Kesler Woodward

Into the Night, Into the Woods

Falling  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

It's just a few days after the Autumnal Equinox, and here in Interior Alaska we are rapidly losing daylight, six or seven minutes each day, heading toward winter. I love the fall--the leaves of the boreal forest turning brilliant yellow before filling the air and fluttering to the ground like big, golden snowflakes, just a week or two later. I love the bright red berries and the rich carpet of multicolored flora on the forest floor. I love that night returns, and with it the aurora and the stars.

The sweep of the seasons here is dramatic, and never more so than in the fall. It's always a poignant, reflective time of year for me. I like that the seasons are so inexorable, and I love the snow and the cold and the brilliant white of winter, with its subtler, almost unearthly hues. But it always strikes me as ironic that the leaves are never so brilliant as in the moments before they die, darken, and turn to dust. I love those brilliant leaves, like those of the fireweed in this big new painting, gloriously brightening before falling into the winter night.

I've spent my summer not just painting, but doing something far outside my comfort zone as well--being filmed by KUAC-TV, our local public television station, for an 8-part television series. Into the Woods, with Kes Woodward is the brainchild of KUAC-TV producer Makenzie (Mak) Landry, who with her crew made a brief mini-documentary about me in 2017, when the station used one of my paintings for its annual fundraising poster. Following that effort, Mak almost immediately began to suggest to me ideas for a larger, more ambitious series about art, based on things I'd said about what it takes to be an artist. This spring, we settled on exploring my insistence that being an artist has nothing to do with talent, but everything to do with passion, commitment, hard work, and the courage to undertake the "hero's journey" of confronting, over and over, the daunting challenge of each new blank canvas. 

We found three diverse individuals who made the mistake of telling me that they admired artists, and thought making art was an attractive idea, but had "no talent," and we invited them to undertake that hero's journey this summer--to be artists, and to make art. All three accepted eagerly. Mak and her crew filmed my taking them into my studio, and into the literal and metaphorical woods, and for eight weeks they made art, culminating in a resoundingly successful First Friday exhibition of their work this month in downtown Fairbanks. Into the Woods is the chronicle of that adventure, which I hope and believe is one on which they will continue. I also hope that it poses for viewers important questions and ideas about making art and being an artist.

The series, which Mak has brilliantly produced, debuted last Saturday, and it will continue on KUAC-TV for the next 7 weeks. It is not stream-able, and unless it is picked up by Alaska Public Media or some other outlet, it will only be viewable on broadcast public television in Fairbanks and Interior Alaska, but if you live here and can see the broadcast, I hope you will check it out.

You can read more about the program in a recent Fairbanks Daily Newsminer article  or in this news release from KUAC. Below are images from the announcement of the show at this month's First Friday exhibition of work by the three artists.

 

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. 

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.

A Brief Passion

Epiphany  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas   30" x 40"

I never know what I'm going to paint until I'm in the studio painting it, and the title almost invariably comes after, when I sit and look at the finished canvas and ask myself, "Now what was that about?" So it's with some interest that I find myself, in the new year, still making paintings about the passionate light of the midwinter dawn.

I started working on Epiphany in early December, before my family came to visit for two weeks over Christmas, and then Dorli and I spent the first weeks of the new year at the other end of the world, hiking in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. On our return, the light was subtly different from when we left, and I spent another week finishing it in the studio, changing the shapes of the shadows and the hues in the beams of dawn.

I call all these paintings with the winter sun blasting through the forest my "epiphany" paintings, as they reference a time right around Epiphany (January 6), and they are about the way the winter sun, which barely creeps above the horizon at this time of year in the North, breaks so brightly into the dark world. Returning from Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, at the end of the third week in January, we were happy to be home to this glorious light.

A Brief Passion  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

The sun is even bigger, almost overwhelming the forest, in the much smaller painting A Brief Passion. As I worked on this little canvas, the bright spot of light with which I began grew and grew, until it threatened to obliterate the woods themselves.

I think it's about the passionate intensity with which the sun, in the midst of its brief acquaintance with the horizon, bursts on a winter morning into and through the forest. This little canvas might capture that fleeting magic more clearly than any other painting I've done so far. 

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)

 

 

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.

Genesis

Genesis  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

For more than half a century when I've walked in the woods, I've rearranged random landscape elements into patterns. Long before I made my first real painting, or ever gave art a second thought, I regularly picked up rocks and leaves and sorted them by color, leaving circles or other patterns on the forest floor. I didn't think of it as making art.  I just felt a need to impose little bits of order on the chaos.

Forty years ago, my MFA thesis exhibition included on the floor of the gallery large arrangements of rocks with quartz dikes in them, the bright white lines in the different-sized rocks carefully touching edges to form continuous circles and squares.  The paintings and prints and drawings in that exhibition reflected on that impulse to impose order where none is apparent. There was a 5' x 7' painting of a starry night sky in which I carefully plotted the positions and relative brightness of hundreds of stars as they appear in the real night, on which I imposed constellations that the ancients "found" in that random arrangement of stars, and new ones I made up.

I continued for years after to make patterns on the forest floor, whenever and wherever I went, still not really thinking of it as art, but finding it deeply satisfying. When the British artist Andy Goldsworthy came to worldwide prominence some years later, doing everything I'd done and far more, far better, and much more elaborately, and photographing the results beautifully, I loved his work, but seeing it in books and magazines everywhere spoiled my enjoyment of making such arrangements myself, and I quit doing it altogether for a long time.

[23 years ago I made this 4 1/2'  x 6 1/2' oil painting, now in the collection of the Anchorage Museum, of an arrangement of lichen-covered rocks that I assembled and left on the shore of Hudson Bay during a long kayak trip in the Canadian Arctic. It's called A Circle of Rocks in the Arctic.]

