Replenishment ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 60"
I'm not certain why I've been painting mountains, glaciers, and falling snow for the last month, rather than birch trees and boreal forest. I've been reading and thinking a lot about climate change, and about how the coastal glaciers I began visiting more than four decades ago have almost all shrunk dramatically in that time, but I didn't go to my studio and decide to make paintings about climate change. It's hard--for me at least--to work that way without simply illustrating an idea. I'd much rather discover, after I've made a painting and asked myself what it was about, that I had something to say about it.
I've painted mountains and glaciers for decades, but it's been some time since I turned to them as subject matter, so when I finished this painting, I sat and looked at it from across the studio and asked myself, as usual, "So what was that about?" The snow arrived very late this year here in Fairbanks, as it has for several years now, and I'm sure that the falling snow in these paintings came in response to my perennial eagerness for it. But when I cast about for a title, Replenishment came to mind immediately, and I thought, wryly, that Alaska's glaciers must be longing for it at least as much as I have been.
As soon as it was done, I prepared another large (4 ft. x 5 ft.) canvas and tackled another glacier that I know well, imagining that it, too, must be dreaming of the snow and cold that enabled it to grow and spill from mountaintop to sea, and which it needs, in its season, to continue to thrive.
Glacier Dreams ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 60"
Since my last post, and before making these big mountain, glacier, falling snow paintings, I finished the half-dozen new pen and ink drawings I set out to make of some of my favorite birches in our own yard. I'll get around to having them framed individually, eventually, but for now I'm enjoying having them push-pinned as a group on the painting wall in my studio, where they catch my eye with delight daily, as I paint.
Six new pen-and-ink birch portraits on the wall in my studio. For titles, sizes, and individual images, click on the Available Works Album at the top of the right-hand column above and then on any of the individual thumbnails.
