Kesler Woodward

New Paintings in a New Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Replenishment

Replenishment  ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 60"

I'm not certain why I've been painting mountains, glaciers, and falling snow for the last month, rather than birch trees and boreal forest. I've been reading and thinking a lot about climate change, and about how the coastal glaciers I began visiting more than four decades ago have almost all shrunk dramatically in that time, but I didn't go to my studio and decide to make paintings about climate change. It's hard--for me at least--to work that way without simply illustrating an idea. I'd much rather discover, after I've made a painting and asked myself what it was about, that I had something to say about it.

I've painted mountains and glaciers for decades, but it's been some time since I turned to them as subject matter, so when I finished this painting, I sat and looked at it from across the studio and asked myself, as usual, "So what was that about?" The snow arrived very late this year here in Fairbanks, as it has for several years now, and I'm sure that the falling snow in these paintings came in response to my perennial eagerness for it. But when I cast about for a title, Replenishment came to mind immediately, and I thought, wryly, that Alaska's glaciers must be longing for it at least as much as I have been.

As soon as it was done, I prepared another large (4 ft. x 5 ft.) canvas and tackled another glacier that I know well, imagining that it, too, must be dreaming of the snow and cold that enabled it to grow and spill from mountaintop to sea, and which it needs, in its season, to continue to thrive.

Glacier Dreams  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

Since my last post, and before making these big mountain, glacier, falling snow paintings, I finished the half-dozen new pen and ink drawings I set out to make of some of my favorite birches in our own yard. I'll get around to having them framed individually, eventually, but for now I'm enjoying having them push-pinned as a group on the painting wall in my studio, where they catch my eye with delight daily, as I paint.  

Six new pen-and-ink birch portraits on the wall in my studio. For titles, sizes, and individual images, click on the Available Works Album at the top of the right-hand column above and then on any of the individual thumbnails. 

Fall Comes Like a Fire

Morning Journal ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 24"

Much of the time I'm painting images that are out-of-season. In summer I often long for the hush of winter, and I paint snow scenes. And as much as I love the winter, after being enveloped in whiteness for six months I find myself dreaming of the brighter colors of spring. But the fall, which turns the boreal forest from green to gold in a few short weeks, captures me every year. Two new paintings are personal responses to that glorious blaze.

Like a Fire ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas 20" x 16"

The smaller painting Like a Fire addresses that notion directly. It's a scene from early September, just a stone's throw from my studio. Our bright fall leaves are mostly yellow, but a handful of aspens turn orange and red on occasion, and a few weeks ago I was struck by how much the rampaging transition to fall, with whole sections of trees still green and other boughs blazing yellow, orange, and red, looked like sudden flame engulfing the forest. 

 

 

 

 

 

Dooryard Birch ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Pen and ink on BFK Rives paper  15" x 10"

Since finishing these bright fall paintings, I've heeded the note to myself I posted some time ago in my studio, saying "Draw more!" In Dooryard Birch I revisited my current favorite tree, just steps from my studio door. I made a drawing of it several months ago with bold strokes of pen and ink. In that summer drawing, I tried to capture some of what I saw as that birch's remarkable vitality and strength

So what would it look like, I wondered, if I tackled drawing the same tree with a thinner pen, and searched for different parts of its personality? The new Dooryard Birch is the same section of the same tree, drawn from the same angle, at the same size, but in it I've tried to capture a little of that still young-and-growing tree's delicacy, its vulnerability, and a different element of its sensuality. I honestly don't know how much of those qualities come through in the finished drawing, but this is the way I think about my work.

 

 

Unfurling ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Pen and ink on BFK Rives paper  15" x 10"

As usual for me, one painting or drawing leads to another, and another, so for now I'm still drawing portraits of some of my favorite trees in our own yard. I just go to my studio every day and go to work, so I'll simply continue until another image calls. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rubenesque ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Pen and ink on BFK Rives paper  15" x 10"

That Time of Year

That Time of Year  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

Fall comes early to the forests of Interior Alaska, and it is too fleeting. Leaves begin to change color in mid-August, by the first week of September they cover the ground on the trails where we run, and by mid-September the branches are bare. The changes in the understory are just as dramatic, and anyone who lives here and pays attention might guess what week it is in my new painting That Time of Year. It's the last week of August. The bunchberries are red, the early-fallen aspen leaf hasn't quite finished changing color, and the ground around is dark and rich with the detritus of early fall-- leaves already down and decaying, bits of color brightening the forest floor briefly in the duff, before becoming soil.

