Kesler Woodward

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. 

New Paintings at Blue Hollomon Gallery in Anchorage

I have just returned from the opening of a show of 15 of my last year's paintings at Blue Hollomon Gallery in Anchorage.  As always, the gallery did a wonderful job of installation and promotion, and it was a great delight to visit with the more than 200 people who came out for my First Friday opening on a 4th of July weekend. The show was enthusiastically received and is off to a good start, but the best thing about opening receptions for me is getting to see and visit with so many friends, many of whom I hadn't seen since my last exhibition in Anchorage, two years ago. 

Imperative  ©Kesler Woodward  2016   acrylic on canvas   24" x 48"

Included in the show were several brand-new paintings that I've finished since my last blog post--among them Imperative, which features a branch of a young birch that I kind of "adopted," and began observing and painting last year, and that I hope to continue chronicling in its growth for some time. This beautiful, unusual tree is part of a grid of birches planted in a long-term environmental study field within the 2000-acre arboretum of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. Dr. Jan Dawe, the Director of the OneTree Alaska program that I've been working with for more than a year now, explained to me that the female catkins which feature prominently in the image are almost certainly a response to stress.

The tree I chose to follow has two main stems, one of which Jan describes as "normal," and the other as a "mutated one." The two stems differ markedly--from the color of their bark and resin glands to the shape and color of their leaves. The darker stem I painted last year (now on view in the OneTree lab on campus) had catkins last summer, but has numerous female catkins--infructescences--this summer. From what Jan has told me, and what I've read, "my" tree may be following a biological Imperative to reproduce itself, in case it doesn't make it.

Several of the paintings in my current exhibition are wondering responses to things I've noticed while working with the scientists at UAF, and as I told a number of people at my exhibition opening last Friday, I'm amazed, and more than a little embarrassed, that I've been looking hard at birches for almost forty years in Alaska and am just now seeing so many new things about them for the first time.

        

Smith Lake Glory  ©Kesler Woodward  2016  acrylic on canvas  10" x 8" and Ridgelight  ©Kesler Woodward  2016  acrylic on canvas   10" x 8"

And though I have more than enough new work ready when each new exhibition approaches, I always want to finish just one or two more pieces before shipping it all to the gallery. I completed Ridgelight and Smith Lake Glory in the weeks just before this show. These little paintings are as much my humbled response to the glorious Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico paintings that Dorli and I tracked down all over the hill country in Tuscany in May of this year as they are celebrations of the beautiful light of Interior Alaska.

Light, Leaves, and Stonework of the Sky

Rosary  ©Kesler Woodward 2016   Acrylic on Canvas   36" x 48"

I have had the pleasure for some time now of working with University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Jan Dawe and Nicole Dunham, as they conduct research and programs around the impact of climate change on the birches and boreal forest of Interior Alaska. They were kind enough not only to give me access to their research plot of young birches in a fenced compound in the middle of the "T-Field" in the 2000-acre Arboretum that adjoins campus, but to even create a little "Artist-in-Residence" desk and work area within their spacious OneTreeAlaska lab in the former Tilly Commons building on campus. There, I've been examining and learning about the hundreds of very young birch saplings that they're studying by controlling their exposure to various kinds of light and manipulating their entry and exit from dormancy in coolers and freezers. 

I pepper them with questions about what I'm seeing in the little saplings in the lab, and over the last month, I've been looking hard at the variety of the shapes and colors of their leaves as the plants enter and exit dormancy, photosynthesize or don't, and grow. As in the past, I have found the stressed, damaged, even dying leaves especially beautiful, and have marveled at how varied they are in shape and character. I began gathering leaves themselves, and images of them, and taking them back to my studio to paint.

I've wanted for some time, for reasons I haven't really understood, to paint an image of leaves arranged in a growing spiral, so for this newest painting, I laid out a perfect spiral on the canvas, starting just above and to the right of center to avoid exactly centering the spiral in the canvas' rectangle, and one by one for more than a month, I've painted individual leaves along that spiral. By the time I filled the space, there were 114 of them.

