Kesler Woodward

All the Light in the Boreal Forest

All the Light in the Boreal Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

It's light late into the evening already, this spring, and the boreal forest glows in that late light. The tops of the trees catch the last of the sun's rays as the forest floor begins to darken. The treetops suddenly, briefly blaze and then quietly begin to soften and subside into the not-quite-dark of the spring night.

Here, in that late light, are some of the trees I love---the most ubiquitous trees of the Interior Alaska forest--white spruce, aspen, and birch.

Whispering Tree  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  40" x 16"

For forty-five years I have painted birches more than any other kind of tree, and more often than any other subject. In 2005, Red Hen Press of Los Angeles published Blaze - a beautiful 160-page volume featuring  thirty years of my paintings of birches, juxtaposed with poems by my friend, Alaska Poet Laureate Peggy Shumaker.

I made paintings in response to Peggy's poems, she made poems in response to my paintings, and we selected other, wholly independent images and poems from past decades that we felt could speak to one another. Even today when I open that volume, seeing my work in conversation with her poems makes me see my own paintings in new ways.

Very few people, even those who know my work well, notice that I paint aspens almost as often birches.

Whispering Tree is a tall aspen whose crown I admire almost daily in different lights as I make the short, 15-stride walk between our back door and my studio.

The Celts and other ancient peoples called the aspen the "whispering tree," as its leaves tremble in even the slightest breeze. They told tales of how the fluttering leaves helped the wind speak to the ancestors, make connections between this world and the next, and bring gifts of inspiration and poetry.

Every tree of the boreal forest abounds with myth and mystery in the old stories. Every year I learn more of those stories, and though I don't illustrate them, I can't help but think some of those tales creep into every painting I make. 

         

Three April Drawings - Studio Window, Lodgepoles, and Trail to the Forest - Pen and ink on Rives BFK paper. 13" x 9" each. Unframed.

I don't draw often. A note to myself on the studio wall says, "Draw More!" but I very seldom make time to do it. As soon as I finish one painting, I'm eager to begin the next. But a few weeks ago, I decided I just wanted to take a break and draw for a few days, and I so enjoyed simply responding with pen on good paper to the views from my studio windows and to some of the less-familiar trees I'm getting to know in the "Exotic Tree Plantation" that's part of the University of Alaska arboretum.

Studio Window is, as the title suggests, the view from the big north window of my studio, of just a few aspens on the steep slope below, casting sharp shadows on the still-pristine snow, still 3-feet deep in early April. 

Lodgepoles was a fun drawing because only someone really into trees and looking very hard would notice, from this vantage point, that they are lodgepole pines planted in an experimental plot, and not the white spruces that are everywhere here.

And Trail to the Forest, drawn with a finer-tipped pen, is a view of a birch and an aspen from the west window in my studio, at the very beginning of the endless trails that we and several of our friends run on three times every week, all year-round.  

It's been sunny every day here for a month. The sap is rising in the birches, and I'm tapping a few of them to make syrup. Happy spring!

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!

Trees and Twilight

In the Boreal Garden  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on canvas  48" x 60"

I have continued this autumn to visit the Exotic Tree Plantation in the University of Alaska Arboretum, watching the trees that were planted there from around the circumpolar north respond to the change of seasons.

Two species of birches from Finland--downy birches and silver birches--continue to thrive there, several decades after planting. Two species of Siberian larches, Siberian pines, and Siberian firs are all doing well, and a couple of dwarf stone pines from eastern Siberia have survived. Spruces from Norway, Canada, and Alaska grow not far apart. Lodgepole pines from 29 sources in northern Canada grow alongside Jack pines from the Canadian Northwest Territories and Scotch pines from Finland. All three green alders transplanted in 1967 continue to grow, and one of several triploid (extra chromosome) aspens grown from tissue cultures in a lab in Wisconsin has survived, and is spreading by root cloning.

