Kesler Woodward

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.

  

  

Last Big Painting for 2019

Snow Country ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 60"

There will be drawings, and perhaps even another small painting, in the few weeks remaining in 2019, but Snow Country will be my last big painting of the year. It's a view of Mount Dan Beard from the Sheldon Hut, a tiny cabin perched on a 200 ft-high rock outcropping at 5000 ft elevation on the Ruth Glacier in the Alaska Range. Dorli and I spent 5 days there with two friends, several years ago, and it was easily the most spectacular place I've ever been. Just seven miles from the summit of Denali, it is a world of perpetual whiteness, punctuated only by rock outcroppings too steep for the snow to ever cover completely.

Painting this fairly large canvas was, despite the looseness of the brushstrokes themselves, an incredibly slow, deliberate process. As always, I wanted the scene to be very realistic from a distance and completely abstract, altogether painterly, up close. But rock outcroppings are already so abstract in form that unlike trees, forests, or other subjects that are replete with immediately recognizable silhouettes, capturing the crenellations, snow slides, cornices, and drifts while keeping the paint lively--not just descriptive--was an exacting balancing act. Even more than usual, I had to keep walking away from the canvas to see exactly where I was in the scene, approach and attack a small section of rock, snow, and shadow quickly and freely, make myself stop and walk away to get my bearings again, and re-engage to tease out just a bit more representational form. It was a patient dance of stop and start--slow, almost meditative--and it was especially satisfying to see this very specific, highly distinctive mountain's form emerge on the canvas bit by bit, day after day. 

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.  

 

Narrow Road to the Interior

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

 "The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat or in old age, leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." Thus begins the great 17th Century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho's best known work, Narrow Journey to the Interior, a journal of prose and haiku recounting his journey through the far northern provinces of Japan. 

Though Basho began his journey in the spring, for some years since my writer friend Frank Soos introduced me to it, I have read his account each fall. Those opening lines captured my imagination, and I've wanted to make a painting in response to them, but it's taken me this long to compose one. 

As Sam Hamill, the best translator of Basho's work, says, Narrow Road to the Interior is much more than a travel journal, and Basho completely redefined both haiku and the form which combines short prose passages with haiku, called haibun.

Though my closest artistic alliances are with writers, I've only occasionally made paintings in response to specific written works. This one has been preying on my mind for some time, though. Finally, this fall, I felt that I was ready to tackle it, and it was a monthlong struggle, finding a way to turn it to my own devices. I'm happy to have found a way, within my own artistic vision, to respond to it.

Gorge Creek  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

Travelers, a large 4' x 5' canvas, follows several smaller works that I've posted about earlier, and one other new one that I've completed since my last post. Gorge Creek is another tribute to one of my favorite places in Denali National Park, a valley that Dorli and I explored yet again this fall. We were turned aside from our intended route by bears descending to the drainage we were ascending. We retreated deliberately, but immediately, reminded that we were the visitors in their place, and that there were plenty of other places to explore.

Different Inspirations

Smith Lake Morning  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

When I'm about to start a new painting, the first decision I have to make involves scale. I like to work on canvases that are quite large--big enough that it seems you could step into them--or quite small--small enough that you want to walk very close to them and enter their more intimate worlds.

When I've just finished a large painting...or as this summer, several large ones in a row that each took a month or more to complete...I often myself working on small paintings--canvases that I can begin with an end in sight. Each of the three small new paintings I've completed in as many weeks derives from a different impulse, a different inspiration.

Fall is my favorite time of year, and many autumns I find myself on the shore of Smith Lake--a fairly large and very beautiful pond in the 2000-acre arboretum of fields and boreal forest that is part of the University of Alaska campus. This has been the mildest, and one of the brightest and sunniest, autumns in memory here, and for the first time ever, I've put aside my impatience for snow to arrive and have let myself fully enjoy the lingering fall. Smith Lake Morning is a paean of thanks for that beautiful body of water, and for this glorious season. 

 

 

Sunset Peak  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  10" x 20"

Another perennial place of inspiration for me is Denali National Park, which I have visited and painted for forty years, and in which I've spent time every year, in all seasons, since I was the park's first Artist-in-Residence 16 years ago. In addition to time nearly every year in the East Fork Cabin, 43 miles into the park, I've spent a week every-other-year as a Special Emphasis Speaker at Camp Denali and North Face Lodge.

