. We’ve made this book in Barry’s honor, not as he would have made it, but as an attempt to honor the way he was uniquely able to isolate and preserve beautiful passages of bark in his well-known photographs."

It is a privilege to have been able to work on this piece in Barry's honor, from the bark he chose. As I said when I spoke at his memorial service last summer, Barry was not only a dear friend, but was the only artist I know who has loved birch trees as deeply and explored them in images as fervently as I have myself.

It was also a privilege to work on this piece with Margo, in whose style and technique the work is made. I have long admired Margo's work, and I appreciate it even more now, after being introduced firsthand to the painstaking, labor-intensive processes that are involved in the making of her magical, mysterious boxes.

Never Night

Never Night, poems by Derick Burleson. ©Derick Burleson, 2007. Grosse Pointe, Michigan: Marick Press, 2008.

I am honored that Alaska poet Derick Burleson chose to use my painting  West Ridge October on the cover of his extraordinary new book of poems. Never Night is a wonderful collection of the Fairbanks poet's reflections on life, family, love, death, place, and home, stretching from his childhood on a farm in Oklahoma to the homestead on which he lives today in Two Rivers, Alaska.

Derick, whose first book, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-1994 won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  You can get your own copy of this volume by visiting your local bookstore, clicking on the direct Amazon.com link to the book in the lower right hand column of this website, or at www.marickpress.com.

It has been a great privilege for me to have my paintings associated through publication with the work of several of Alaska's most talented writers. Blaze, published by Red Hen Press in 2005, juxtaposes thirty years of my paintings of birch trees and boreal forest with poems by Peggy Shumaker, one of Alaska's best known poets. 

The product of a long and rewarding collaboration, Blaze was conceived as a conversation between poet and painter, some paintings done in response to specific poems, some poems written in response to my paintings, and other pairings selected by the two of us to question, challenge, reinforce, and enrich perceptions of each.

 

Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace, by Fairbanks writer Frank Soos, was published in 1999 by University of Georgia Press and released in a new paperback edition by them in 2006.  Five of Frank's remarkable essays, ostensibly about fly fishing but at least as much about values and how one lives one's life, are illustrated by a number of my paintings.  University of Alaska Museum designer Wanda Chin created the striking design for this small volume, and the University of Georgia Press produced it exquisitely.

It has been a great joy for me to participate in each of these collaborations, and I hope to do many more in the future.  If there are any of these books you haven't seen, please check them out.  You won't be disappointed.

For more information and details on all of my books, click here to reach the "Books" page on my main website, www.keslerwoodward.com.

Blaze

Now available from Red Hen Press is a beautiful new 160-page book, Blaze, featuring 70 color reproductions of my paintings juxtaposed with a like number of poems by Peggy Shumaker. Peggy and I have been working for almost two years on this collaborative effort--matching existing images of mine to poems of hers and vice-versa, as well as each of us making new works in response to the work of the other.  The wonderful folks at Red Hen Press have produced from that collaboration what I think is a stunning volume, and we will be introducing it to the public for the first time in slide talk/readings at museums, bookstores, and university campuses in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Homer between October 28 and December 2. If you are not able to make one of these opening events and are eager to get a copy, Blaze is available from Red Hen Press in hardcover for $39.95 and in softcover for $29.95.