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!

Commissions

A Beautiful Lady  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on paper  24" x 30" 

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate doing commissions? When I go to my studio to paint, I never worry about whether people will like what I do. I paint what I want, and I figure there are 7 billion people on the planet, and someone is bound to like and want it. The problem with commissions is that as soon as I undertake one, that 7 billion number shrinks to one individual.

I only ever agree to paint on commission something that I would want to paint anyway, but knowing that it needs to please one person is a great source of anxiety for me. I worry inordinately whether he or she will like it, and I have bad dreams about their being disappointed. That has never happened, or if it has, those for whom I've undertaken commissions have been kind enough not to say so, and good enough actors that I couldn't tell. The anxiety is awful for me, however, every time, and I try as hard as I can to avoid putting myself in that position.

Nevertheless, sometimes I give in...usually for dear friends to whom I can't say no. Two recent portrait commissions were just such cases. A Beautiful Lady is a "portrait" of a beloved, and now lamented, chokecherry tree on the lawn of a longtime friend. As chokecherries here tend to do, it flourished for years, but finally grew too large to support its own weight, and it split apart over the past two years.

My friend asked me last fall to consider painting a portrait of it for her, as her husband was urging her to cut it down, and she knew that it was the right thing to do. I put it off until this spring, when she called me again and said they were going to cut it down that day. I'd seen "The Lady," as my friend fondly and invariably called it, last year in its fall splendor, and I saw it one last time this spring, as it gamely gave birth to new leaves. A Beautiful Lady is a tribute to that lovely tree and my friend's love for it...a composite of some of its gorgeous bark and branches, with leaves from its last glorious fall and its last indomitable spring.

   

Bruth ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on paper  11" x 9" and Al ©Kesler Woodward 2008 acrylic on paper, 11" x 9"

And speaking of beautiful ladies... Less than a mile from that chokecherry tree lives a woman whose family has been my surrogate Fairbanks family for 35 years. Bruth George and her daughter Katie Sanders took a class from me at the University of Alaska that long ago, and when Bruth and her husband Al invited me to their home for the first time, that winter, I immediately felt as if I'd come home. My late wife Missy and I were a part of family gatherings with them on so many holidays and family birthdays for years, and since Missy's passing, they have embraced Dorli just as thoroughly. The George family is an irreplaceable part of the fabric of living here, for me. 

When Kate, Bruth's granddaughter and Katie and Phil Sanders' daughter, was about to celebrate her marriage to her own beloved Ross this summer, and she said what she really wanted was a portrait of her grandma Bruth, how could I say no? It was a privilege to get to paint this little portrait of Bruth, and I did it in the same medium and size that I painted Bruth's husband Al almost ten years ago, shortly after he passed away. I hope that I captured at least a little of Bruth's indomitable spirit, which continues to shine in her thoughtful eyes. 

New Year, New Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Paintings at Blue Hollomon Gallery in Anchorage

I have just returned from the opening of a show of 15 of my last year's paintings at Blue Hollomon Gallery in Anchorage.  As always, the gallery did a wonderful job of installation and promotion, and it was a great delight to visit with the more than 200 people who came out for my First Friday opening on a 4th of July weekend. The show was enthusiastically received and is off to a good start, but the best thing about opening receptions for me is getting to see and visit with so many friends, many of whom I hadn't seen since my last exhibition in Anchorage, two years ago. 

Imperative  ©Kesler Woodward  2016   acrylic on canvas   24" x 48"

Included in the show were several brand-new paintings that I've finished since my last blog post--among them Imperative, which features a branch of a young birch that I kind of "adopted," and began observing and painting last year, and that I hope to continue chronicling in its growth for some time. This beautiful, unusual tree is part of a grid of birches planted in a long-term environmental study field within the 2000-acre arboretum of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. Dr. Jan Dawe, the Director of the OneTree Alaska program that I've been working with for more than a year now, explained to me that the female catkins which feature prominently in the image are almost certainly a response to stress.

The tree I chose to follow has two main stems, one of which Jan describes as "normal," and the other as a "mutated one." The two stems differ markedly--from the color of their bark and resin glands to the shape and color of their leaves. The darker stem I painted last year (now on view in the OneTree lab on campus) had catkins last summer, but has numerous female catkins--infructescences--this summer. From what Jan has told me, and what I've read, "my" tree may be following a biological Imperative to reproduce itself, in case it doesn't make it.