The title--chosen as is usual for me after the painting was finished, when I sat and pondered what it was about--comes from a Shakespeare sonnet that I love. This is not a cheery-bright evocation of autumn, but an effort to capture some of the season's bittersweetness--the darkness that is returning after a long summer of light, anticipation of the cold and stillness of winter that will inexorably follow, and the determination of the forest to flare with brief brilliance as it enters into night.

Old Friends  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  30" x 40" 

I do try to wrench my attention from the beauty of individual birches, but after painting mountains, streams, light in the trees, and the forest floor for weeks or months, I seem inevitably to give in to wonder at the beauty of a new birch that I hadn't noticed before, on the trail as we run. Or, as in Old Friends, the growth and change in individual birches that I've painted over and over, and that have become in fact just that--old friends. So in the midst of responding to the changing seasons, the dance of light through the forest and through the year, the flash of sun on bright northern waters, and the majesty of the mountains, I make portraits of birches, day after day, and year after year. I can't help myself.

Four recent birch portraits on paper ©Kesler Woodward 2019  

And one last thing, for now. I am grateful to the Nevada Museum of Art, Bill Fox, Director of its Center for Art + Environment, and Sara Frantz, its Archivist and Librarian, for organizing and mounting a small exhibition of my work there this summer and early fall. Kesler Woodward: The Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced features several of my paintings and a number of my sketches and notes from that extraordinary 2001 voyage along the coast of Alaska, when I served as Expedition Artist for a Smith College-sponsored retracing of the route of the last great exploring expedition to Alaska--the 1899 Harriman Expedition.

The exhibition opened on June 29, and continues through October 13, so if you're in or near Reno, Nevada before mid-October, please check out the Center and the Nevada Museum of Art, and my exhibition. The Center for Art + Environment  is an internationally recognized research center that supports the practice, study, and awareness of creative interactions between people and their natural, built, and virtual environments. Housed at the Nevada Museum of Art, it is home to a research library with archive collections from more than 1000 artists and organizations working on all seven continents. For the last several years they have been duplicating, organizing, and indexing a vast array of my images, notes, publications, and other materials related to my life as an artist. The online searchable database of that material will go live soon, and I'll post a web address for it here on my website. In the meantime, you can get some sense of what will be there by clicking here for the online finding aid to my archive. Below are a few of my Harriman Expedition Retraced works in the current exhibition.

Iceberg, Hubbard Glacier - Harriman Expedition ©Kesler Woodward 2002  Oil pastel on paper  30" x 42"

 

 

 

 

 

 

College Fjord, Harriman Expedition ©Kesler Woodward 2007  Acrylic on canvas  16" x 20"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rising Mists, Tracy Arm - Harriman Expedition  ©Kesler Woodward 2002  Oil pastel on paper  17" x 24"

 

True at First Light

True at First Light ©Kesler Woodward 2019  acrylic on canvas  30" x 40"

It's a nice time of year in Interior Alaska. I love every season here, but late winter to early spring is one of the most dramatic, in terms of rapid change. We're gaining almost an hour of daylight a week, and already it's light outside my studio windows until 10 o'clock in the evening. Beginning in just a few weeks, we'll have no real darkness until mid-August.

Though very different in handling and appearance, both my new paintings are responses to this unique, transitional season. 

The title True at First Light is borrowed from one of my favorite Ernest Hemingway novels, but I think it's an apt name for this paean to the intricate beauty of the forest treetops on the hillside at our home, in the dawn light of early spring. As always, I'm not interested in simply rendering a scene, but am trying to capture what I can of the character of my experience being in a specific place, at a particular time, in a certain quality of light.  

