Kesler Woodward

Drawings

Wayfinding  ©Kesler Woodward 2025  Oil pastel on paper  28" x 32"

I have for years had a note on the wall of my studio admonishing myself to "Draw More!" but it's been years since I heeded it. A month ago I decided a good place to start would be with some little pen-and-ink birch portraits, and over the course of a couple of weeks I had a great time doing a number of them. I loved just noodling their forms and textures into life with a fine-tipped pen on beautiful white paper, teasing out their so-individual forms without the distraction of hue. It was pure pleasure, starting each one knowing that it wouldn't be weeks of work to finish, and I think I could have happily continued to make them for months.

Birch Portraits ©Kesler Woodward 2025  Pen and ink on paper  9" x 6" each 

When I've finished several small works, however, I invariably become eager to tackle something bigger-- a more ambitious image I can pursue and lose myself in for days or weeks, not knowing exactly where it will lead.

The Forest at My Door ©Kesler Woodward 2025 Pen and ink on paper 20" x 28"

These are the woods that beckon from our living room windows--the forest whose endless trails we run on all year round from our back door. I know this view so well, and responding to it with the same pen I'd used to do the little birch portraits seemed such a simple, only slightly more complicated task. It was after a couple of days of drawing, only a tiny portion of the image worked-up, that I began to realize the commitment I'd made. From there, it was just a matter of settling into the almost zen-like process of representing dense forest with tiny lines for days without trying to depict more than a few individual leaves.

My drawings, like my paintings, are very realistic from a distance and very abstract up close. This one took a long time, but I loved every minute of it, and after finishing it I could have done another, and another...

But of course I began to imagine entering the woods, with color, and as I've so often done since my very first months of making art in college well over a half-century ago (four little completely abstract oil pastels at that time, in response to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets), I turned to oil pastels.

I have a trove of oil pastels. Boxes and boxes of every kind, from the cheapest ones on the market--eight basic colors, affordable for school children--through a panoply of brands of wider color ranges and differing character, to magnificent sets of hundreds of French Sennelier oil pastels that are so soft and sensual that every stroke with them is like a caress. I sometimes employ my entire arsenal of brands and types in a single drawing, choosing firmer ones for crisper parts, softer ones for others, furiously layering and layering, but this drawing is all done deliberately, softly, with those fine Senneliers. The creamy white of the paper shines throughout, between the strokes. It's been some time since I used oil pastels, and I'd almost forgotten what a pleasure it is to explore the forest with them.

Winter Dreams and Winter Light

A Midwinter Dream   ©Kesler Woodward 2025   Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 40"

We are well past Imbolc, the ancient name for the midpoint between Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, and the days are rapidly lengthening, but I am still having fever dreams of color. I've been dreaming lately about some of my favorite views in Denali National Park, and when I went to the studio to try to make a painting about one of them a few weeks ago, the image that emerged on my canvas was this one--a very familiar place illumined by an almost surreal light.

I am amazed again and again by how little command I have of what I decide to paint. I never know until I am about to begin, and once underway, I never know where I will arrive. When people I've known for years but haven't seen for some time ask me, "Are you still painting a lot?" I always glibly answer, "All day, every day!" It's very nearly true, and I think it's that element of surprise with every canvas that makes me happy and keeps me at it.

Watchers  ©Kesler Woodward 2025  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 16"

I may be dreaming in technicolor, but as the days grow longer, the real winter light itself becomes almost as fey. The enchantment is most pronounced at dawn and dusk, and it is most striking to me when the rising light strikes the evergreens that stand like stolid sentinels in the mostly birch and aspen forest. At the ground it is still night--not yet even twilight--but among the dark boughs of the spruces, bright spots and shafts of warm color suddenly appear. Flickering ever-so-briefly and then gone, to me they are better than Christmas tree lights. 

Winter in the Arboretum  ©Kesler Woodward 2025  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

This, too, is true winter light. Almost every week for several years I have visited a little 2-acre experimental planting of trees from throughout the circumpolar north, located in the middle of the 2000-acre University of Alaska campus woods. I visited this plot for the first time 44 years ago, when the trees were saplings and forest scientists were actively studying how these species from other parts of the far north would grow in our climate and soils. This fenced test garden, called on campus the "Exotic Tree Plantation," has long been abandoned, but I go in every week to see how those specimens have fared in the decades since they were being studied. My goal is to get to know every tree. 