When I started, all I was really interested in was how the real leaves differ so greatly from any kind of textbook image of a birch leaf. Wrinkled, torn, curling, remarkably diverse in color and shape, I wanted to explore and to show their individuality. But as I worked my way out from the center of the spiral, I found myself thinking of these beautiful little leaves almost as beads on a rosary, and each morning when I went to my studio, I'd begin work by looking at each in turn, starting in the center of the spiral, and even saying my morning prayers as my attention moved from one to the next. I am not Catholic, and have never used a rosary, but as the spiral of leaves grew, I found it meditative and calming to regard them methodically, in turn. One morning, doing the brief reflective reading with which I begin each day in the studio, I was surprised to read about even longer and more elaborate strings of 108 prayer beads called mala beads, used by Hindus, Buddhists, and some Sikhs, and similar beads used as an aid to prayer and contemplation in other religions.

I think that's what I love most about both art and the natural world--the way you wander into the forest of either and find something entirely different than what you were looking for.

Stonework of the Sky  ©Kesler Woodward 2016  acrylic on canvas  24" x 36"

In every painting I've done lately, I've made choices early on that sentenced me to an absurd amount of work in order to bring it all together. I didn't think about, when I started Rosary, how long it would take to fill 12 square feet of canvas with tiny leaves in a compact spiral. In Stonework of the Sky, it was the handling of the sky itself--minutely articulating the gradation from dark to light in the early evening heavens--that kept me busy for many days on end. I hadn't intended to turn the darkening sky into tessellations, almost a mosaic of bits of changing and darkening color from horizon to zenith, but in the course of mining the structure of the branches of the dark trees, I realized I'd need to apply that same kind of excavation in the sky to make it all work together.

Stonework of the Sky is a very different painting from the one I set out to make, and it took three or four times as long as I'd anticipated, but I was excited, when done, with what was for me a new way of structuring a broad field of color, and of saying something about the night sky. The name, suggested to me by my friend Robert Hannon, comes from the title of a book of poetry by late Fairbanks poet Joe Enzweiler. I wasn't familiar with the book when Robert mentioned it, but the name seemed perfect for this image, and when I read some of Enzweiler's poetry and his reference to stonework of the sky, I liked it even better.

Feedback about my paintings from friends often teaches me things about my own work and helps me see and understand what I've done in new ways. My friend Simon Hamm, who with his wife Jenna purchased this painting, brought it even more to life for me when he told me about having met years ago in Maine an elder in the Wolf clan of the Mohawk nation, whose name in Mohawk meant "the color of the evening sky between sunset and night." That's not something we have a word for in our language, but it defines exactly what I was after in this painting.

Incandescence  ©Kesler Woodward 2016  acrylic on canvas 20" x 24"

And one more new painting... When I posted in mid-January an image of and brief commentary on A Small Epiphany, my latest painting of looking through the winter forest into the sun, a collector of my work in New Mexico called within hours to say he wanted it. Another collector, in St. Louis, wrote just after to say she had wanted it, but had waited to measure an area of wall, and was disappointed to find it already sold.  She said if I ever did something similar, but ideally a bit larger, she'd be very interested. I am normally very reluctant to do commissions, but I was at that point very much on fire with this kind of mid-winter light, and was already planning to do at least one more of the sort, so I made Incandescence specifically for her. She sent me a photo of it on her wall a week later. I always love seeing photos of my paintings in their new homes!

A Small Epiphany

A Small Epiphany   ©Kesler Woodward 2016   acrylic on canvas  10" x 20"

Every early January, ironically right around Epiphany, I lose my faith...in spring.

I know in my head that the earth and the trees, which have been covered by a mantle of purest white since late September, will one day be green again, but in early January I look out at the landscape and that prospect never seems quite real. I honestly don't miss the light in winter, as the sunlight we do have at this time of year is so unique and so beautiful. But I think I must always be craving color in January, as I invariably find myself in the studio making paintings filled with the brightest hues I use all year.  