Every few years, though, I give in to the impulse, because I can't help myself. One recent fall, I noticed a number of atypically bright red aspen leaves on the trail, randomly scattered throughout the yellow, brown, gray, and still-green fallen foliage. Those red leaves simply needed, in my mind, to be gathered into a solid circle. 

I love to paint leaves almost as much as I love painting trees, so when I began thinking again, just over a month ago, about my need to impose order, I started making Genesis, another big painting of such an arrangement, knowing it would take me a very long time and drive me crazy. It did, and it did...but it was worth it, in the end, to see my memory of the little circle of red leaves I'd left in the woods come to life, "writ large," on a ridiculously complicated canvas.

I really do believe the impulse to find patterns and impose order is one of our most basic human traits, and so I think it's no wonder we imagine God's having felt the same need, in the beginning, giving into it, and spending seven days creating order out of chaos.

A Pillar of Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

In all of my work, I try to capture memories of moments...to make images that reflect not so much on what places look like, but how it felt for me to be in them, at particular moments in time.

One afternoon this winter, Dorli and I were walking our dog Sigi along the ridge in our neighborhood that overlooks the Alaska Range, and thanks to the ice crystals and strange optics of our subarctic atmosphere, there was the most amazing pillar of light beneath the low sun. The sun seemed to be balanced atop it, and the column of light was mostly obscured by the forest, but broke through in a few small openings. It was fleeting, magical, and in this painting, done a couple of months later, I tried to capture a little of what it felt like to be at that very particular place, time, temperature, and light. 

A Poster Signing, a Video, and Some New Small Paintings

Several months ago, I was at work in my studio when I received a call from Gretchen Gordon, Assistant General Manager and Director of Development and Outreach for our extraordinary local public broadcasting station, KUAC, asking if they could use an image of one of my paintings for their 2017 poster.  I was thrilled at the prospect--honored to have one of my artworks associated with the essential role KUAC plays in our community.

I told Gretchen they should go to my website and select any image they wanted. They chose Daybreak, a painting I completed last November. It is a view of the winter sun, low on the horizon, blasting through the trees in our front yard like an epiphany. It is a scene at which I marvel each time Dorli and I return from our every-other-morning runs on the trails out our back door in the boreal forest, and I almost invariably stand for a few moments and drink in that sunlight, before re-entering our home.

This past Saturday I signed posters steadily, for four hours, for a long line of supporters of KUAC who were willing to donate $50 each to the station for the great work they do. Many, perhaps most, of those individuals and families had contributed to KUAC already this year, but they were willing to give even more in order to receive a poster and support the work of KUAC.

The owner of the painting, who luckily lives in Fairbanks, allowed us to borrow the painting itself for display at the event. I saw scores of old friends and made new ones, and it was an utter delight to be able to contribute in a small way to KUAC--one of the key organizations that make life in Fairbanks and Interior Alaska so rich and full.

All photos of the event are courtesy of KUAC TV.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As part of their outstanding promotion of the poster and signing event, KUAC produced a terrific, short video about me and my work. The station's television producer Mak Landry and her staff members Brian and Heather spent a half day in my studio--lighting the space and asking me questions, conversationally and more formally, and from those several hours' work they distilled this delightful 4-minute profile:

Daybreak: Kes Woodward

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well Street Art Gallery, which generously hosted the signing event, displayed in addition to the painting on the poster three small paintings I've completed in the last month, since Dorli and I returned from a four-week trip to Australia.

Like Daybreak, these small paintings celebrate the magical light of our Northern winter and the returning light of spring. 

 

 

Promise  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  8" x 8" (image) 

Solstice  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  10" x 20" (image)

Spring in the North  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  20" x 10" (image)

 

New Year, New Work

Colors of Winter  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas   30" x 40"

Life goes on very much as normal in Fairbanks when it's 50º below zero. On a day last week when the most accurate bank temperature sign in town read -52º F (this picture was on the front page of the local newspaper), and the Weather Service recorded an official -51º F at the airport, I drove downtown through dense ice fog to read to the kindergartners at Denali Elementary, just as I have every Wednesday morning I've been in town for the last 24 years. A few of the kindergartners were a little late arriving, but nearly all showed up, the buses were on time, and classes, business, and most other activities in town went on as usual.  

I did a big grocery shop, hoping the cold would cut down on customers and checkout lines at the Fred Meyer (it did, a bit), took Dorli to the University to teach her classes, and was glad to be able to come home, park my car in our heated garage, and commute the few steps to my studio to go to work.

I painted 10 hours that day, late into the evening, and I was grateful. I was grateful not to have running water in the studio, so I didn't have to worry about its freezing-up. I was grateful for my little wall-mounted Home Comfort propane heater that uses no electricity, has run silently and constantly for almost four years without a hiccup, and keeps my tightly insulated studio toasty at any temperature. And I was grateful, as I am every day, to Alaska's Rasmuson Foundation, whose significant Individual Artist support made building the studio easier and better than it would have been without the support, several years ago.

In the studio that day, and for most of the week before and the week since, I worked hard on Colors of Winter. I almost never do "studies" for larger paintings, but this one grew directly out of a little watercolor birthday card (the image at left) that I made Dorli in November. The two feet of snow that fell at our house between Christmas and the end of the first week in January, and more that has fallen since, surely prompted the desire to do a larger painting based on that little "study."

I love our woods, lit by the low-but-brilliant winter sun, and I love running with Dorli on the new racing snowshoes that she got us for Christmas, on winding trails that are pristine and unbroken when we head out on them at first light. Few things in this life make me happier than seeing snow fall as we run through the winter forest. That simple pleasure is all this first painting of the new year is about. 

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.