Unlike in the spring, fall, and throughout much of the summer, little changes visibly in this plot from week to week in winter. I note only the steadily deepening snow and the occasional fallen limb or treetop, broken by snow load and infrequent wind. These fully mature trees from northern Canada, Siberia, and Scandinavia continue, more than a half century after their planting, to slumber through the winter and wake with the spring. All winter I walk around and among them on my snowshoes, admiring them in the changing light.

Conjuring Light

Conjuring Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2025   Acrylic on Canvas   30" x 40"

I am thoroughly enjoying winter and looking forward to months more of it, so I am surprised, as I am about this time every year, that the colors in my paintings are becoming dramatically warmer and brighter. These are not the colors I see in the landscape around me, but fantasies...dreams. When I sit across the studio and look at a just-finished painting like this one, wondering what it's about, I realize that some part of me must be longing for color after months of being swaddled in a blanket of white. I think these must be the mountains and trees in winter, dreaming of spring, and so as at this time every year, I find myself in the studio conjuring light.

Invocation  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 48"

When I begin a painting like this one, inspired by the glorious view south to the Alaska Range from an overlook just below our home, what I'm focused on is not the distant mountains, but the intricate screen of bare trunks and branches through which I see the light from the south. I always think, "Well, maybe I'll put in a few of those trees," and a week later, I'm still painting them. It's crazy to try to paint that foreground network, "growing" the trees on canvas from scratch to disperse the light, but despite the ridiculous hours day after day, I find it comforting, almost meditative, and deeply satisfying to watch it grow. There's no way to convey the wonder of that light without those trees.

At the Edge of the Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 24"

The light in deep winter is wan, but the most delicate and beautiful of the year, and there's no place so perfect to see it as on the snow that burdens the branches of the spruce in the forest. The rising light of late morning dawn turns the dollops on the stunted boughs to jewelry, transforming gnarled limbs to faerie. I never tire of this magic. 

It Would Suit Me Fine If It Snowed All the Time

First Snow  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  acrylic on canvas  30" x 24"

Forty-five years ago, when I was living in Juneau and was a curator at the Alaska State Museum, I made a big (4 ft. x 6 ft.) painting that is now in the Alaska Contemporary Art Bank, titled It Would Suit Me Fine If It Snowed All the Time. All these years later, I still feel much the same way. Few things make me more excited than the first flurries of fall.

One of my favorite places in Fairbanks (where I've now lived for 43 years) is Smith Lake, a sizable body of water in the 2000-acre arboretum that is part of the University of Alaska campus. I've made paintings of that lake in autumn numerous times, and again this year I found myself celebrating on canvas the first flakes of snow falling on its not-yet-frozen surface.  I love the stillness that accompanies this initial harbinger of the half-year winter to come.

 

Go to Sleep, Darlings, Till the Summer Comes Again     ©Kesler Woodward 2024    acrylic on canvas 24" x 30"

Just a couple of weeks after those initial flurries, the ponds and lakes had frozen and winter descended on Interior Alaska in earnest. More than a foot of snow fell at our home in the hills, and on our running snowshoes, we were beginning to pack it down on the endless trails that lead from our back door. I love the way the snow blankets the trees, tucking them in for winter, and I often think of the line by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again," but I'd never used that line as a title. When I finished this painting and asked myself what it was about, something about that last remnant of warm autumn light fading into nightfall on the tucked-in forest made me think, "Oh yes...of course."

 

Equinox   ©Kesler Woodward 2024   acrylic on canvas   36" x 48"

The transition from late summer to winter is fleeting here, barely slowing for an always-too-brief but brilliant fall.  The autumnal equinox provides the pivot. Just two weeks before the first snowfall in town, the forest was a blaze of color against the impossibly bright blue, early September sky.

I never know what I'll paint next until I'm about to begin, and I seldom find myself painting "in season," but time seems to move faster and faster for me these days. I think I must have needed to grab this blaze of color as it flew past. 

New Works Ready for a New Exhibition

These are just a few of my new paintings in the studio, awaiting transport to Well Street Art Gallery here in Fairbanks for an exhibition with 3 outstanding artist friends--Todd Sherman, Jim Brashear, and Bonni Brooks--all of whom live on our short street. "Merlin Lane Artists" opens this Friday, September 6, from 5-8 pm at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks.

