Kesler Woodward

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.

 

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.

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)

Travel and Work

I've just returned from a weeklong artist residency on Orcas Island, Washington. My stay in the beautiful Kangaroo House Bed and Breakfast there was the prize for being chosen 2012 Artist of the Year by Artsmith,  an Eastsound, Washington-based arts organization that provides residencies, literary events, and exhibition, performance, and publishing opportunities for artists and writers. 

The week exploring relatively remote, sprawling, lake- and mountain-filled Orcas Island from this peaceful, comfortable base was both restful and energizing, and will lead, in time, to new work. I am deeply grateful to Jill McCabe Johnson, Director of Artsmith, and to her and her husband Charles for their great breakfasts, warm welcome, and care during the week on Orcas.

As always when I travel, especially to new locales, I tried on Orcas to focus on being in the place, getting to know it, rather than making images of it. I try as hard as I can not to even think about what kind of images I might make, but instead give the place itself my full attention, explore it as fully as possible. I sometimes do sketches, and I do take photographs for future reference, so that when the time comes I will get the shape of things exactly right, but I don't try to do work about the place while I'm there.

I know from past experience that if I work from life, I will spend a lot of time responding to the landscape's prettiest, most superficially attractive aspects, and that it is much better for me to give all my attention to the place itself. I pay attention to what it looks like, of course--its weather, its light, its topography--but just as much or more to what it makes me think about, how it relates to what I've been reading, how it feels to be there. I am ultimately, always, trying to make work about what it felt like to be in a place, more than what that place looked like.

Weeks or months, perhaps as much as a year from now, I'll go up to my studio one morning, and I'll realize that the experience of being on Orcas Island has trickled down into my consciousness deeply enough that I have something more personal to say about it than, "Isn't this a pretty place?"  Then I'll marshall my images, and more importantly my memories, and I'll try to distill on canvas or paper something that gets at that feeling. I have no idea what those images will be. The only thing I know is that they won't look anything like the photos I took this month of that pretty place.

 

 

I tend to think that unless I'm in my studio, painting, then I'm not at work, so it's important to remind myself that both getting out every day into the great boreal forest that surrounds my home and traveling to new places are parts of my work as well.  In the last year, I've spent time in many other parts of Alaska, and in North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, and Arizona, and images have come from or will come from all of them.

On my studio wall, in drawers and sketchbooks and elsewhere, are lots of images from past travels--oil pastels and paintings on paper from riverbanks near Fairbanks to Denali National Park in Alaska, Congaree National Park in South Carolina, a bridled titmouse at Patagonia Lake in Arizona, and many more. These are not currently framed and hanging in galleries, and most don't even appear on the "Available Works" section of this website, but they are an essential part of the weird, idiosyncratic way in which I seem to need to work.

So, for example, I have made two trips to Juneau in the last year--more than 600 miles from Fairbanks and a world away in climate and ecosytem. I taught a weeklong workshop there last June, and I went back down in November for the opening of our Boreal Birch exhibit at the Alaska State Museum.

The June trip afforded me the opportunity to get out with artists from the Plein Rein group of plein-air painters into some of my favorite landscapes anywhere. I didn't paint while I was there, but focused on my teaching and on being in that wonderful place with those terrific people. Many months later, well into winter, I made images based on that experience--not the images I would have guessed I would make, when I was there, but of moments and places that seemed to need to be painted when the time came.

Three of those images--a raven sitting on rocks below the tidal waterfall at Amalga Harbor, silvery light off the water filtering through the Southeast Alaska rainforest, and Mendenhall Glacier, which I hadn't painted since I lived there more than 30 years ago--have just this month migrated from my studio wall to my framer, on their way to the Juneau City Museum.

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Paintings will almost certainly come from the November trip, as well, but I don't know when. All I can do is go to my studio and work. What happens there, what I need to paint, only reveals itself to me in its own time.

Fall and Winter

Liberty Falls  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas  36" x 48" (image)

The snow has arrived in Interior Alaska, and so I'm not only remembering wanting it to come, but looking back to the days just before it began drifting down. Liberty Falls is just off the road to Chitina, Alaska, almost seven hours' drive south of Fairbanks--a place I've gone most summers for the past 30 years to harvest salmon to fill my freezer for the coming winter.  Nearing Chitina and access to the mighty Copper River, I'm usually gripped by fishing fever and can't make myself stop to admire Liberty Falls, but I have managed it often enough to paint it several times over the years.