Camp Denali is an extraordinary ecotourist lodge, an inholding deep within the park, near the very end of the sole, 90-mile-long Park Road. It is a Northern Rivendell--a haven of rustic comfort, pleasure, and delight in the wilderness of Denali. Its hospitality is legendary, the naturalist guides who take guests on daylong explorations of that wilderness are remarkable, and the place attracts guests from all over the world who are as interesting as the gracious owners and the unfailingly attentive, welcoming staff. It is a perfect place, and it's always a privilege for me to get to spend a week there hiking and visiting with guests during the day and giving talks in the evenings about the key role artists played in the rise of the conservation movement in America, the establishment of nearly all of our earliest National Parks, and the way artists continue to depict and interpret this and other National Parks today.

Sunset Peak is the latest of many paintings I've made of a portion of one of my favorite views in Denali Park--the vista looking south from Eielson Visitor Center, 63 miles into the park, across Gorge Creek to Sunset Peak and the Sunrise and Sunset Glaciers. As always, I'm interested in making paintings not so much about what a place looks like, but how it felt to me to be there, at a particular time of day and time of year. Like all of my work, whether painting the forest, the mountains, or the sea, it's more about light than about topography.

 In the Park - Study for Sunset Peak  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Oil Pastel on Paper  9" x 13" (image)

I seldom make on-site studies for my paintings, but in this case I did...in a way...as earlier this summer I worked on this little oil pastel painting for the cameras of a BBC film crew who were interviewing me about artists in Denali, the Denali Artist-in-Residence program, and my own work for an episode that will air next year about the Alaska Railroad. Comparing it with the studio painting Sunset Peak provides a glimpse of the substantial difference between the way I work from life, and the more distilled vision I strive for in the studio.

Hope Begins in the Dark  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 10"

And finally, for now, a very different image...one looking toward the winter light that I so love. As I've said on this site before, I seldom know what a painting of mine is really "about" until I've finished it. I knew in this painting that I wanted just a tiny glimpse of the brave-but-wan winter sun peeking through the dense branches of the winter forest. But I got carried away with the branches, having fun constructing and tangling them in the narrow space of this small canvas, and as the painting neared completion, I realized it was darker than I'd anticipated it would be, and the light of the winter sun even more tentative than I'd expected. 

As so often, when I sat down across the room from the finished painting and asked myself, "Now what was that about?" the answer came to me. In the dark days following the sudden passing of my dear late wife Missy, more than eight years ago, I saved on the wall next to my desk a passage from writer Anne Lamott: "Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work, and you don't give up." 

My dear wife Dorli has brought light brilliantly back into my life, and I hadn't thought about that passage in years, but when I looked at this painting, I thought it captured some of its essence. Though unbidden, it's what the painting is about.

Anticipation and Reflection

Light in the Dooryard  ©Kesler Woodward 2016   acrylic on canvas  18" x 36"  (image)

As hard as I try to focus on the here-and-now in the rest of my life, in my art I seem always to be either reflecting on what I have seen or done, or looking forward to what I will see or do. Light in the Dooryard is a look back at the magical light that sustained me through the winter.

Dorli and I run on the trails out our back door for miles, at least three days a week, all winter long, and when we come back up the hill to our house at the end of each morning's run, I nearly always walk to the front yard and drink in this scene--the morning light's beaming from almost due south, boring a hole through the forest and casting sharp shadows of the trees to my feet, at our front door. I absorb it daily, all winter long, but I almost never paint it until April, when the sun comes from north of east at 5 a.m. and already wheels about, above the horizon, until after 10 p.m.

Adynaton  ©Kesler Woodward 2016   acrylic on canvas   10" x 20" (image)

When I'm not looking back, I'm looking forward, to the time I'll be in Denali National Park again, as I have been every summer since I served as the Park's first Artist-in-Residence in 2002. I'm planning the talks I'll give at Camp Denali in August, and in doing so, I'm remembering the first time I ever saw "The Mountain" from the campground at Wonder Lake, just 30 miles or so away from the foot of the massif. Almost 40 years ago, my late wife Missy and I were camping at Wonder Lake with a friend from college who was visiting. Denali had been shrouded by clouds on our way in, but late in the midsummer night, they were tantalizingly beginning to break up, and we were lusting for a view of the great peak. Occasionally, a hole would open, impossibly high above the horizon, and we'd seem to see a bit of ice and snow, but we told ourselves that it couldn't be the mountain. It couldn't possibly be that high. When, in the wee hours of the morning, it did clear, we could see that it was indeed Denali, and it was even more grand than we'd ever imagined.

"Adynaton" is a figure of speech--a form of hyperbole, of outlandish exaggeration, indicating something so extreme as to seem impossible. "When pigs fly," is the example given most often in definitions of the term. The mountain Denali, as it was unveiled that day almost 40 years ago, and each time I see it still, is like that to me. It couldn't possibly be that high...that big.... It couldn't possibly tower that grandly over the lesser peaks. But it does. This little painting is an homage to that recollection.