Todd, Jim, and I were colleagues for many years in the University of Alaska Art Department, and Bonni, another longtime friend, is an extraordinary tapestry weaver. We all now live just a few doors apart in Taiga Woodlands, a forested subdivision in the hills overlooking Fairbanks, and we thought it would be great fun to show our very different work together. 

A Few Acres of Snow ©Kesler Woodward Acrylic on Canvas  54" x 84"

At 4 1/2 feet by 7 feet,  A Few Acres of Snow will be my largest painting in the exhibition. This big, celebratory scene of winter in all its glory was the centerpiece of a solo exhibition of my work in Montreal several years ago, but I have never shown it in the U.S.  I am excited to have it back and to show it here. The fun title, suggested by the gallery in Montreal, is what the 18th Century French writer Voltaire called Canada in his most famous work, the novella Candide.

 

Mysteries  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 24"

Right now, summer is waning after months of continuous light in Interior Alaska, and darkness is beginning to steal back into the late hours of twilight. There is richer color in the clear evening skies, and real night is trying to slip in around the edges. I'm always intrigued by the mystery and wonder of that inexorable invasion.

 

Celestial ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

The stars, which I've missed all summer, come back in September.

 

Snow Music ©Kesler Woodward 2024 Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

And the coming snow is on my mind. I love the months of continuous summer light, but as the days get rapidly shorter, I begin to look forward to the first falling snow. It is only truly dark here for brief periods in the spring and fall. When the last snow disappears in late April or early May, and it's not yet light all night, we have darkness for a few hours each evening. Again in early autumn, when the days grow shorter and the nights longer, for a little while we have real darkness. But soon, the brilliant white snow will start to settle softly not just on the trails and forest floor, but on every twig and branch in the woods, and every bit of ambient light from the moon, the stars, or the lights of our homes is reflected and multiplied a thousandfold. It is never truly dark here in winter. In Snow Music, I'm dreaming in the fall about the colors of winter.

 

Merlin Birch  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  20" x 10"

And birches...always more birches...

Whether gathering wild lowbush cranberries (lingonberries) in our own wooded yard or running with friends on the endless forest trails that lead from our back door, I am surrounded by the birches I love. I can't remember a year when I haven't painted some of their portraits.

I go back and forth between painting in oils and painting in acrylics. The ethereal light of the northern sky seems to me to require the myriad thin layers of transparent acrylic I employ to try to capture some of its magic. But the bark of the birches, just as beautiful but marked by scars, peeling layers of growth, and other events in their lives, is more physical. The life of a birch is written not just in its form, but in its "skin," and celebrating that this year has seemed to me to call for the greater sensuality of oils.

 

 

 

 

Woodland Neighbors  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  24" x 30"

Twins  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  30" x 24"

Oils and Acrylics

Aglint  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 48"

As I've said in this space many times, I never know (or even think about) what I'm going to paint next until I finish a painting and am about to start a new one. I never, ever work on more than one painting at a time, and while I'm working on that painting, it's all I can think about. When it's finished, it goes on the studio wall out of the way. As I put up a new canvas, I start to ponder what I want to paint next, and at the same time, whether I want to work in acrylics or oils. For me, paintings that are about light, like this one, seem to need to be in acrylic, so that the light can pass through the transparent pigment, bounce off the pure white of the primed canvas, and return to the viewer's eye almost as if backlit. 

Aglint was painted in the last days of winter, as the glorious light of the long season of cold was just beginning to change to the burgeoning light of  spring. I'm always excited that the days are growing longer, of course, but I always want to cling just a little longer to the crisp snow on the branches in the forest and the magical light that fills the winter woods.

Brothers ©Kesler Woodward 2024 Oil on Canvas 20" x 16"

The birch portraits, by contrast, often seem to want the richer, fleshier sensuality of oils. As I walk out my door, I greet the birches which I pass by every day like old friends, noting the way the shifting light brings out their individual colors and the way they change as they age, season by season and year by year. And as we walk or run on the endless trails through the surrounding forest, I invariably spot new ones, wondering why I hadn't noticed this one or that one before. 

The woods are dense with these tall, thin trunks. I can almost never see a single tree in its entirety, in isolation. I always feel like I'm greeting new ones face-to-face, and so I seem to always paint them eye-to-eye. 