Several of the paintings in my current exhibition are wondering responses to things I've noticed while working with the scientists at UAF, and as I told a number of people at my exhibition opening last Friday, I'm amazed, and more than a little embarrassed, that I've been looking hard at birches for almost forty years in Alaska and am just now seeing so many new things about them for the first time.

        

Smith Lake Glory  ©Kesler Woodward  2016  acrylic on canvas  10" x 8" and Ridgelight  ©Kesler Woodward  2016  acrylic on canvas   10" x 8"

And though I have more than enough new work ready when each new exhibition approaches, I always want to finish just one or two more pieces before shipping it all to the gallery. I completed Ridgelight and Smith Lake Glory in the weeks just before this show. These little paintings are as much my humbled response to the glorious Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico paintings that Dorli and I tracked down all over the hill country in Tuscany in May of this year as they are celebrations of the beautiful light of Interior Alaska.

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.

 

Light, Leaves, and Stonework of the Sky

Rosary  ©Kesler Woodward 2016   Acrylic on Canvas   36" x 48"

I have had the pleasure for some time now of working with University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Jan Dawe and Nicole Dunham, as they conduct research and programs around the impact of climate change on the birches and boreal forest of Interior Alaska. They were kind enough not only to give me access to their research plot of young birches in a fenced compound in the middle of the "T-Field" in the 2000-acre Arboretum that adjoins campus, but to even create a little "Artist-in-Residence" desk and work area within their spacious OneTreeAlaska lab in the former Tilly Commons building on campus. There, I've been examining and learning about the hundreds of very young birch saplings that they're studying by controlling their exposure to various kinds of light and manipulating their entry and exit from dormancy in coolers and freezers. 

I pepper them with questions about what I'm seeing in the little saplings in the lab, and over the last month, I've been looking hard at the variety of the shapes and colors of their leaves as the plants enter and exit dormancy, photosynthesize or don't, and grow. As in the past, I have found the stressed, damaged, even dying leaves especially beautiful, and have marveled at how varied they are in shape and character. I began gathering leaves themselves, and images of them, and taking them back to my studio to paint.

I've wanted for some time, for reasons I haven't really understood, to paint an image of leaves arranged in a growing spiral, so for this newest painting, I laid out a perfect spiral on the canvas, starting just above and to the right of center to avoid exactly centering the spiral in the canvas' rectangle, and one by one for more than a month, I've painted individual leaves along that spiral. By the time I filled the space, there were 114 of them.

When I started, all I was really interested in was how the real leaves differ so greatly from any kind of textbook image of a birch leaf. Wrinkled, torn, curling, remarkably diverse in color and shape, I wanted to explore and to show their individuality. But as I worked my way out from the center of the spiral, I found myself thinking of these beautiful little leaves almost as beads on a rosary, and each morning when I went to my studio, I'd begin work by looking at each in turn, starting in the center of the spiral, and even saying my morning prayers as my attention moved from one to the next. I am not Catholic, and have never used a rosary, but as the spiral of leaves grew, I found it meditative and calming to regard them methodically, in turn. One morning, doing the brief reflective reading with which I begin each day in the studio, I was surprised to read about even longer and more elaborate strings of 108 prayer beads called mala beads, used by Hindus, Buddhists, and some Sikhs, and similar beads used as an aid to prayer and contemplation in other religions.

I think that's what I love most about both art and the natural world--the way you wander into the forest of either and find something entirely different than what you were looking for.

Stonework of the Sky  ©Kesler Woodward 2016  acrylic on canvas  24" x 36"

In every painting I've done lately, I've made choices early on that sentenced me to an absurd amount of work in order to bring it all together. I didn't think about, when I started Rosary, how long it would take to fill 12 square feet of canvas with tiny leaves in a compact spiral. In Stonework of the Sky, it was the handling of the sky itself--minutely articulating the gradation from dark to light in the early evening heavens--that kept me busy for many days on end. I hadn't intended to turn the darkening sky into tessellations, almost a mosaic of bits of changing and darkening color from horizon to zenith, but in the course of mining the structure of the branches of the dark trees, I realized I'd need to apply that same kind of excavation in the sky to make it all work together.

