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.

 

It's All About Light

Smith Lake Twilight  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  acrylic on canvas  36" x 24" (image) 

The woods change dramatically in the short few miles between downtown Fairbanks and our home on a ridge overlooking the city. Dense, dark spruce forest lines the lower portions of the road that climbs from permafrost-laden Farmer’s Loop, giving way almost entirely just a few hundred feet higher to aspens and birches that grow in the south-facing, better-drained soils. As I started the steady climb on the way home one evening a few weeks ago, I was struck by the drama of the tops of the tall, dark spruces against the twilit sky.

It’s been a while since I looked hard at and thought about painting spruces against the sky, but something clicked in that moment, and I found myself musing not just on the spruces lining the way home, but on those which grow in profusion on the lower slopes of Chena Ridge, in the forest surrounding Creamers Field, and especially on those in the 2000-acre preserve of woods, ski trails, ponds, marshes, and fields that adjoin the University of Alaska campus. In memory, and soon in fact, I was back on the shore of Smith Lake in those woods, one of the places in Fairbanks I’ve most loved to paint.

Smith Lake Twilight is my latest paean to the way the descending April sun not only blasts through the tops of the spruces, filling the space just above the horizon with white light, but kindles some of the first clouds trying to form cumulus shapes above, in the lengthening days of spring.

 

Twilight Ridge  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  oil on canvas  20" x 10" (image)

Hard on the heels of painting Smith Lake Twilight, I received another unexpected jolt of inspiration. Dorli and I watched on DVD a terrific film made in 2010 by the great documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog and Russian director Dmitry Vasyukov, about the lives of hunters and trappers in a remote village on the Yenisei River in central Siberia.  Happy People: A Year in the Taiga took us through the seasons with Russians who live in a landscape remarkably similar to our own, on a great river much like the Tanana or Yukon.

I loved seeing the villagers fish for pike, whitefish, and burbot in those rivers much as I have, and I marveled at the trapper’s patient, competent, solitary maintenance of his traplines and huts in winter, catching sables to support his family back in the village. But a couple of scenes, especially, caught my painter’s eye—twilit vistas with baroque clouds above the rivers at the change of seasons.

This week and last I’ve been in my studio, remembering just such scenes, looking south from hills above the north bank of the Tanana, and thinking that here in the North, it really is all about light.

 

 

 

Light in the Sky  ©Kesler Woodward 2014   oil on canvas   8" x 10" (image)