So as always, everything in the painting is a fiction. Here are not the literal trunks and limbs of the very treetops I looked up to, one fine morning a few weeks ago, and these are not the "true" colors of their myriad branches. But more than any photograph I could take, the painting is true to my experience that morning...True at First Light.

Birches in Winter Dream About Spring ©Kesler Woodward 2019  acrylic on canvas 36" x 48"

The somewhat larger Birches in Winter Dream About Spring is just as "true," I think, but is more obviously a fiction--almost a fantasy. It is as loose, expressive, even riotous, as True at First Light is delicate and intricate. I began painting it weeks earlier, toward the end of more than five months of relentless winter whiteness. I love the long months of winter and am always sorry when the pristine snow starts to disappear, but I do find myself at the end of each winter craving color, and it's during that time that I often make my most colorful, wildest paintings of the year.

In Birches in Winter Dream About Spring, I'm imagining that the trees in the late winter forest are filled with the same longing I feel for brilliant hues. In it, I imagine that the robust birches still slumbering just outside my studio toward the end of a long winter are dreaming in technicolor of a coming spring. 

 

     

And one last thing, for now...

Last fall, I wrote here briefly about the 9-part television series Into the Woods, with Kes Woodward, that was produced and shown locally by KUAC, our local Public Television station. I was surprised and delighted by its popularity, and by the number of people who found it interesting and inspiring. KUAC is airing all nine episodes again this month and next, during the station's spring fundraiser, so there is an opportunity for those in Interior Alaska to see some or all of the segments on the local, over-the-air broadcast. 

Many collectors of my work who read or heard about the program, but don't live in Fairbanks, have asked me how they might be able to see the series, and I was sorry to have to say that the programs weren't, and still aren't, as of this date, streamable online. The station did, however, put together a deluxe 2-DVD set with all nine episodes, plus a lot of extra material that was cut for time from the half-hour programs, and a few mildly embarrassing out-takes. (In the course of scores of hours of filming over three months, I often made unguarded observations on the spur of the moment, and there is one whole section of the extra material titled "Kes' Pet Peeves.")

So...if you are unable to see any or all of the episodes and would really like to watch it at your leisure, KUAC Public Television is offering the 2-DVD set as a thank-you gift for a donation of $140, at this link: https://kuac.org/kuac-friends-group/one-time-donation/ I want to emphasize that if you do so, ALL of your donation will go to KUAC. The program itself was a completely volunteer effort, on my part, and my time and energy, as well as any donations, go completely to support public broadcasting in Interior Alaska. 

 

Headlong

Headlong  ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 48"

It has been some time since I've painted rushing water, and I had a great time tackling that ephemeral imagery again in my new painting Headlong. Much of the cascading water of a stream like this one is as white as snow, and I love trying to capture in flickering, transparent glazes some of not just its fluidity, but its exuberance--the way it hurries headlong toward the sea. 

I seldom know what I'll paint next until I go to the studio and actually begin working on a new canvas, and it's often only after I'm done that I understand what called me to undertake a particular image. Surely the fact that every lake, stream, and river here in Interior Alaska has been frozen hard for almost five months, and will be for two months more, had something to do with my dreaming of flowing water. But also, even though it's still midwinter cold, February is a time of the year here when the burgeoning of daylight, 7 minutes per day, seems to be hurtling us toward spring. I think as much as anything else, this is a painting about feeling that excited rush.

Winter Bright  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Oil on Canvas  36" x 36"

The luminous colors and brilliant whites of winter are also rendered in transparent glazes--in this case oil glazes--in my new painting Winter Bright. It has been an especially radiant winter here, and the morning sun breaking in the forest turns the aspen and birch trunks, fleetingly, into molten gold amid the downy snow and the darkness of the tangled woods. 

Dorli and I run every other morning, all year-round, on endless trails that begin at our back door, and in winter our runs invariably include the dawn, and the magical light that it brings. It's often hard for me to take the hour and a half or so away from time in my studio, but I reassure myself that time in the forest is as much a part of my work as time with my brush in hand. 