Primavera   ©Kesler Woodward 2016   acrylic on canvas   20" x 10"

Meanwhile, between recollection and anticipation, here in Interior Alaska it's spring. It seems like hubris to name a painting of my own Primavera, as if it had anything to do with Botticelli's great allegory of spring, but I painted this little birch out my window, and when I sat back and looked at it, so pretty, and so full of the promise of the budburst of leaves that will come in just a few weeks to every tree in the boreal forest, there seemed no other title to give it.

Young Ones   ©Kesler Woodward 2016   acrylic on canvas   30" x 40" (image)

Budburst is going on every week, as well, in the laboratory run by the scientists at OneTree Alaska, where I've been spending a lot of my time. Jan and Nicole, whom I've mentioned before, and the school classes from the community with whom they are working, are growing birch saplings in controlled conditions, putting them into dormancy in coolers and freezers, bringing them out and exposing them to various colors of light, and measuring their responses, in an ongoing effort to understand the effects of climate change on the boreal forest. 

When I look at row after row of those tiny saplings, I wonder why I haven't looked closely at younger birches before...why I haven't paid attention to the ones just a few inches or a a foot tall, but only to those of adolescence, maturity, and old age. Working with these scientists makes me realize that for all my attention over four decades, there's so much more to see than I've ever noticed. Young Ones is a small song of praise to saplings that remind me of my 4 1/2 year old granddaughter Sage--beautiful, full of promise, reaching for the light with joy and anticipation.

 

A Small Epiphany

A Small Epiphany   ©Kesler Woodward 2016   acrylic on canvas  10" x 20"

Every early January, ironically right around Epiphany, I lose my faith...in spring.

I know in my head that the earth and the trees, which have been covered by a mantle of purest white since late September, will one day be green again, but in early January I look out at the landscape and that prospect never seems quite real. I honestly don't miss the light in winter, as the sunlight we do have at this time of year is so unique and so beautiful. But I think I must always be craving color in January, as I invariably find myself in the studio making paintings filled with the brightest hues I use all year.  

This January, as so often, my response to color-craving takes two main forms. The first is a celebration of the brilliant and utterly unique, peach-colored light cast by the wan winter sun as it struggles above the horizon, almost due south, for a few hours each midday. A Small Epiphany is just such a celebration--a view of the forest I love riven by that light, just after daybreak. In it, from almost the highest point on the trail that we run at least three times a week, year-round, from our back door, I'm looking directly into the sun, and I'm awed by the transfiguration of the forest it provides.

Dreaming of Denali from Nugget Pond   ©Kesler Woodward 2016   acrylic on canvas   10" x 20"

The other way I respond to color-craving is to remember summer, and to dream of it. Dreaming of Denali from Nugget Pond is a view I go to in my mind's-eye often in January--a vision of "The Mountain" as its peak looms above an intervening ridge from the shore of Nugget Pond at Camp Denali, one of my favorite places on earth. I've painted this view often, almost always with the pond itself in the foreground, but this week I'm focused, in my dreams, on the tops of the dark spruces that surround that tiny pond, the brilliant August hillside that fills the horizon, and the apparition of the giant massif rising implausibly above it.

In the Mountains

Gorge Creek from Mt. Thorofare   ©Kesler Woodward 2013   acrylic on canvas   30" x 40"

My two newest paintings come not from the forest, but from high in the mountains. Each year since 2002, when I served as Denali National Park's first Artist-in-Residence, I've spent a week or more in summer--and twice spent a week in winter--in a cabin in that extraordinary wilderness preserve. I've hiked and climbed and skied and snowshoed in many parts of the park on the north side of the Alaska Range, and I've made scores of images responding to and recollecting those places and experiences.

One of the areas I've painted most often is the high country near the park's Eielson Visitor Center--dramatic Gorge Creek and the highlands surrounding it, from Stony Dome, 62 miles in on the Park Road, to Grassy Pass, six miles further west. While staying in the East Fork Cabin the last week of August this year, Dorli and I hiked up the well-used path from Eielson Visitor Center to Thorofare Ridge, but instead of turning at the ridgetop and descending as most visitors do, we kept going up, from one visible, nearby, higher ridge to the next, until we eventually reached the top of  Mt.Thorofare.

It's just a hike, not a climb, but at 5629 feet, Mt. Thorofare is one of the highest peaks on the north side of the Denali Park Road that far west, and it affords wonderful views in every direction. The tapestry of fall colors and the deep shadows that day, from the canyon of Gorge Creek to the glaciers on Sunset and Sunrise Peaks, were amazing. We looked at and talked about the places we could see that we'd hiked to before, and we identified others for the future. It was a perfect day in one of my favorite places anywhere.