This January, as so often, my response to color-craving takes two main forms. The first is a celebration of the brilliant and utterly unique, peach-colored light cast by the wan winter sun as it struggles above the horizon, almost due south, for a few hours each midday. A Small Epiphany is just such a celebration--a view of the forest I love riven by that light, just after daybreak. In it, from almost the highest point on the trail that we run at least three times a week, year-round, from our back door, I'm looking directly into the sun, and I'm awed by the transfiguration of the forest it provides.

Dreaming of Denali from Nugget Pond   ©Kesler Woodward 2016   acrylic on canvas   10" x 20"

The other way I respond to color-craving is to remember summer, and to dream of it. Dreaming of Denali from Nugget Pond is a view I go to in my mind's-eye often in January--a vision of "The Mountain" as its peak looms above an intervening ridge from the shore of Nugget Pond at Camp Denali, one of my favorite places on earth. I've painted this view often, almost always with the pond itself in the foreground, but this week I'm focused, in my dreams, on the tops of the dark spruces that surround that tiny pond, the brilliant August hillside that fills the horizon, and the apparition of the giant massif rising implausibly above it.

Leaves, A Young Birch, and...Tiles?

Dancing into the Dark  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  48" x 60"

I always seem to be at least a season behind in terms of what I'm painting. It was 27º below zero last night in Fairbanks, two weeks before the winter solstice, and I'm still painting fall leaves. I'm not wishing it were still September. I love this time of year, with its crystalline air and peach-colored light. But in my studio, I'm clearly still ruminating on the meaning of the bright fall leaves I so admired three months ago.

I've been thinking a lot about the fact that the leaves are most beautiful and brilliant as they are about to fall and crumble into dust. That and other, related things were much on my mind as I visited nearly daily this September a fascinating field of young birches in a research plot within the 2000-acre University of Alaska Fairbanks campus arboretum. There, my friend Dr. Jan Dawe, a research professor at UAF, is conducting in cooperation with other UAF researchers and classes from K-12 Fairbanks schools a long-term study on the effects of Fairbanks' lengthening growing season on growth characteristics of Alaska birches. Jan has repeatedly invited me to spend time in the research plot, to help characterize the visual changes in the young birch saplings as they grow and to respond to what I'm seeing there in my work.

This fall I took up that offer in earnest. As the leaves changed color in preparation for the coming winter, I began looking much harder at individual parts of the young birches than I ever have before. I peppered Jan with questions about what I was seeing throughout the plot, but I also "adopted," as a focus of my looking, a particular sapling which I'll visit as often as I can throughout the coming year and beyond. The large canvas Dancing into the Dark, which I've worked on for nearly a month, is my first painterly response to those visits. It's not only a collection of observations about parts of that tree and its falling leaves, but as so often in my work, a personal rumination on life, growth, beauty, strength, vulnerability, and change.

Droplets  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  oil on canvas 20" x 16"

More fall leaves. I'm almost the antithesis of a plein-air painter. It takes a long time for what I see to settle into my consciousness deeply enough to decide I have something personal to say about it--something more than, "Isn't this pretty?" I relate strongly, in this respect, to the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's famous comment, "I paint not what I see, but what I saw." 

This is actually a leaf that I saw three years ago, alongside the rough, slow road that leads from Chitina to McCarthy. It had rained the night before, but the fall morning Dorli and I drove the road was cold, crisp, and clear, and everything was bright--from the fallen autumn leaves to the rocks on which they fell.

I knew then that this leaf, and the raindrops on it, were beautiful, but I didn't know until very recently what I wanted to say about it. It took three years of living before I had a real inkling of what that image meant to me.

Brilliant  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  16" x 20" 

This fall, as Dorli and I ran the trails through the forest and along the ridgetops near our home, equally brilliant leaves from aspens and birches brightened our path. When I brought some of those leaves back to the studio to paint, I found their torn places, their mottled skins, and their final gasps of glory more poignant and more beautiful than ever before. 