This little two-acre plot is a microcosm of wonder for a lover of the boreal forest like me. I see new things each time I visit, and I bring others in with me who open my eyes to more. I love seeing the mists rise in the trees at dusk and the needles of the larches go golden and drop for the winter, and I marvel at the way spruces and pines are alike and not alike, as are birches and aspen.

A Gentle Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on canvas  24" x 20"

And I continue, for now, to be bewitched by twilight. I'm interested in the way these images of dawn and dusk seem to suggest different moods to different viewers--from transformation to uncertainty, from foreboding to hope and reassurance. I think viewers find in them what they bring to them, what they hope or need to find or what they worry they might. I am as surprised when the light comes up gentle and kindly as I am when it broods, and as genuinely puzzled myself by each.

Ancient Voices  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 24"

Arboretum

Arboretum  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 48"

40 years ago, I visited for the first time a fascinating 2-acre compound of exotic (non-native) trees in the middle of the 2000-acre arboretum that is part of the University of Alaska campus. The saplings I saw there were grown from seeds of trees around the circumpolar north, planted by forestry scientists at the university to study how other northern trees might thrive, or not, in this environment. I was fascinated by what the scientists who gave the tour had to say about the early results of the experiment. 

Those studies ended decades ago, and now those trees--enclosed early on by a tall, chain-link fence to protect the saplings from moose and hares--have become fully grown and are only distinguishable on close observation from the native forest that surrounds them. I've run and skied on trails right beside the compound for years and have longed to get back in there to see how they are doing and study them more closely. Finally, just this past summer I was able to get access to the plot. I've since spent countless hours in that 2-acre "Exotic Tree Plantation," as it's called, read as many reports about the studies as I have been able to find, and am on my way toward my goal of getting to know every single tree there. 

  Portal  ©Kesler Woodward 2021   Acrylic on Canvas   48" x 60"

The paintings in this post are my first two about my fascination with the site and the trees in it. I am awash in delight at the subtle differences in the leaves and bark of the different varieties of birch from throughout the north, and I have fallen just as in love with the varieties of conifers, with their diverse needles and cones. Every time I enter the garden, I feel as if I've gone through a gateway to faerie.

I honestly don't know what these new paintings are "about," or what they have to say. I'm just doing what we artists do--bearing witness to the wonder we feel at the world--and I'm singing personal praises to the richness and diversity of the great Boreal Forest that circles the globe. 

Liminal

Liminal  ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 48"

In this highly unsettling, deeply fraught time of pandemic, running on snowy trails in the beautiful forest in the returning light of early spring is a tonic. The burgeoning light splits the darkness, and here in the North we are grateful for nearly an hour more of it each week. It is a dramatic, a Liminal time, at the threshold between darkness and light.

Apricity ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

I finally completed Liminal this week, in mid-March--a time of year when despite deep snow and nightly temperatures well below zero, even at first light spring seems just around the corner, and by mid-morning the sun provides warmth that can be felt on our faces. 

The much smaller painting Apricity, by contrast, was painted in January and early February, at a time of year when the sun at this latitude, even at its daily zenith, provides little or no perceptible heat. 

Apricity is "the warmth of the sun in winter." It's a purely visual warmth which reminds us, on days like the one in this scene--when it was 40º below zero on the south bank of the Chena River--that warmth will someday come again.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And one last thing, for now. I've just learned from Makenzie Demmert, TV Producer at KUAC Public Television here in Fairbanks, that Into the Woods With Kes Woodward, the 9-part television series that she produced for KUAC in 2018, is now available for viewing on PBS nationally, through PBS Passport. If you contribute at a modest level to your local Public Television station, you are eligible for PBS Passport, and you can stream any or all of the episodes for free, at this link: Into the Woods with Kes Woodward

You can read more about the series on one of my earlier website posts, at Into the Woods. It was very popular here, but when it was aired in the fall of 2018, and shown again the following year, it was only viewable locally and live, on KUAC-TV. Many Fairbanksans who don't have televisions or who can't receive the local broadcast, as well as people from other parts of Alaska and beyond, asked how they could see it. KUAC developed a 2-disc DVD set of the entire program which is still available through the station, but now it is also available for streaming to anyone who contributes modestly to his or her local Public Television station.

