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.

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!

Oils

Colors in the Snow ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Oil on canvas  30" x 40"

I go back and forth between painting in oils and painting in acrylics. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Acrylics dry too fast, so are hard to blend evenly. They are too bright, and have to be knocked down in intensity as they come out of the tube, if you want to make them look rich and full. But they are crisp and brilliant, and if something goes wrong, after 15 minutes they're dry, and you get another chance.

Oils dry too slowly, so if you impatiently try to change things, they get muddy. But they are rich, full, and juicy as they come out of the tube. They feel good, smell good, and if you're patient, you can fiddle with them at leisure. I work with one or the other for a year, two years, or more at a time, before changing back to the other. For the last several years, I've painted mostly in acrylics, exploring the opportunities they afford to build layers of transparent brilliance. But with the dawn of a new year, I've returned to oils, reveling in their lush, sensual texture and richness.

January Morning ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Oil on canvas 20" x 16"

In each of my three new paintings, I've handled the oils in very different ways. Colors in the Snow was painted slowly, delicately, sparingly, scrubbing the oils onto the surface without any use of white paint, allowing the white of the canvas to both stand for the purest white of snow and lighten all the other colors as needed. It's a nearly all-white snow scene that's illumined by the myriad, subtle colors of winter. 

In the smaller canvas January Morning, I took advantage of thicker, creamier pigments to do wet-into-wet blending, trying to capture some of the intricacies of early morning light as it breaks through the woods and spills onto the foreground snow. And in Graces, I gave in entirely to the sensuality of oils, making unabashed portraits of the beautiful bodies of two of the gorgeous birches that adorn the boreal forest near my home.

Graces  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Oil on canvas  30" x 40"

I think because I didn't grow up making art, but came to it late, in college, and painted entirely abstractly--non-representationally--for years before turning to representation, the way I approach image-making is somewhat unusual. Most artists paint lots of different subjects, but paint them all in similar ways. By contrast I paint similar subjects year after year--light in the North, trees and the boreal forest, the mountains and rivers of the circumpolar landscape--but I paint those subjects, over time, in very different ways. I make images of the things I love, but I love exploring the myriad possibilities of paint just as much. That's why when people who aren't familiar with my work ask me what I paint, I tell them, "I make big abstract paintings that happen to look like birch trees."

Birches and Bark

Opulent ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

As much as I love late winter, especially the burgeoning light on the still-pristine, still-deepening snow cover of March, after six months of living in a nearly all-white landscape, I'm always surprised to find brighter, deeper color appearing my paintings. The birches never look more opulent than they do outside my studio windows in the glorious light of March, and as I've worked on new "portraits" of them over the last month, I've also noticed that the green of a still-distant summer has started appearing behind them in my paintings.

 

Shining ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  30" x 12"

The deep green woods that are the setting for Opulent began sidling into the field of view in the painting I completed just before it.

After months of making paintings in which I was looking directly into the low winter sun, in Shining I was content to let the higher, brighter sun of spring illuminate the trunk of a slender birch, backed by a dark spruce on the hillside below my studio. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pilgrimage ©Kesler Woodward 2018 birchbark on canvas  48" x 48"

And something completely different...

Last fall, I was invited to participate in an exhibition to open this spring which would include a panoply of works of art and craft made by local artists and artisans from parts of a single large, locally harvested birch tree. I was given a small strip of beautiful bark from the tree with which to work. It sat on a table in my studio for months, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.  

In the end, I made this piece for the show--a spiral, which I started at the center of a 48" x 48" canvas and created by attaching thin sections of the bark, carefully peeled and torn from the strip I'd been given. Two straight-pins hold each fragment in place, pushed through the bark and into and through the tight canvas.

I had no idea how many of these small pieces it would take to complete the spiral, which I initially thought of as something like a Catholic rosary--a string of 59 prayer beads. But when I reached 59 pieces of bark, I was a long, long way from filling the canvas. When I reached 108--the number of a Mala string of Buddhist prayer beads--I was still only a third of the way there. I simply continued, peeling thin layers, tearing them into similar-sized, slightly irregular pieces, and pinning them on--wondering as I worked whether I would have enough bark for the growing spiral to fill the canvas.

It took days to complete, but contructing it was curiously meditative and satisfying. When I reached the edges of the canvas, I had just enough bark left to add a few final fragments in the corners, like arriving wayfarers that hadn't yet joined the pilgrimage. I counted the delicate little pieces, each a bit different. 300 in the spiral, and 29 more waiting in the wings to join.

Small Wonders

Last Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Winter seems to arrive later and later here in Interior Alaska, where three decades ago I could usually ski out my back door on my birthday in early October, and the Chena River reliably froze solid in the third week of that month. This year we narrowly escaped having a snowless Halloween for the first time in seventy years. But our beautiful, downy snow is finally here, not only covering the trails, but sitting atop every twig and surface, brightening even the night.