And finally, for this time, something entirely different...a new kind of collaboration... I have been talking for some time with my friend Nancy Hausle-Johnson, an extraordinary maker of artwork in ceramic tiles, about the possibility of our collaborating on a public art project. I have admired her work for years, and when I raised the possibility of having her make a work in tile based on one of my images, to propose for a public art commission, she was enthusiastic about the prospect.

We decided to do a couple of test pieces together, and the results were even more rewarding than either of us had imagined. Nancy made one larger and one smaller tile based on existing images of mine--not reproducing them, but interpreting them in her own medium. The tiles she produced are one-of-a-kind interpretations, not in any way reproductions.

We'd thought that we might sell these test pieces, if they turned out well. It's a sign of how delighted we were by what she produced that I purchased the larger one from her to keep, and she purchased the smaller one from me to keep as well.  We are excited to find a public art competition to which we can apply, in the hope that we can make a really large-scale work of this sort. Wish us luck!

     

 

Our Boreal Forest

Boreal Brethren  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  48" x 24" 

Even as I was working toward what turned out to be a very successful solo exhibition at Well Street Gallery in Fairbanks last month, I was pleased to have been invited to participate in an important group exhibition in Fairbanks that opens in August, titled "Our Boreal Forest." The exhibit, at the Bear Gallery in the Civic Center in Fairbanks, will include works by a number of accomplished artists and writers, reflecting on the great Northern forest that encircles the globe. I will be giving a lecture in conjunction with the exhibit on August 25 at 7 p.m.  in the gallery, in which I'll talk about the way artists from Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and the Russian North have depicted this extraordinary ecosystem--the world's largest land-based biome and one that represents almost 30% of the earth's forest cover.

My two paintings in the show focus on two of the major trees in the Boreal Forest--birches and aspens. Nearly everyone who knows my work thinks of me as a painter not just of the boreal forest, but specifically of birch trees. Almost no one notices that I paint almost as many aspens as birches. Both these paintings are about the fact that these two similar-looking, but actually quite different and unrelated, trees are nevertheless boreal brethren, and that aspens are beautiful, too.

Beautiful Aspens  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  36" x 24"

New Works - New Exhibition

I have been hard at work, and many of the fruits of my recent labors go on view tonight, when my latest exhibition opens at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks. Only one of the 19 paintings in the exhibition is more than a year old, and most were completed in the first six months of this year.  I have held off on posting images of and commentary on the latest works, so they would all be available for the show, but I've just put all the info on them into my Available Works Album which you can click on at the upper right of this page at any time, and I'll make a few comments on several of them here. 

   

Kyrie ©Kesler Woodward 2015 acrylic on canvas 30" x 40"

I think the most difficult challenge every artist faces, sooner or later, is to avoid making copies, and eventually parodies, of his or her own work. So though I make images of birches and the boreal forest again and again, I'm always trying to find new ways to paint them, and new things to say about them. In Kyrie and Tree of Mystery, among the paintings in this exhibit especially, I was reaching for a somewhat less literal, almost mystical quality. The looser handling of the glazes and the contrasting hues in Kyrie, I hope, contribute to my effort to capture a little of the magic of budding birch leaves in the North, straining to burst free in the burgeoning days of the first week of May. Those leaf buds appear in many of my paintings of birches, and they are always a symbol of hope, light, and new life, but I've never focused on them so directly as in this new, large canvas.

         

North Window, Merlin Birch, Birch and Aspen  ©Kesler Woodward 2015   acrylic on canvas  20" x 10" each

When I've just finished a big painting like Chant or Branches Bare, a canvas that takes many weeks to complete, I often want to paint something small--something that will only require days. It's nice, at such times, to be able to see an end in sight when I begin. North Window, Merlin Birch, and Birch and Aspen, each just 20"  tall and 10" wide, are little paeans of praise to favorite trees in my own yard, and the view out my north studio window.  Birch and Aspen is a frank acknowledgment of something that few followers of my work notice, or at least remark upon--that there are almost as many aspens as birches in the scenes I paint.