                  

Dayspring, Late August, Lambent  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10" each

Whether large or small, every painting of mine is as much about a particular moment as it is about trees, mountains, or water. In these three small paintings, completed over the past few weeks, I've tried to remember and to capture not so much what those places look like, as how it felt to me to be there, at those moments of the season and times of the day.

Many Alaskans will immediately recognize the mountain Denali looming above the ridge in one of these small paintings, but I've called it Late August because what it's about for me is not so much that spectacular peak, as about the very specific way that color is changing on the foreground ridge in the...well, headlong...rush in late August toward another fall.  

 

New Work and an Upcoming Exhibition

If you're in Anchorage on Friday, June 1, I hope you'll come say hello at the opening of a solo exhibition of my work at Georgia Blue Gallery. Thirteen of my  new paintings will be on view that evening, and for the remainder of the month of June.

Chorus ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 36"

Chorus is testimony to my ongoing fascination with bright, warm color in the white of winter. As I worked on it for many days, I completely forgot, at one point, what season I was painting. I told Dorli one day that the new painting in my studio was starting to come together, and when she asked what season it was, without thinking I replied, "It's a brilliant fall scene," before remembering that it was actually about the chorus of light that transfigures the boreal forest when the sun rises in winter, and I look directly into its glow.

I have more paintings than usual in my studio right now, as I'm about to ship the thirteen newest ones to Anchorage for my show at Georgia Blue Gallery next month. I welcomed a trio of friends visiting from Anchorage to my studio yesterday, and one of them said, "I usually don't like winter paintings, especially this time of year, as they're so cold, but although almost every painting in your studio is a winter scene, they are all full of such warm light." Many of our friends complain bitterly this time of year about the long winters, and the snow that lingers through April, so I'm always glad that both Dorli and I love the winters--however long--at least as much as the summers. I guess for both of us, it's because this, rather than cold and dark,  is the way it looks to us as we run on the snowy trails at first light for almost seven full months of the year.

 

Taiga Trail ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 16"

One of the things I do like about late spring is the way the shadows of the trees deepen so dramatically in density and definition in the stronger light. Anyone who has spent years in this forest, paying attention to the light that changes not just month by month, but day by day, might well recognize that despite the still deep, unbroken snow on this trail, these are the shadows of spring, not winter.

 

Rampant  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 24"

Rampant speaks to my seemingly endless fascination with the individuality of birch trunks, my occasional need to break away from the intricate and tightly-controlled way I've been working and indulge myself in thick, juicy paint, and the way my paintings take on a life of their own as I work on them. This canvas began life as a smooth, almost flesh-pink torso, but without much warning turned inexorably into this far wilder, rawer, scarred-but-proud, still-rampant figure. 

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"

 

Thick and Thin, Tight and Loose

Deep Summer Birch ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  60" x 48" 

Many artists paint diverse subjects, but paint all of them in much the same way. I seem to do just the opposite. I paint trees and woods, rivers and streams, mountains, skies, and above all, light, but the subject of almost all my work is my response to place--how it feels, or felt, to me to be in a very particular place at a very specific time of year, time of day, and quality of light. What changes most dramatically is not what I paint, but how I paint it. For several years now, I've been using thin, transparent layers of paint to try to achieve a certain kind of luminosity that's not possible with thicker, opaque color. When I began doing that 5 or 6 years ago, it was something new to me, and it opened up whole new ways to highlight different aspects of the things I love to paint.

Gradually, too, my paintings have become tighter, more controlled. I begin each painting by laying in an image loosely, thinly, all-over, but lately I've been going in with fine brushes after, "excavating" more and more detail...both representational detail and more abstract, but clearly defined areas of shape and color. 

There is much more I want to explore with those thin, transparent layers, and I'm sure I will return to them, but when I went to work one day a few weeks ago, I found myself missing and craving the kind of thick, juicy paint and sensual surfaces and textures I employed in years past.  