Sheldon Amphitheater   ©Kesler Woodward 2013   acrylic on canvas   24" x 48" 

As much as I've explored Denali National Park on the north side of the Alaska Range, I had spent almost no time in the part of the park on the south side of it before 2012. My friend John Gimbel has been urging me for years to accompany him and his friend Nanne Myers to the Sheldon Mountain Hut, high on a rocky promontory in the icy wilderness of the Sheldon Amphitheater of the Ruth Glacier.  Finally, last May, Dorli and I flew in with them and were dropped off, spent five and a half hours getting our gear and food up to the small, hexagonal hut built by pioneer aviator Don Sheldon, and enjoyed five days of near-perfect weather in what is without question the most spectacular setting I've ever visited.

The tiny bit of peak at the very top of the painting is the summit of Denali, just six miles away. Everything around us was ice, snow, and blinding light.  In the mornings, as the sun hit the sheer, corniced peaks all around us, avalanches of snow fell a thousand feet like waterfalls, followed seconds later by sounds like thunder.  I took it all in for five days, filled with awe, and was so overwhelmed by it that  it's taken me a year and a half to find a way to begin to respond to it on canvas.  

 

   

Montréal

We have just returned from a fabulous trip to Montréal, where a solo exhibition of fifteen of my new paintings opened on October 10 at Beaux-arts des Amériques Gallery. The gallery has represented my work for several years, but this was my first solo show there, and it was the first time I'd seen the gallery in person. It's a gorgeous, elegant space in a vibrant section of that great city, and the installation of the work was beautiful.

The gallery shows work by both Canadian and American artists, and it was a treat for me to get to talk at the opening with several outstanding Montréal artists who are represented by them. They produced a beautiful, 12-page catalog for the exhibition, which includes full-color images of all the works in the show, an introduction by gallery owner Jacqueline Hébert Stoneberger, my artist statement, a vita, and a terrific essay on my work by Montréal art critic and writer John K. Grande, who has written extensively for Artforum, Art Papers, Sculpture, Vie des Arts, and many other journals.

I have included here images of a few of the new paintings in the exhibition, and have posted images of all the works--which range from a number of small, 12" x 9" oil on canvas birch portraits to two quite large, 54" x 84" canvases--in the Available Work Album at the top of the right-hand column on this page. 

We were treated royally by everyone associated with the gallery. They maintain a beautiful apartment on the floor above the gallery, for use by artists whose work is showing, and we spent four full days in the city. It was great for me to get to see other artwork in Montréal, and to spend an entire afternoon in the Montréal Gallery of Art, one of the largest and most important museums of art in Canada.  

I have traveled extensively in Canada, visiting nearly every major art museum in Canadian cities from coast to coast, and have curated two traveling exhibitions of work from Canada's Contemporary Art Bank and taught courses in Canadian and other Northern art at the University of Alaska. I have canoed, portaged, and camped in Algonquin Park  in Northern Ontario, visited remote Hydro-Quebec sites in northern James Bay in winter, and kayaked and camped in Hudson Bay and Richmond Gulf.

My view of the North, and the images I make of it, have been much influenced by those travels, as well as by the work of a number of twentieth and twenty-first century Canadian artists. Knowing how important those experiences have been, and eager to add to them, following the exhibition opening in Montréal Dorli and I spent more than another week exploring eastern Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. We drove part of the way out the Gaspé Peninsula, visited museums in Quebec City and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and ran and hiked along the Bay of Fundy and on trails on Grand Manan Island.

As always, I don't know how long it will be before the experience of those places settles deeply enough in my consciousness for me to have something personal to say about them on canvas, but there is no doubt in my mind that new images will come from these latest travels. 

Denali Dreams   ©Kesler Woodward 2013  acrylic on canvas    30" x 40" (image)

Boreal Canopy   ©Kesler Woodward 2013   oil pastel on paper   28" x 40" (image)

Light in the Forest   ©Kesler Woodward 2013   oil pastel on paper   28" x 40" (image)

New Work, New Studio, New Adventures

Paean  ©Kesler Woodward 2012   Acrylic on canvas   48" x 60"

So many new things to catch up on, I hardly know where to start, so I'll begin with what's always the most important thing--my newest painting. Paean is the latest in my ongoing series of large multiple birch portraits. It is a paean, or song of praise, to the beauty of the birches themselves. As always, the title came after the painting. As I sat and looked at this new canvas and asked myself what it was about, the thing that most struck me was how much brighter, bolder, more unabashedly full of life it is than any of the similar works I've done in the last couple of years. It's burgeoning with life, and I think is simply a testament to my optimism, energy, and sense of delight as I settle into a new studio, continue to settle into a new home and new life, and look forward to new adventures.