 

Springfall: Listening  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

And finally, for this post, another different kind of image in the current exhibition. Springfall: Listening is the latest in the ongoing series of paintings I'm doing in response to poems by my friend Peggy Shumaker. The yearlong "conversation" between a poet and a painter that we're engaged in is ongoing, and I've mentioned it here before and will have more to say about it in future posts, but to eavesdrop on the full conversation, you'll have to attend my next exhibition, in Anchorage in September at the Alaska Humanities Forum, which will feature all the poems and the paintings. The series continues to twist and turn in ways that surprise each of us, and all I'll say for now about "Listening Among Birches," Peggy's poem to which this painting most immediately responds, is that it begins with these lines:

Those of us still rooted to this earth

lie back on the sponge of other lives,

look up through thirteen layers of breath.

That's a frank teaser, so I'll hope you'll stay tuned, and that you may be able to attend the exhibition at the Alaska Humanities Forum, which will open on the second Friday in September.

And I hope  in the meantime, many of you who read this will be able to see my current exhibition at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks, which will be up throughout the month of July. Thanks so much to David Mollett and his staff for the great job they do at Well Street of supporting art and artists from Fairbanks and throughout Alaska.

Below are images of just a few more of the works in the current exhibition. As always, you can click on them to see larger images, or find all the information about them in my Available Works Album.

          

Plains of Murie, Tree of Mystery, Spring Leads Us On  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas   16" x 20" each

    

Deep Woods Birch and Summer Birch  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  10" x 8" each

The Pleasures of Spring

Birches Bare  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas   48" x 60"

I worked on the large canvas Birches Bare for more than a month. Like many of my recent images, it's part of an ongoing "conversation" between my paintings and a series of poems by my friend, former Alaska Poet Laureate Peggy Shumaker.  She writes a poem, and I make a painting in response to it. She writes a poem in reply to that painting, and I paint in answer to it. Each painting or poem is a response to the last. The exhibition we'll have together at the Alaska Humanities Forum in Anchorage in September will afford an opportunity for visitors to eavesdrop on that yearlong conversation.

I am not thinking so much about making a consistent body of work for this show as immersing myself in the conversation. I can only paint what I paint, and the way I paint, but what I'm trying to do is immerse myself in each of Peggy's poems as they arrive. I read the new arrival many times, over weeks, and then one day, I go to work in my studio in response to it. I never know, when I begin, what that response will be, and my surprise at what emerges is one of the chief pleasures of this collaboration.

Birch trunks stand in for people in my work, and Birches Bare--like the poem to which it replies--is a drama. Dark, aggressive branches jut from trunks bright with life but scarred by living. Out of those dark limbs, tiny spring leaves of renewed life bud, slowly swell, and prepare to unfurl, just as they are doing this week outside my studio window.

 

 
Panoply   ©Kesler Woodward 2015   acrylic on canvas   36" x 48"

I started painting Panoply almost five years ago. Struck by a particularly gorgeous birch I saw one day while running in the forest, I decided to compose on canvas, in a vertical stripe, a little song of praise to its exceptional beauty. I put the painting away and tried to forget about it until many months later, when I found myself staring at another trunk on a different trail. I added a laud to the new trunk in a new, slimmer stripe, and I put the painting away again. For nearly five years I've put it away and brought it out, adding canticles each time a new birch pelt struck me with wonder unexpectedly. 

Just this month I filled the last slot on the canvas. I like that it's a kind of five-year chronicle of being surprised by delight.

 

Morning ©Kesler Woodward   2015 acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Two small paintings I have completed since my last post represent two sides of the way I'm affected by winter. 

Morning is the view across our front yard as we complete the climb home on the wooded trail behind our house, at the end of our winter runs. The sun rises late, barely east of due south, and it backlights the trees, casting shadows our way as we crest the ridge on which we live. I often stand in the driveway for a minute or more, not so much catching my breath as drinking in those rays.