Taiga Birch ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas 20" x 10"

Crystal and Kept

Crystal and Kept  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas   48" x 60"

Late winter/early spring is a time of mixed emotions for me. I am excited by the burgeoning hours of daylight, of course, but I'm always sorry to see the snow go away--first lose its deep, crisp purity and then raggedly retreat. 

A major consolation for the messiness of spring thaw for me is the occasional appearance of something called "ammil," a British word I learned long ago for the fleeting glitter of ice that frequently forms on bare twigs when freeze follows thaw. Somehow, having a word for the phenomenon encourages my noticing it. The more steeply rising and rapidly strengthening spring sun steals these little glints almost as soon as they appear, but for me they are always a welcome gift.

The beauties of early spring are subtler than those of winter, sharper and shorter-lived, but they are real. They make me think about the lines in Seamus Heaney's poem The Singer's House - "So much comes and is gone / that should be crystal and kept."

Grandfather  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

A new friend, Frank Keim, took me on a several-hour walk last fall from his home just north of Fairbanks to an extraordinary local remnant of old-growth forest. He calls it "The Legacy Forest." It's more than 100 acres of woods I'd never visited or heard about, just minutes from my own home--filled with some of the oldest and largest spruces, aspens, and birches I've ever seen in Interior Alaska. Somehow, this patch of forest escaped the felling of nearly every mature tree in our area in the early 20th Century Gold Rush, to fuel the riverboats that brought settlers and supplies to our part of Alaska. Just as miraculously, this swath of Legacy Forest has dodged destruction by lightning-started wildfire for more than a century and a half. 

The enormous white spruce in my painting Grandfather is only one of hundreds of giants in that forest, and not the largest, but it is the one that struck me most, framed in rosy autumn light by curtains of deciduous trunks and boughs. Walking those woods with Frank--a wise and thoughtful leader for more than half a century in local preservation efforts and appreciation of the boreal forest and all that lives in it--was a privilege and a pilgrimage.

Flurries at Vespers  ©Kesler Woodward 2023   Acrylic on canvas   20" x 20"

I so often find myself painting out-of-season. What we call Green-Up happened here this year on May 16--the birch and aspen leaves unfurling in their annual budburst, turning the winter-bare trees that surround Fairbanks to carpets of green hillside in a single day and a half. It is an altogether magical transformation that I dearly love, and I have often painted the newborn yellow-green leaves and trees bedecked by sudden summer. But this year I found myself just two weeks later painting bare trees and evergreens at the hour of Vespers, softened in their silhouettes by flurries of snow. 

I never know what I'm going to paint until I'm about to begin work on a new canvas. I'm happy that it's light all night now, and that it won't be dark until August, so I wonder why I chose to paint the falling snow that has just gone, and which will return soon enough, not long after deep twilight like this returns to the North.

Light in the North

Snow in Faerie  ©Kesler Woodward 2023 acrylic on canvas 48" x 60"

I always feel sorry for Alaskans who "snowbird" for the winter to warmer locales, as they miss the most beautiful light of the year. From January into March, especially, the winter light is not only magical as it gently breaks the long night's darkness, but it grows by nearly an hour in extent from week to week. It's glorious.

Winter is the time when the boreal forest here in Interior Alaska is most clearly unique. With abundant sunshine, temperatures reliably well below freezing, and no wind for weeks at a time, powder snow sits undisturbed on every twig and branch in the forest. We had an early snowfall this year which coated the trees with a thick layer of unusually sticky snow that has held fast the downy accumulation of winter. Every woodland vista is a fairyland abstraction of subtly-colored light. 

First Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

There's nothing quite like that first light of dawn on the birches in the forest. The trunks suddenly appear, singly or a few at a time as if stepping, like the individuals they are, from the darkness of night. 

Glory  ©Kesler Woodward 2023 acrylic on canvas  20" x 20"

By mid-February, the dawn light is growing not just brighter, but warmer in hue, and it's chasing away the darkness. Night is in full retreat, and we are reminded that it is shrinking toward the wee hours before disappearing for months, along with the stars.

