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.

 

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. 

Sparks: A Conversation in Poems and Pictures

Through my studio window, I'm watching snow fall on a late September morning. Five inches on the ground and more coming down steadily. We've gone from early autumn, to late autumn, to winter in a couple of weeks. I like that it's so inexorable.

That inexorable rush from season to season, in the boreal forest and in life, is one of the major subjects of a yearlong conversation I've been having with my friend, former Alaska Poet Laureate Peggy Shumaker, through her poems and my paintings.  On September 11 we were able to see all the products of that discourse together for the first time, on the walls of the Alaska Humanities Forum in Anchorage. We are both so grateful to the Forum, its director Nina Kemppel, and its curator Christina Barber for providing this impetus to engage in another collaboration and a beautiful space to show its results.

The opening reception was a wonderful opportunity to share the full scope of the conversation with others, from Peggy's husband Joe and my wife Dorli to scores of writers, artists, and other friends who came out on a Second Friday to help us celebrate.  The Humanities Forum encourages exhibiting artists to do a talk about their work at the opening, and we took full advantage of it. We walked the substantial crowd through an almost hourlong tour of the conversation from its outset--my asking Peggy a year ago to write a poem to get it started--through the many twists and turns the conversation took as I painted in response to each poem and she wrote in response to each painting.

As we told those in attendance that evening, by the end we each were responding not just to the immediately preceding work, but to the entire conversation, and to all sorts of things that were happening in our lives and in those of our families and friends.

There is no way in a blog post to even summarize, much less fully discuss, the thread of that conversation, so we are extraordinarily grateful to Ron Spatz, founder and Executive Editor of Alaska Quarterly Review, that AQR will reproduce all the poems and paintings, as well as our commentary about them, in its 2016 spring issue. The New York Review of Books has called AQR "one of our best, and most imaginative, literary magazines," and the Washington Post Book World has said, "That one of the nation's best literary magazines comes out of Alaska may seem surprising, but so it is." We are deeply honored that our collaboration will not only be featured, but given so much space, in this fine publication, and we are happy that it will enable us to share it with many who won't have an opportunity to see the exhibition.

In the meantime, you can get a little more sense of how we went about this collaboration, and what it meant to us, from the excerpt in the Alaska Humanities Forum's online newsletter of an excellent interview that Forum intern Lillian Maassen conducted with us a few weeks before the opening: "A Conversation with Peggy Shumaker and Kesler Woodward"

And finally, for now, below are images of and brief commentary on my final two paintings in the exhibition.

Darkness in the Path  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas 36" x 24"

I was in my studio, working on the painting that became Darkness in the Path, when I got a call from Peggy saying that she had been diagnosed with cancer. Both her poems and my paintings, up to that point in the conversation, had several times reflected concerns for friends and family who had been ill or injured in various ways, the challenges of growing older, and the uncertainty of life, but this terrible news was much more direct, much more present. We now know that Peggy's cancer was caught early, that the operation to remove it was successful, and that even as she's undergoing followup treatment, her prognosis is excellent. But that day, all we knew was that terrifying diagnosis. 

Shocked, utterly dismayed, and feeling totally helpless, I cleaned my brushes and drove straight across town to Peggy and Joe's condo, just to give them both hugs and to let them know that Dorli and I would be there for them in every way we could. That evening, I returned to this painting, on which, in response to some lines in Peggy's preceding poem, I had begun to create an image of looking down an inviting path in the forest.  But in yet another instance of one of my paintings' taking on a life of its own--veering in a different direction without my conscious control--over the next week a big, dark spruce grew up in the path, my gaze shifted upward, away from the path and toward, then beyond, the dark spruce, and the season in the forest changed from fall to winter.

Firefall (For Eva)  ©Kesler Woodward 2015   acrylic on canvas   36" x 36"

Though Dorli says that as each season comes around in turn, I declare it my favorite, fall really is the season that makes me most grateful, for its bright beauty, and most thoughtful. It has always struck me that the leaves are most beautiful in their last weeks, most brilliant just before dying.

I'd been especially taken this year with the gorgeous fireweed leaves, as they turned red in August, and I had been collecting them on afternoon walks and bringing them back to the studio, admiring not only their brilliance, but the way their torn, battered, stained and broken parts just added to their richness and their beauty. I had been ruminating on how to use them in a painted response to several of Peggy's poems, and to numerous conversations about our mutual friend Eva Saulitis, a gifted writer in Homer, Alaska who has been battling metastatic breast cancer for several years, and is in the final stages of that battle.

Eva has written extensively and exquisitely about that struggle, and just recently about her hard-won acceptance of the fact that it's nearly over. Peggy referenced Eva's travail more than once in her poems, wrote a poem to her and shared it with both Eva and with me, and we acknowledged in several conversations that Eva had entered this conversation. Firefall is about the beauty of Eva's words and spirit as she acknowledges pain and loss, but continues to find and celebrate wonder, delight, and love all around her. It's about how much beauty is possible on the autumn path that we will all all travel, and how glorious even that last fall can be.