This kind of light is one of the reasons we not only plan to stay in Fairbanks, but have no interest in "snowbirding"--spending months of each winter in a warmer clime. We'd so miss this ethereal, explicitly seasonal light. 

 

Dreaming in March  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

Dreaming in March represents another aspect of winter--especially late winter--for me. Though I'm less conscious of it than I am of winter's beauty, by early spring I think every year I'm starved for color.

By March, the Northern world has been blindingly, sublimely white for six months or more, and though it's perhaps my favorite time of year, I think some part of me longs for other brilliant hues. Sooner or later, perenially, I find myself dreaming of, and painting, landscapes filled with the rich chromas of the nearly forgotten fall.

 

2015 - Family, Home, and Collaboration

Family  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  36" x 48" (image)

We began the new year by visiting family. My son Eli, his partner Becca, and my granddaughter Sage live in Snohomish, Washington, and Dorli and I flew to visit them early on the morning of New Year's Day. When we came home, the first painting I did in the studio was this one. As I've explained here before, I very seldom know what my paintings are about until they're done. I go to my studio and paint what I feel ready to paint, and it's only when I'm done that I sit back, look at it, and ask, "Now what was that about?" 

Painting birches is not a default for me. I know by now that when I paint a new "birch portrait," with a group of highly individual birch trunks, it's because I'm pondering something--that the trees, as always in my work, stand in for people, and that through them I'm processing thoughts and feelings. I didn't realize, when I was working on it, that I was painting a portrait of a strong young family like my son's, but when I'd finished, I could see it. Close but individual, strong but vulnerable, beautiful...

Horizon Holds On: Denali from Taiga ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  30" x 40" (image)

Like family, "place"--where I am home--is important to me, so it's not surprising that it's a constant focus of my work. Nearly every day, Dorli and I take a brief afternoon break to walk our dog together, and most days we make the short stroll with her down to an overlook in our subdivision, Taiga Woodlands, that affords a panoramic view of the city of Fairbanks in the foreground and a huge swath of the Alaska Range in the background, including Denali--Mt. McKinley.

It's more than 120 miles, by line-of-sight, from our hillside in Fairbanks to the mountain itself, but especially on the many crisp, clear days of winter, Denali looms above the Chena Ridge hillside on the southwest horizon. Like the auroras at night, which we can see in Fairbanks on average 120 nights a year, the sight of Denali at sunset is something we never tire of admiring.

Vespertine  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  20" x 16" (image)

I visited Denali for two decades before I ever painted it, waiting until I felt I had something personal to say about it in my work. By now, however, I've painted it from as close as six miles from its summit and as far away as Fairbanks, in all seasons, times of day, and weathers, for another two decades. I've painted it enough that I often wonder whether it's possible to paint it again personally, freshly, from a differently evocative perspective. Just this month I've realized that this view--the giant mountain tiny on the horizon, only visible at all because it stands so tall--is yet another way to pay homage to its grandeur.

 

Three Blues: Mt. Dickey from the Sheldon Hut  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  oil on paper  28" x 40" (image)

I'm excited, too, to be collaborating once again with Peggy Shumaker, our dear friend and a former Alaska Poet Laureate, on a new body of work that will be a "conversation" between her poems and my paintings. I was invited last fall by the Alaska Humanities Forum to have an exhibition of my work in the gallery at their Anchorage offices, and I asked Peggy if she'd like to collaborate with me on this venture. I asked her to write a poem, to which I'd respond with a painting, to which she'd respond with a poem, which I'd reply to with another painting, and so on... 

I don't like to talk too much about works in progress, even a year-long, many-part work in progress like this new collaboration, so I won't share now the wonderful poem of Peggy's that inspired Three Blues: Mt. Dickey from the Sheldon Hut. This conversation between poet and painter will have many twists and turns in the coming months, and one of the most exciting things about it for me is that I don't know what it will look like when complete.  All I'm comfortable telling you now is that the "Three Blues" part of this painting's title is the title of Peggy's initiating poem,  and that a passage in her poem "Geology of Wonder," written in response to this painting, helped open my eyes to a way to paint Denali from my home in Taiga Woodlands. 