The four small paintings I've completed since my last post are testaments to my anticipation of winter before it came in earnest, and to my ongoing exploration of the mysteries of winter light now that it has arrived. Dreaming of Winter was painted before the first sticking snowfall, when I was engaged in exactly that reverie. Last Light, Gleam, and Glint are ruminations on the subtle but real differences among first light of morning, last light of evening, and the early winter sun's occlusion by beautiful birches at the entrance to the woods.

           

Left - Glint  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

Right - Gleam  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

In both Glint and Gleam, I was determined to have it both ways--beautiful birches up very close, staring us in our faces, with just enough space around them to suggest the particular winter light.

Dreaming of Winter  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"  

Light in the North

Blessing  ©Kesler Woodward 2017   acrylic on canvas   20" x 16" (image)

When people who don't know my work ask me what I paint, I often tell them that I paint "big abstract paintings that happen to look like birch trees." And if most people who know my work well were asked what I paint, they would probably say "birch trees," or "the Northern forest." But more and more I realize, and should probably acknowledge, that what I really paint is light--"Light in the North."

We are blessed, in this subarctic landscape, to have extraordinary light all year-round. The shallow angle at which the sun wheels around the sky at 64º North latitude means that in every season, we get hours of the kind of magical twilight that is fleeting in most of the settled world. The rising sun, struggling to crest the southern horizon on a midwinter morning, looks and feels like a blessing. And the light in the treetops, when the ground is in shadow, always seems to me a kindly reminder of the day that's just gone and the sun that will come again.

Kindly Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2017   acrylic on canvas   24" x 30" (image)

 

 

Bold Birches and a Show in Anchorage

Burgeoning ©Kesler Woodward 2017 acrylic on canvas 36" x 24"

I've been hard at work, riding an ongoing wave of pleasure in painting more directly, boldly, and sensuously than I have in some time.  Maybe it's the burgeoning light of summer and the rampant new life in both our garden and the boreal forest. I just know that I've been looking out my studio windows, seeing the beautiful birches in the woods around me brighten and peel as their trunks stretch and swell with new growth, and trying to capture a little of that fecundity. Each tree, each trunk, is an individual, full of life and character all its own.

Seven large paintings of mine will be in an exhibition at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage that opens this Friday, August 4, from 5-8 pm. The exhibit includes not only my paintings, but work by four friends--Fairbanks artists Bill Brody, Sara Tabbert, Adam Ottavi, and Annie Duffy. If you're in Anchorage on Friday, I'll hope to see you at the opening, and if you're there any time during the month of August, I hope you'll get a chance to see the show.

Rubenesque  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  60" x 48"

 

Spring Dreams and New Year's Light

Spring Dreams   ©Kesler Woodward 2016    acrylic on canvas    36" x 24" 

As so often when I paint a new "birch portrait," the impetus for this painting came from running through the woods and being struck by an especially beautiful trunk. The woods are wintry now, of course, so I was surprised when the branches on my canvas sprouted leaves. In the all-encompassing whiteness of winter, I do tend to crave color, and I suppose I must also, wholly unconsciously, be thinking ahead to spring.

 

I think young leaves are especially on my mind, though, as I've been conducting, in a closet in our house, a small part of a larger experiment the scientists at OneTree Alaska have been doing. They are germinating birch seeds (many of them from "my" tree--the one I've chosen to follow in their major test plot) and are growing them under controlled lighting conditions that simulate differences between late spring and mid-summer germination. By mimicking the amount of light each cohort of seedlings would receive under those conditions, they hope to gain further insights into the effects of climate change on birches and the boreal forest. Working with these folks as their "Artist-in-Residence" is a continuing source of inspiration for me, and seeing the tiny leaves on the inch-high birches in my closet grow daily, in the depths of winter, has to have an impact on what I do when I go to my studio to paint.

New Year's Light ©Kesler Woodward 2016  acrylic on canvas  36" x 24"

New Year's Light may look like a fantasy, but as always in my work, it's an effort to capture my experience at a very specific place and time. The dark, almost silhouetted trees in the foreground are the very ones I looked through from Chena Ridge one winter morning as the almost due-south rising sun transformed the all-white Tanana River Valley into an array of brilliant colors.

As I work on this post today in Fairbanks, a week before the winter solstice, we have only 3 hours and 49 minutes of true daylight, and the sun struggled to a midday zenith less than 2 degrees above the horizon. It should be dark and depressing, but it's not...it's absolutely beautiful.

The sky has been clear nearly every day for a month, every hour of the day and night. The light during the short days is peach, and on either side of those 3 hours and 49 minutes of daylight, we have hours of the kind of magical twilight that lasts just minutes in latitudes where the sun travels a steeper path.

It's never truly dark in winter here, as snow on every surface reflects not only the moon, which is full today as I write and casting shadows like a beacon, but every other bit of ambient light as well. And have I mentioned that we are able to see auroras dance across the late night sky here, on average, 120 nights a year? 

I do look forward to gradually increasing daylight, beginning in just a few days, and to the time from May through July when it's light all night, but I love our winter at least as much as our summer, and I love the dramatic sweep of the seasons most of all.