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.

Commissions, Collaborations, Influences

Eminence   ©Kesler Woodward 2013   acrylic on canvas   24" x 48"

It has been a busy spring, including travel to extraordinary places that will eventually lead to new paintings. Dorli and I walked the spectacular 95-mile West Highland Way in Scotland in May, from near Glasgow to Fort William, and we hiked up Ben Nevis--the highest peak in the British Isles. I know that some of that experience will appear in my work, months or even years from now, when it's had a chance to settle deeply enough in my consciousness that I have something personal to say about it. Meanwhile, before and since our travels, I've been as busy in the studio as ever.

In the weeks before we left for Scotland, I completed and delivered Eminence, a commission for a prominent Alaskan law firm with offices in Fairbanks and Anchorage. When a Managing Partner in the firm contacted me late this winter, he wrote, "I know from your blog that you hate doing commissions, but..."  I do much prefer selling existing work to doing commissions (see my latest discussion on that topic in my October 30, 2012 post), but I was intrigued by what he wanted, and so made an exception.

As always in my work, Eminence not only depicts a specific place, but grew out of my effort to portray not so much what that place looks like, but what it felt like to me to be there at a very specific time of day and season. A very few viewers of this painting may recognize the mountains (and others will undoubtedly be convinced that they recognize them, and be wrong), but I don't want to say where this is. Though every peak and ridge is in its proper place, what I hoped for this painting is that it would be less about that specific locale, and more about what it feels like to be in the high, clear air of the mountains in Alaska--something that is important not only to me, but to the Managing Partner of the firm that commissioned it and to some of his colleagues.

Some of the most rewarding artwork I've done in the last decade has involved collaboration with writers and graphic designers. Letterpress broadsides have combined my images with poems by both Alaska State Writer Peggy Shumaker and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass. Those beautiful broadsides were made possible by the inspired work of designers Heather Kasvinsky of Fairbanks and Jennifer Viviano of Portland, Oregon, respectively. Each of them made of our words and images a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.

The same was true of the gem of a volume that designer Wanda Chin made from my images and my friend Frank Soos' essays in Bamboo Fly Rod Suite, published beautifully by University of Georgia Press in 1999 and still available in softcover and Kindle e-book editions. I am currently at work with Alaska poet John Morgan on two more books, each combining my images with his poetry, one coming soon from University of Alaska Press and the other, we hope, from Alaska Geographic. I will have more on those in a later post.

My latest collaboration to come to full fruition is this image for the poster and catalog for this year's Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. It was a delight once again to work with dear friend and recent Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker. In 2003, Red Hen Press of Los Angeles published our volume Blaze, juxtaposing three decades of my paintings of birches and the boreal forest with Peggy's extraordinary poetry. In this year's Festival poster, my recent painting Aubade--the title itself refers to a poem of praise to the dawn--tries to capture some of the magic of Peggy's words, which celebrate the first joys of creating works of art, in any medium.

I have been honored to have my artwork featured on the widely collected Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival posters twice before, in 1995 and 2002, but this year's poster is the Festival's first combining poetry and art, and it was especially fun and rewarding for me. Once again, the collaboration includes not only my image and Peggy's words, but the great design work of another friend, a gifted poet herself as well as a designer, Erin Hollowell of Homer, Alaska.

Chant II   ©KeslerWoodward 2013   acrylic on canvas   54" x 84"

My influences have long come more from writers than directly from other artists, and I think that more recently, music has begun to have an increasing influence on the way I think about my work. My nephew Charles, now a music major at UAF, began my belated, remedial education in classical music when he came to stay with us for parts of four summers to attend Summer Music Academy and lived with us during his senior year of high school. Dorli, who is principal flutist for the Fairbanks Symphony and has been a member of the music faculty at UAF for more than thirty years, has taken over that daunting task. I still know little, but am continually intrigued by what I'm slowly learning about how music works, and I think that the very incomplete nature of my understanding may even make stronger its influence on my thinking about new ways to make paintings.

For years I have thought of my birch paintings as "portraits" of individual trees, occasionally double- or more rarely triple-portraits. But as I talked about in my February post, I have lately been not only complicating and elaborating those compositions, but thinking of them in almost musical terms. I was so intrigued by the idea of melisma--the musical stretching of a single syllable over a run of many notes, as sometimes in Gregorian chant--that as soon as wonderful collector friends in Anchorage told me they wanted to purchase my first big Chant, I couldn't wait to begin another composition of a similar complexity and size.

A month later, Chant II sings sonorously to me from my studio wall. I sometimes think of my studio almost as a kind of monastery, and the woods around it as its grounds. I'd like to think that I turn to my work each day much as a monk does, engaged in devotions and hoping for a bit of enlightenment by simply working through the Hours. As we ran through the forest one day last week, I asked Dorli to explain another musical concept new to me--overtones, or partials. I think most days of how lucky I am, at this stage in my life, to have a guide and a whole new world as big as music to explore.

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.