This is the way, I hope and believe, our collaboration will unfold. Each of us will make work not unlike that which we normally make, but our works' conversation will help each of us get outside ourselves enough to see new possibilities, explore new sensibilities, and see ourselves and our work in new ways.

Birches, Winter Light, and...LEGOs?

      

       
Taiga Woodlands Birch Portraits ©Kesler Woodward 2014  Oil on Canvas 16" x 20" each

It's been much too long since my last post, but as always, I've been hard at work in the studio. In the past couple of months I've completed several modest-sized birch portraits, a larger image of winter light in the treetops, and a much larger, commissioned painting of midwinter sun bursting through the boreal forest.

The three 16" x 20" oil-on-canvas birch portraits above are paeans to just a few of the beautiful trees in my own yard and neighborhood--Taiga Woodlands--high in the hills above Fairbanks. I like going back and forth between smaller, more intimate canvases and paintings large enough to "step into." I also like alternating between the juicy, sensual richness of thick oil paint and the glowing, diaphanous transparency of acrylic washes and glazes.  Beyond my delight in working with each in its turn, different kinds of images seem themselves to call for differing mediums and sizes. 

Bright Day  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 24"

We met a neighbor on the trail as we were nearing home on our every-other-day run yesterday, and when he exclaimed at what a beautiful day it was, I said to him, "You know, the quality of light this time of year is why Dorli and I don't expect to ever be 'snowbirds' like so many of our friends. How could we miss out on this extraordinary light?" Bright Day is about that delight.

Radiance  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

I just completed Radiance last week--a large canvas commissioned by Mat-Su Services for Children and Adults (MSSCA) in Wasilla, Alaska. It will be unveiled in the lobby of a new building housing this extraordinary social service agency when it celebrates its 30th anniversary this spring.  MSSCA provides a wide range of services for Mat-Su residents with developmental disabilities, families with children experiencing developmental delays or disabilities, and parents with questions about child safety and development. I am honored to have my work associated with the agency and will be delighted to have Radiance hanging in their beautiful space.

The selection committee for this commission expressed interest in several of the images I submitted for their consideration, but they were especially excited by several examples I provided of what I think of as my "epiphany" paintings--the bright, near-horizon sun of midwinter bursting not only out of the short, dark days, but through the tangle of the boreal forest. That light is not only a marvel to me, but an ongoing metaphor for so much of life here in the North.

And finally, just for fun, yes...LEGO bricks!  The Anchorage Museum recently organized "Brick by Brick", an amazing exhibition exploring "the compelling pull and creative potential of building toys, including LEGO toys and bricks." New York artist Nathan Sawaya's large-scale LEGO brick sculptures and British photographer Mike Stimpson's photographs recreating scenes from history and popular culture using LEGO figurines are the featured items in the show, but it includes work by other artists as well, and interactive stations for museum visitors to build with LEGO bricks and use Chrome and Minecraft computer technologies to design and create.

The architectural firm Bettisworth North  was invited to produce a piece for the community gallery portion of the exhibition, and they asked me in late September if they could try reproducing my 2013 painting Radiant in LEGO bricks. I was thrilled at the idea. I loved seeing images of the LEGO version of this large, 40" x 60" painting (the original resides in the waiting area of the Audiology Suite at Fairbanks Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic) develop through in-progress photos sent by Leah Bolz, the firm's Director of Marketing and Business Development. Leah, Rebecca Rorabaugh, and Clark Yerrington of the firm brought it to life. Their LEGO version of Radiant was only on view for the opening and first two weeks of the exhibition, as the community gallery portion of the show is changing every two weeks, but the exhibition continues through mid-January.

Emmanuel Daskalos of Bettisworth North with the firm's LEGO rendition of my painting Radiant, at the Anchorage Museum's opening reception for "Brick by Brick"