Paean is the first painting completed in my new studio--a fabulous facility which I had built this summer to my own design, directly behind our house. It sits at the brow of a fairly steep slope down into a beautiful birch forest. I'm almost embarrassed by how nice it is, and worry about doing work good enough to deserve it. But I'm 61 years old and have never had a space designed and built from scratch for me and my work, and I am unreasonably excited about it and am loving working in it.

There are only a couple of windows--one above the desk in my office space, and a larger one on the north wall of the studio. I like to control the light, and there are 11 fixtures, each with four full-spectrum, daylight-balanced 4-foot fluorescent bulbs, as well as two tracks with incandescent spotlights. The windows are more for my view of the boreal forest than for the light.

Since I only work on one painting at a time and am obsessively tidy, the main space can function as both my studio workspace and a gallery of my available works, with a separate office space for writing, research and museum consulting, all my art books, supplies, and racks for paintings. The hillside site allowed for the construction of a sizeable basement storage space for framing and packing materials, shipping crates, boxes of my books and catalogs, and the like.

There is no running water, as the house is only 15 steps away, and a cabin-style 5 gallon jug with spigot provides water for coffee and cleaning brushes--the only real essentials.

I am deeply grateful to the Rasmuson Foundation for my 2012 Artist Fellowship, which provided major support for the building of this new studio. I had committed to the construction before I learned of the fellowship, but it afforded me invaluable financial and moral support for the undertaking. My next big show will be next fall, at Beaux-arts des Amériques, the outstanding gallery which represents my work in Montreal, and I am especially excited to have room to work on large new paintings for that exhibition.  

        

Denali Drama  ©Kesler Woodward 2012  Acrylic on canvas   24" x 36" (image) 25 1/2" x 37 1/2" (framed)

Commissions  Some of the other work I've done during the summer (painting in a tiny room in the basement, listening to the sounds of construction on the new studio) involved commissions, which, to be honest, I hate doing. I'd much rather go to my studio and just paint what I feel like painting on a given day, knowing that the potential audience for anything I produce numbers just over seven billion--everyone in the world--and that all I really is need is one person to love it and want it. When I do a commission, I'm acutely aware that that seven million number narrows to one, or usually two, since they're normally done for a couple, and I am fraught with anxiety over whether they will like it.

I painted Denali Drama for a couple from Anchorage who had seen one of my paintings of the mountain on an earlier visit to Denali National Park and wanted something similar. In my anxiety, I did two paintings, one larger than the other, and let them choose which one they wanted. I never paint anything for a commission that I wouldn't choose to paint sooner or later anyway, and it was actually fun. It was especially fun to deliver both paintings for them to see and choose from while they were camping in Denali Park, on my way in for a week's stay in the East Fork Cabin. They chose the larger, and Dorli and I had a brief visit with them at their campsite, all of us trying to keep the paintings upright in a stiff wind, and a better visit with them when they took one of the Park buses to see us in the East Fork Cabin.

Denali Brilliance  ©Kesler Woodward 2012  Acrylic on canvas  16" x 20" (image) 17 1/2" x 21 1/2" (framed)

This was the smaller painting.  They are both views of Denali from Stony Hill, a vantage from which I've painted the mountain a number of times. Dorli and I climbed Stony Dome, the mountain above the viewpoint, on this trip, giving us an even more panoramic view of Denali and countless other peaks. Sooner or later, when the experience of being atop Stony Dome and seeing that view on a perfect August day has settled deep enough in my consciousness that I have something personal to say about it, I'll make one or more paintings about that experience, as well.

Finally--this post is too long, already, but there's so much to catch up on--I completed another small commission for old friends from college that I hadn't seen or heard from in decades.  When I was back at Davidson College in North Carolina this summer for the planting of a tree on campus honoring my late wife Missy as the first woman graduate of that venerable institution, I reconnected with Jon and Betsy Jewett, friends whose wedding we drove to in Texas, from South Carolina, almost forty years ago.  After several catching-up conversations on the last few decades, Jon asked me to do a painting for them, and it was a great pleasure to paint for them this small scene of the James River in Richmond, Virginia, where they live.  Commissions are still fraught with anxiety for me, but they are more palatable when they involve reconnection with old friends or the making of new ones.

James River  ©Kesler Woodward 2012   Acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image) 20" x 17" (framed)