Stonework of the Sky is a very different painting from the one I set out to make, and it took three or four times as long as I'd anticipated, but I was excited, when done, with what was for me a new way of structuring a broad field of color, and of saying something about the night sky. The name, suggested to me by my friend Robert Hannon, comes from the title of a book of poetry by late Fairbanks poet Joe Enzweiler. I wasn't familiar with the book when Robert mentioned it, but the name seemed perfect for this image, and when I read some of Enzweiler's poetry and his reference to stonework of the sky, I liked it even better.

Feedback about my paintings from friends often teaches me things about my own work and helps me see and understand what I've done in new ways. My friend Simon Hamm, who with his wife Jenna purchased this painting, brought it even more to life for me when he told me about having met years ago in Maine an elder in the Wolf clan of the Mohawk nation, whose name in Mohawk meant "the color of the evening sky between sunset and night." That's not something we have a word for in our language, but it defines exactly what I was after in this painting.

Incandescence  ©Kesler Woodward 2016  acrylic on canvas 20" x 24"

And one more new painting... When I posted in mid-January an image of and brief commentary on A Small Epiphany, my latest painting of looking through the winter forest into the sun, a collector of my work in New Mexico called within hours to say he wanted it. Another collector, in St. Louis, wrote just after to say she had wanted it, but had waited to measure an area of wall, and was disappointed to find it already sold.  She said if I ever did something similar, but ideally a bit larger, she'd be very interested. I am normally very reluctant to do commissions, but I was at that point very much on fire with this kind of mid-winter light, and was already planning to do at least one more of the sort, so I made Incandescence specifically for her. She sent me a photo of it on her wall a week later. I always love seeing photos of my paintings in their new homes!

Our Boreal Forest

Boreal Brethren  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  48" x 24" 

Even as I was working toward what turned out to be a very successful solo exhibition at Well Street Gallery in Fairbanks last month, I was pleased to have been invited to participate in an important group exhibition in Fairbanks that opens in August, titled "Our Boreal Forest." The exhibit, at the Bear Gallery in the Civic Center in Fairbanks, will include works by a number of accomplished artists and writers, reflecting on the great Northern forest that encircles the globe. I will be giving a lecture in conjunction with the exhibit on August 25 at 7 p.m.  in the gallery, in which I'll talk about the way artists from Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and the Russian North have depicted this extraordinary ecosystem--the world's largest land-based biome and one that represents almost 30% of the earth's forest cover.

My two paintings in the show focus on two of the major trees in the Boreal Forest--birches and aspens. Nearly everyone who knows my work thinks of me as a painter not just of the boreal forest, but specifically of birch trees. Almost no one notices that I paint almost as many aspens as birches. Both these paintings are about the fact that these two similar-looking, but actually quite different and unrelated, trees are nevertheless boreal brethren, and that aspens are beautiful, too.

Beautiful Aspens  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  36" x 24"

New Works - New Exhibition

I have been hard at work, and many of the fruits of my recent labors go on view tonight, when my latest exhibition opens at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks. Only one of the 19 paintings in the exhibition is more than a year old, and most were completed in the first six months of this year.  I have held off on posting images of and commentary on the latest works, so they would all be available for the show, but I've just put all the info on them into my Available Works Album which you can click on at the upper right of this page at any time, and I'll make a few comments on several of them here. 

   

Kyrie ©Kesler Woodward 2015 acrylic on canvas 30" x 40"

I think the most difficult challenge every artist faces, sooner or later, is to avoid making copies, and eventually parodies, of his or her own work. So though I make images of birches and the boreal forest again and again, I'm always trying to find new ways to paint them, and new things to say about them. In Kyrie and Tree of Mystery, among the paintings in this exhibit especially, I was reaching for a somewhat less literal, almost mystical quality. The looser handling of the glazes and the contrasting hues in Kyrie, I hope, contribute to my effort to capture a little of the magic of budding birch leaves in the North, straining to burst free in the burgeoning days of the first week of May. Those leaf buds appear in many of my paintings of birches, and they are always a symbol of hope, light, and new life, but I've never focused on them so directly as in this new, large canvas.