A Cat  Sage Lang-Woodward 2016 acrylic on canvas board  9" x 12"

Also, sitting on a counter in my studio, where I see it every day, is this wonderful little painting my 5 year-old granddaughter Sage gave me for Christmas last year. It's the only work by another artist in my studio, and every time I look at it, I think, "Have I lost my ability to be so bold, confident, and expressive as that?" With Sage's Cat as inspiration, I launched into painting Deep Summer Birch, a big, bold image of a particularly beautiful birch just outside my studio window, and the dense, almost dark summer woods beyond it. I loved pushing the thick, juicy paint around and blending it wet-into-wet again. 

It remains a mystery to me that I have so little control over what I paint, or how I paint it. All I can do is show up in my studio every day and go to work, and so that's what I do. When I finished Deep Summer Birch, I wondered what I might do next. 

Winter's Web  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas 48" x 60"

Winter's Web followed. It usually takes me a long time for the experience of seeing something to settle deeply enough in my consciousness that I know what I want to say about it, so Dorli teases me that I'm always making paintings out-of-season--winter scenes in summer, fall ones in spring. She was surprised that with Deep Summer Birch, I'd actually painted a summer scene in July.

With Winter's Web, I returned to my out-of-season norm. The intricate frosting of deep, soft snow that bedecks every branch and twig in winter here is a continual source of wonder for me, and the kind of wet-into-wet, lush paint I'm currently excited about employing seemed perfect for capturing the way bits of bright color in the winter forest are reflected in the nearly all-white woods. Painting Winter's Web had me recollecting the beauty of winter's cold, even as it reached 90º one day here in Fairbanks while I worked on it.

New and Different

Aurora Betula  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  48" x 48"

In a moment of weakness a couple of months ago, I responded positively to my longtime friend Yolande Fejes' invitation to be included in a group exhibition she's hosting of artwork about the aurora--the "Northern Lights"-- at her Alaska House Gallery this March. Friends were surprised and amused to hear that I'd accepted that invitation. For many years, I taught a graduate Northern Studies course at the University of Alaska called "Visual Images of the North." In this course about the art of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and northern Russia, one of the lectures I gave each semester was titled "Trying to Paint the Aurora." I showed more than 100 paintings, drawings, and prints of or about the aurora, from medieval times to the present, concluding that no one had ever done an entirely successful one. I always told my students that if the great 19th Century American landscape painter Frederic Church couldn't do it, we probably couldn't either, and perhaps we should leave the aurora to God.

As the time for the exhibition neared, I dithered with increasing anxiety about how I might respond to the challenge I'd accepted, and it wasn't until one day a couple of weeks ago, on one of our regular morning runs through the birch forest, that an idea came to me. Aurora Betula is the result. 

Betula, of course, is the scientific name for birches, and my initial thought was that it might be nice to make a little fun of my own obsession with birches and the boreal forest as a subject. Some of my favorite auroral images date back to medieval times, long before scientists learned the real cause of these beautiful, ghostly lights in the night sky. Early artist-observers imagined them as the light from celestial battles, Valkyrie maidens escorting fallen warriors to Valhalla, mythical celestial foxes with their tails on fire, and other wonderful, fanciful explanations. Why, I thought, couldn't they be supernatural birches, sheltering the earth and the more earthbound spruces below in a heavenly arc?

I had no idea what fun it would be making such a painting, and I'm grateful to Yolande and Alaska House Gallery for the challenge that prompted this big, fanciful, celestial scene.

Margo  ©Kesler Woodward 2016  Oil pastel on paper  40" x 32" 

Unlike auroras, portraits of friends are something I have done before, but not for a long while. More than a decade ago, I had a solo show of a dozen or more large (more than four-times life-size) oil pastel portraits, but I've only done a handful since--one every few years. In that first batch of portraits was one of my longtime friend, extraordinary writer Frank Soos, and it hangs on the wall in the living room of the beautiful home he shares with his equally extraordinary artist wife Margo Klass. Every time we've gone to dinner there, I've looked at it and thought I should do one of Margo, too, so in December I finally did.

The same size and medium as the one of Frank, it's handled in exactly the same way--very abstract up close, and somewhat expressionist in color, but quite realistic, from far away.  I don't know whether they will hang the two together, but I'll enjoy knowing I've tried to bring not just one, but both of their images to life in my own way.