This year, thanks to my broken, dislocated shoulder, I didn't make it to Chitina to perch precariously on rocks above the nearly half-mile wide torrent of the Copper, sweeping a 3' diameter net on the end of a 10' long pole through eddies of opaque, silt-laden water for hours, sometimes days, in search of sockeyes, silvers, or the occasional king salmon. But just before Labor Day, Dorli and I drove past the Liberty Falls campground on our way to McCarthy--a long 60 miles on a road rough even by Alaska standards, past Chitina. We took a few minutes to stop at  the falls, camped nearby, and on the way back through a couple of days later, hiked up onto and around some of the ridges in the area. 

I've painted falling, fast-running water off and on over the years and never tire of trying to capture a little of its magic.  It's always hard to restrain my impulse to paint the water itself, to let the rocks, the vegetation, and the sticks and logs brought down by the torrent channel the brilliant white of the canvas and the little bits of flashing, flying color and darkness, the way they do the water itself.

 Merlin's Woods  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas  20" x 16" (image)

The fall in Interior Alaska is breaktakingly brief, but always beautiful, and this year it was especially spectacular. I love the brilliant color of the variously yellow leaves on the birches and aspens, set against the dark, blue-green, almost blackness of the spruces, but even more magical for me is the bright red understory of the boreal forest. When it looked like this, just weeks ago, I was dreaming of snow. Now that I'm able to ski out my back door and onto the trails, I can revel contentedly in the memory of that brilliance.

Gorge Creek Snowfall  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas  16" x 20" (image)

Just before the snow started falling here, I completed this small painting of another autumn squall in Denali National Park. Gorge Creek Snowfall is almost a smaller version of the 4' x 5' canvas Harbinger that I completed this summer and posted an image of  in July. It's the same kind of day, the same time of year, the same kind of sudden snow swirling through the bright autumn landscape, just turning my gaze slightly to the left and down, into the dramatic cleft of Gorge Creek. 

New Birch Portraits

 

I have been out in the woods, on the trails, even more than usual this winter as I've been preparing for a long ski into Denali National Park in late February. My writer friend Frank Soos and I will ski in 43 miles and spend about a week in the Murie Cabin on the East Fork of the Toklat River, where I have stayed and worked every summer since 2002. This will be my first extended trip into, and stay in, the Park in winter, and I'm excited about it.  I have no idea what kind of imagery will come out of that trip--probably months after I return, when the experience has settled into my consciousness deeply enough that I think I have something personal to say in paint about what it was like to be out there in the quiet of winter.  

Skiing nearly every day on the trails around Fairbanks this fall and early winter has led to different imagery than I might have expected. After a year and a half of looking into the sun, painting what I call "epiphanies," and looking up through the trees toward the sky, I've found myself once again enthralled by the character of the individual birch trees I glide past on the trail. This has happened so often, over the past quarter century.  Again and again, I quit painting birch "portraits" and focus on other subjects--mountains, water, people, animals, light in the forest... Then one day I find myself standing in front of a particularly gorgeous birch, open-mouthed in wonder at its individuality and beauty, and the next thing I know I'm back in the studio painting its portrait.

That's what happened this January. Returning to the northern forest following a trip to Florida, where Missy and I spent two weeks exploring the Everglades and the Keys, I have been riveted by the way the daily-burgeoning light picks out individual trees, single trunks, along my path. These new paintings are tiny paeans of praise to some of the beautiful birches in the Fairbanks woods, oil-on-board responses to their individuality, sensuality, warm color in the cold winter white. 

The five above are 7" x 5" images, and the two below 8" x 6". (They will be 9 1/2" x 7 1/2" and 10 1/2" x 8 1/2", respectively, in their frames.) It's nearly pointless for me to predict what I'll do next, but right now I'm thinking I'll just keep working gradually larger, painting beautiful birch trunks in the growing light, until the impulse slackens and I find myself enthralled by something else.

All images ©Kesler Woodward 2010.

  

Remembering Winter, Dreaming of Summer

Solstice Sun

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on canvas

48" x 60" (image)

49.5" x 61.5" (framed)

I began work on this large painting in the dead of winter, shortly after I wrote my January 2 post about how I really wanted to  paint Fairbanks in the eerie light of 40 below zero and ice fog.  It had been in the -40s for a week at that time, and it continued just as cold for another week. Finally, I began this painting of downtown Fairbanks from the north side of the Chena River, looking directly into the low winter sun through dense ice fog at nearly 50 below zero. 

I'd never included in my many winter paintings downtown buildings, utility poles and street lights, transformers and electrical lines, or anything like the iron railing along the river, and had never tried seriously to paint sunlight blossoming through dense ice fog.  I was traveling off and on throughout January and February, but worked on this painting all the time I was home for two months, finishing it just a few days after returning from Germany in early March. 