         

North Window, Merlin Birch, Birch and Aspen  ©Kesler Woodward 2015   acrylic on canvas  20" x 10" each

When I've just finished a big painting like Chant or Branches Bare, a canvas that takes many weeks to complete, I often want to paint something small--something that will only require days. It's nice, at such times, to be able to see an end in sight when I begin. North Window, Merlin Birch, and Birch and Aspen, each just 20"  tall and 10" wide, are little paeans of praise to favorite trees in my own yard, and the view out my north studio window.  Birch and Aspen is a frank acknowledgment of something that few followers of my work notice, or at least remark upon--that there are almost as many aspens as birches in the scenes I paint.

 

Springfall: Listening  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

And finally, for this post, another different kind of image in the current exhibition. Springfall: Listening is the latest in the ongoing series of paintings I'm doing in response to poems by my friend Peggy Shumaker. The yearlong "conversation" between a poet and a painter that we're engaged in is ongoing, and I've mentioned it here before and will have more to say about it in future posts, but to eavesdrop on the full conversation, you'll have to attend my next exhibition, in Anchorage in September at the Alaska Humanities Forum, which will feature all the poems and the paintings. The series continues to twist and turn in ways that surprise each of us, and all I'll say for now about "Listening Among Birches," Peggy's poem to which this painting most immediately responds, is that it begins with these lines:

Those of us still rooted to this earth

lie back on the sponge of other lives,

look up through thirteen layers of breath.

That's a frank teaser, so I'll hope you'll stay tuned, and that you may be able to attend the exhibition at the Alaska Humanities Forum, which will open on the second Friday in September.

And I hope  in the meantime, many of you who read this will be able to see my current exhibition at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks, which will be up throughout the month of July. Thanks so much to David Mollett and his staff for the great job they do at Well Street of supporting art and artists from Fairbanks and throughout Alaska.

Below are images of just a few more of the works in the current exhibition. As always, you can click on them to see larger images, or find all the information about them in my Available Works Album.

          

Plains of Murie, Tree of Mystery, Spring Leads Us On  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas   16" x 20" each

    

Deep Woods Birch and Summer Birch  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  10" x 8" each

The Pleasures of Spring

Birches Bare  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas   48" x 60"

I worked on the large canvas Birches Bare for more than a month. Like many of my recent images, it's part of an ongoing "conversation" between my paintings and a series of poems by my friend, former Alaska Poet Laureate Peggy Shumaker.  She writes a poem, and I make a painting in response to it. She writes a poem in reply to that painting, and I paint in answer to it. Each painting or poem is a response to the last. The exhibition we'll have together at the Alaska Humanities Forum in Anchorage in September will afford an opportunity for visitors to eavesdrop on that yearlong conversation.

I am not thinking so much about making a consistent body of work for this show as immersing myself in the conversation. I can only paint what I paint, and the way I paint, but what I'm trying to do is immerse myself in each of Peggy's poems as they arrive. I read the new arrival many times, over weeks, and then one day, I go to work in my studio in response to it. I never know, when I begin, what that response will be, and my surprise at what emerges is one of the chief pleasures of this collaboration.

Birch trunks stand in for people in my work, and Birches Bare--like the poem to which it replies--is a drama. Dark, aggressive branches jut from trunks bright with life but scarred by living. Out of those dark limbs, tiny spring leaves of renewed life bud, slowly swell, and prepare to unfurl, just as they are doing this week outside my studio window.

 

 
Panoply   ©Kesler Woodward 2015   acrylic on canvas   36" x 48"

I started painting Panoply almost five years ago. Struck by a particularly gorgeous birch I saw one day while running in the forest, I decided to compose on canvas, in a vertical stripe, a little song of praise to its exceptional beauty. I put the painting away and tried to forget about it until many months later, when I found myself staring at another trunk on a different trail. I added a laud to the new trunk in a new, slimmer stripe, and I put the painting away again. For nearly five years I've put it away and brought it out, adding canticles each time a new birch pelt struck me with wonder unexpectedly. 

Just this month I filled the last slot on the canvas. I like that it's a kind of five-year chronicle of being surprised by delight.

 

Morning ©Kesler Woodward   2015 acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Two small paintings I have completed since my last post represent two sides of the way I'm affected by winter. 

Morning is the view across our front yard as we complete the climb home on the wooded trail behind our house, at the end of our winter runs. The sun rises late, barely east of due south, and it backlights the trees, casting shadows our way as we crest the ridge on which we live. I often stand in the driveway for a minute or more, not so much catching my breath as drinking in those rays.