Gifts From the Forest

Gifts from the Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  48" z 60"

I spent more time completing this canvas than any other I've painted in a very long time. When I look back at notes I've made to myself over the years about painting possibilities, there are so many suggesting I spend a season picking up, or just noting, specific objects in the landscape and painting them one by one on a large canvas--a kind of chronicle of time spent in the forest and some of the things I love there. I finally embarked on that task this summer. As I added object after object to this 4 ft. x 5 ft. canvas over the past two months, it filled slowly, and I began to wonder why I had undertaken such a thing. I never, ever work on more than one painting at a time, and so I couldn't think of painting anything else until this one was complete.

These are far from botanical illustrations. The images here are recognizable renditions of individual leaves, cones, catkins, bark, shoots, twigs, clusters of needles, and more, but they are meant to be evocations of the aspects of those things that intrigue me, not illustrations of them. I exaggerate color, emphasize things I'm interested in, and gloss over other features. I take lots of liberties that an illustrator would never allow. These are simply my personal responses to some of the gifts of the forest this summer.

Not everything depicted here is indigenous to Alaska. I have for more than a year spent time every week in a magical research plot of trees from throughout the circumpolar north, located in the midst of the 2000-acre woods of the University of Alaska campus. In this little 2-acre compound grow two kinds of birches from Finland, pines and spruce and fir and larches from Russia, Scandinavia, and northern Canada, and other species that don't occur in our Interior Alaska forests. The differences in the leaves and bark of Downy Birch,  European Silver Birch, and our Alaska Birch are subtle, just as those trees' responses to this climate and environment are different, but those differences intrigue me.

Trees in Alaska, as elsewhere, are under attack by a host of predators, many of which are aided in their predations by a warming climate. Evidence is on display in these images of the work of not only our familiar Aspen Leaf Miners, which have turned many of our aspen groves from green to gray every summer for years, but also the more recent work of Birch Leaf Miners, which have been dulling the summer green and fall yellow of the birches as they have sweept through our community more recently. Spruce Bud Blight, which I just learned about from a State Forester I took into the Exotic Tree Plantation last week, I now recognize when it appears on the tips of White Spruces, preventing the further growth of every branch it infests.

But there are pure marvels as well...the beautiful, red-violet "flowers" that are the emerging female cones of the Siberian Larches, which make these deciduous conifers look like they're in bloom for about a week each spring. The different-shaped leaves on different parts of an individual highbush cranberry plant. The quite different needles of Norway Spruce and White Spruce, and the changing appearance of a cluster of White Spruce cones between when I picked it up from the ground and when it opened and dropped its seeds, drying on the windowsill of my studio.

I don't think you need to recognize these species to appreciate this painting. But I hope that seeing it, you will be as delighted as I have been all summer by the diversity and wonder of these gifts from the boreal forest.

My exhibition opening this Friday, July 1, in Anchorage at Georgia Blue Gallery!

Treeline  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

A couple of weeks ago, Dorli and I loaded 13 of my recent paintings in our van and drove them down to Anchorage for my exhibition that will open at Georgia Blue Gallery this Friday, July 1. If you're in Anchorage this week, please stop by the gallery and say hello during the opening reception Friday, from 5-7 p.m.

Treeline is the newest and largest painting in the exhibition, at 4 ft. x 5 ft.  The gallery space is not huge, so the other paintings range from several 3 ft. x 4 ft.  and 3 ft. square canvases, down to a couple of 16" x 20" ones and one 20" x 10".

Treeline is not a scene, but a kind of "group portrait" of some of the individual trees I love growing here, pretty close to the treeline in both latitude and altitude. It was inspired in part by reading a terrific recent book called The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, by Ben Rawlence. It has entire chapters on the fate around the circumpolar north of some of the trees I most love--white spruce and black spruce, downy birch, Siberian larch, Scots pine, and more--and some of the consequences of climate change reflected in their spread or retrenchment, and the lives of those who live in and around them.

Below are just a couple of the thirteen paintings that will be in the exhibition at Georgia Blue Gallery, 3555 Arctic Blvd. in Anchorage. Images of and information on all of the paintings are in past posts on this site, and in my "Available Works" album at the top of the right-hand column of this page. 

Our granddaughter is visiting for a couple of weeks in Fairbanks, so I will only be flying down for the opening reception on Friday afternoon and back that evening, but I'd love to see you if you're in Anchorage and are able to drop by the gallery reception from 5-7 p.m.

Be Still and Wait ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  36" square

 

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