 

New Paintings for a New Year

Tapestry ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

A longtime friend visiting our home a couple of weeks ago, seeing paintings of mine from at least four decades on the walls, asked me about the "evolution" of my style. I laughed and told him that I don't think my style "evolves," so much as "meanders." I have consciously tried to avoid adopting a set style or technique. I'm always wandering among different ways of working I've developed over the years, in an effort not just to say, but to discover for myself, what it meant to me to be in a particular place, at a particular time, in specific weather and light.

Hope ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  16" x 20"

Tapestry--a view of one of my favorite places in Denali National Park--and Hope--the low Northern sun bursting through the boreal forest--are images of a sort that I've made many times, but I haven't tackled them in this way way for years. I've been painting for some time primarily in thin veils of transparent color, chasing a kind of luminosity that only transparent paint on canvas can provide. But for these new scenes, I wanted denser, richer paint and less literally natural color. I turned to a strange, highly idiosyncratic way of working that I developed almost two decades ago--laying in the image loosely in strikingly unrealistic, bright colors, and then building up layer after thick layer of contrasting hues on top, each layer covering most, but not all, of the layer beneath. The result is a thickly textured surface that is flecked with bits of the mostly-buried contrasting hues throughout. The colors move toward the natural as I work, but they never become literal. They remain carriers of content, of feeling, rather than description. 

It is an odd way of working...a bit like painting in the dark...as I try layers of color almost arbitrarily to see what effect each will have in combination with the layer before. It takes three, four, or five times as long as just painting the scene, and it is disheartening, and looks ghastly, for days at a time. When it works, though, a day finally comes when it suddenly "gels," almost without warning, and the result is an image that captures much of what I felt I wanted to, but didn't know how to, say. They are maddening paintings to make, but some of my favorites over the years.

I almost never take in-progress snapshots of my work, but I did this time, as I worked on Tapestry. I hope you'll enjoy seeing the way this painting looked over the almost three weeks it took me to complete. You can click on each of the six images below to see the in-progress painting at a larger scale.

  

  

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"

 

Changing Seasons

Persephone  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 24"

Spring is an especially dramatic time in Interior Alaska. In a matter of just a few weeks, daylight soars from wan and short to brilliant, and night disappears. One day in early May, all the trees on the hillsides leaf out, and from one day to the next the landscape changes from bare to green. The delicate yellow- green of those newborn leaves deepens within another week, and it's early summer. 

I almost always make a painting or two about this overnight transformation of the forest, as after four decades of seeing it happen, I'm still startled and delighted by it every time. Persephone, just completed last evening, is my this-year's response. When I began this painting a week and a half ago, I thought I might call it Primavera, but as it often does, the image took on a mind of its own, and when I finished it and pondered what it was about, I realized that it had turned into Persephone. 

 

Golden Hour  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

In April of this year, before the new leaves appeared, but when the trees were often bare of the soft snows that rest on every branch throughout six months of winter, I found myself paying particular attention to the spare beauty of their crowns in the golden hours of twilight and dawn. I've painted the forest in countless ways for more than four decades, so I'm always surprised when I find myself noticing a different aspect of it. Like True at First Light, which I wrote about in my last post, the three smaller new paintings I've completed since then are explorations of the intricate tracery of bare treetops, punctuating golden sky.

 

 

 

Susurrus  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

I almost never set out to paint a "series." Usually it's just as with this run of four paintings--different ways of looking at, thinking about, and depicting something I've noticed and want to explore and/or celebrate. I make a painting, and in the course of doing it, I realize there are other ways I could do it, and other things I have to "say" about its subject. I do another, and then often another, realizing each time I finish one that there are other things I want to say, and other ways to say it. When the impetus runs its course, at least temporarily, I often look up and find my studio full of a "series" of related works.

This series was interrupted by this year's glorious budburst of green, but it's given me yet another aspect of trees to explore in the months and years to come.

 

Gloaming  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  16" x 20"

 

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.