Kesler Woodward

Looking Toward Winter

Winter Dawn  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

It's only early fall here in interior Alaska, but in the studio I've been at work on an image of winter. Even though I always enjoy the season at hand, I often find myself making paintings instead of the season I anticipate. This week's frosts were harbingers of the coming winter, but I'd already completed my latest paean to the ethereal light of December. It's hard to believe that I was just celebrating, less than three months ago, signs of spring.

Opening reception at Blue.Hollomon Gallery, July 3, 2014.  Gina Brown photo.

Our fleeting summer was full of both inspirations and meaningful experiences. Days spent in the Museé D'Orsay in Paris in May and the Art Institute of Chicago in August were inspiring, but even more humbling. Dorli and I hiked in the mountains of the Kenai Peninsula in late June, ran in the Chugach Range above Anchorage in early July, and explored both the high country tundra and the kettle ponds of Denali National Park in late August.

One of the greatest pleasures of the summer was my show at Blue.Hollomon Gallery in Anchorage. It was wonderful for me that so many old friends came out for my first solo exhibition in Anchorage in several years, and Georgia Blue, Gina Hollomon, Pat Wolf, and the staff of the gallery not only installed the paintings beautifully, but over the course of the month helped most of them find their way to good new homes. It is a privilege to have my work represented in Anchorage by this extraordinary gallery, and to work with people so committed to Alaskan art and artists.

  

Thanks to my friend Gina Brown for taking great photos at the opening, including the one above of Dorli and me. And you can see a quick iPhone video of the exhibition made by my friend Davis Peterson just a few days later here.

Birch Biography  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  75" x 9" Oil on canvas Six canvases, each 12" x 9"

My work was only a small part of another exhibition this summer--an amazing show at the Civic Center Gallery in Fairbanks that explored the forms, techniques, and materials of contemporary book making as practiced by Alaskan artists. Books as Art: structure/image/text was organized by the Northwoods Book Arts Guild of Fairbanks and was the first exhibition in Alaska dedicated to exploring the art of the book and including a wide spectrum of approaches to book making--from traditional binding techniques to innovative book structure, collaborative book projects, and book objects.

My friend Margo Klass, a remarkable artist, founder of the Northwoods Book Arts Guild, and one of the primary organizers of the show, urged me to enter a work in the exhibition and assured me that the term "book" would be interpreted widely.  Birch Biography, six stacked 12" x 9" oil on canvas panels, was my response, a visual "biography" of a single birch trunk outside my studio window, from ground to crown. 

Mine was far from the least traditional "book" in the show, and I was honored to be included in this landmark exhibition.

It has been a busy summer in the studio. I've completed and delivered a couple of major private commissions in addition to the works featured here, and I've started work on two new projects--a painting for an intriguing invitational exhibition being organized by Bunnell Street Gallery in Homer, Alaska and a commission for the Services and Operations Center of Mat Su Services for Children and Adults, an agency in Alaska's Matanuska-Susitna Valley. I've loved the summer and am looking forward to the shorter, darker, but just-as-beautiful days of winter. 

 

 

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.

Birchbark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never Night

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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