This kind of light is one of the reasons we not only plan to stay in Fairbanks, but have no interest in "snowbirding"--spending months of each winter in a warmer clime. We'd so miss this ethereal, explicitly seasonal light. 

 

Dreaming in March  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

Dreaming in March represents another aspect of winter--especially late winter--for me. Though I'm less conscious of it than I am of winter's beauty, by early spring I think every year I'm starved for color.

By March, the Northern world has been blindingly, sublimely white for six months or more, and though it's perhaps my favorite time of year, I think some part of me longs for other brilliant hues. Sooner or later, perenially, I find myself dreaming of, and painting, landscapes filled with the rich chromas of the nearly forgotten fall.

 

2015 - Family, Home, and Collaboration

Family  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  36" x 48" (image)

We began the new year by visiting family. My son Eli, his partner Becca, and my granddaughter Sage live in Snohomish, Washington, and Dorli and I flew to visit them early on the morning of New Year's Day. When we came home, the first painting I did in the studio was this one. As I've explained here before, I very seldom know what my paintings are about until they're done. I go to my studio and paint what I feel ready to paint, and it's only when I'm done that I sit back, look at it, and ask, "Now what was that about?" 

Painting birches is not a default for me. I know by now that when I paint a new "birch portrait," with a group of highly individual birch trunks, it's because I'm pondering something--that the trees, as always in my work, stand in for people, and that through them I'm processing thoughts and feelings. I didn't realize, when I was working on it, that I was painting a portrait of a strong young family like my son's, but when I'd finished, I could see it. Close but individual, strong but vulnerable, beautiful...

Horizon Holds On: Denali from Taiga ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  30" x 40" (image)

Like family, "place"--where I am home--is important to me, so it's not surprising that it's a constant focus of my work. Nearly every day, Dorli and I take a brief afternoon break to walk our dog together, and most days we make the short stroll with her down to an overlook in our subdivision, Taiga Woodlands, that affords a panoramic view of the city of Fairbanks in the foreground and a huge swath of the Alaska Range in the background, including Denali--Mt. McKinley.

It's more than 120 miles, by line-of-sight, from our hillside in Fairbanks to the mountain itself, but especially on the many crisp, clear days of winter, Denali looms above the Chena Ridge hillside on the southwest horizon. Like the auroras at night, which we can see in Fairbanks on average 120 nights a year, the sight of Denali at sunset is something we never tire of admiring.

Vespertine  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  20" x 16" (image)

I visited Denali for two decades before I ever painted it, waiting until I felt I had something personal to say about it in my work. By now, however, I've painted it from as close as six miles from its summit and as far away as Fairbanks, in all seasons, times of day, and weathers, for another two decades. I've painted it enough that I often wonder whether it's possible to paint it again personally, freshly, from a differently evocative perspective. Just this month I've realized that this view--the giant mountain tiny on the horizon, only visible at all because it stands so tall--is yet another way to pay homage to its grandeur.

 

Three Blues: Mt. Dickey from the Sheldon Hut  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  oil on paper  28" x 40" (image)

I'm excited, too, to be collaborating once again with Peggy Shumaker, our dear friend and a former Alaska Poet Laureate, on a new body of work that will be a "conversation" between her poems and my paintings. I was invited last fall by the Alaska Humanities Forum to have an exhibition of my work in the gallery at their Anchorage offices, and I asked Peggy if she'd like to collaborate with me on this venture. I asked her to write a poem, to which I'd respond with a painting, to which she'd respond with a poem, which I'd reply to with another painting, and so on... 

I don't like to talk too much about works in progress, even a year-long, many-part work in progress like this new collaboration, so I won't share now the wonderful poem of Peggy's that inspired Three Blues: Mt. Dickey from the Sheldon Hut. This conversation between poet and painter will have many twists and turns in the coming months, and one of the most exciting things about it for me is that I don't know what it will look like when complete.  All I'm comfortable telling you now is that the "Three Blues" part of this painting's title is the title of Peggy's initiating poem,  and that a passage in her poem "Geology of Wonder," written in response to this painting, helped open my eyes to a way to paint Denali from my home in Taiga Woodlands. 

This is the way, I hope and believe, our collaboration will unfold. Each of us will make work not unlike that which we normally make, but our works' conversation will help each of us get outside ourselves enough to see new possibilities, explore new sensibilities, and see ourselves and our work in new ways.