It's exciting for me, slowly incorporating more and more human presence, built environment, acknowledgement of people and their activities in my paintings.  I can't imagine that they will ever not be about light, landscape, weather, and place, but I'm eager to explore in my work the ways that people of the North, and what we do, are a big part what this place means.  

Fresh Snow, Denali Park

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)

17" x 20" (framed)

I think sometimes that the only way I really know what's on my mind is to look around my studio and see what I've painted.  Clearly, in the midst of living through yet another winter and grappling with how to represent it at its most severe, I've been dreaming about Denali Park in summer. Missy and I will go there again this summer, stay in the East Fork Cabin in the middle of the Park, and roam territory that we've come to know very well, but still surprises and amazes us.  I think I do more paintings of the Park during the winter than I do in the summer.  They are dreams of warmth in the midst of winter, recollections of light that I long for in January, February, and March. I think I must store inside the memories and images of those brief, intense summers, and access them for sustenance in the short days of December.

This little painting is all about the bright, bright white of an overnight snowfall in the Park, freshly covering the tundra down to a certain elevation.  It's early enough in the day that the snow line is almost perfectly straight, but that will give way to a receding, jagged contour in sunlight and shadow in a matter of hours, over the course of the brilliant, sunny day. 

Denali Summer Evening

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)

17" x 20" (framed)

I visited the Park for 25 years before I painted Mt. McKinley, but in the last few years I've painted it many times, often from this same vantage point--looking west from Stony Hill. What interests me is how different the same scene looks, not so much from year to year, but from month to month in the summer and from hour to hour in the nearly continuous daylight. 

It's a bittersweet time of year--evening in August, when it's still very light out of doors, but the light is soft, muted, foreshadowing the long nights that are fast approaching.

East Fork Brilliance

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)

17" x 20" (framed)

This is a view of the East Fork of the Toklat River, descending toward the river from Polychrome Pass, traveling east.  It's not literally this bright, but this is how it appears in my memory, especially in January.  Winter dream paintings like this one are, for me, not so much about the way the Park looks, but how I remember feeling when I've stood in this place; how I feel when I think about heading back again. 

This is very near the cabin where I stay in the Park, so it's a place I know particularly well.  Nearly every morning when I'm there, I walk up the hill from the cabin, down to the bridge across the East Fork,and part of the way up the winding way toward Polychrome Pass. I look for animals on the gravel bar of the river, watch the clouds and light move across the mountains to the south. The really simple, but fundamental lesson that birders, hunters, and artists learn as time goes along--the more you look, the more you see--has nowhere been more evident to me than here. 

Quiet Pool near Teklanika

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image)

20" x 17" (framed)

It's such a relief, after struggling with a big, complex, multilayered canvas for weeks or even months, to paint very small oils and acrylics on paper that are done in a day, or days. The challenge for me is, as in many aspects of my work, double-edged, two-sided.  I don't want, just because they're small, these little paintings to be inconsequential.  I want them to be about something--memory, phenomena, anticipation, longing...not just pretty views. But I have to remind myself that they don't have to be complicated, and can't be labored.  It's hard for me to just put the image down and leave it alone, trust to my instincts, suppress detail and go for essence. It's hard not to think that because it goes (relatively) quickly, it can't be right,...can't be enough. 

These days, I seldom throw away a large painting and start over. I know a big canvas is going to be a struggle, and I know that if I can maintain my focus, energy, and faith--not panic and do something dreadful and irredeemable to it when it's looking awful--I can almost almost always bring it around, often discovering in the process something I'd never have found, if it hadn't been such a fight. But these little paintings don't work that way, for me.  They have to be crisp, light, full of certainty I don't always feel. They go more quickly, but a lot of them get trashed.  The four here survived from nine. All nine were probably necessary to get these four, but it's important to me that I'm the only one who ever sees the ones that were thrown away. 

A Cold New Year

Colors of the Magpie

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

20" x 28" (image)

30" x 37" (framed)

It's a new year, and so far it's a cold one in the far North. Though we're on the right side of winter solstice and gaining ground in terms of daylight every day, four hours of wan sunlight through the ice fog doesn't do much warming. It's been 40º below zero or colder every day for the last week. (No need to add Celsius or Fahrenheit to that temperature. -40º is where the two scales overlap.) So it is cold, and it is dark, but each winter solstice, especially when it's this frigid and there's dense ice fog, I'm stunned by the eerie, ethereal quality of the brief hours of light.  I've been driving around town and out to the Chena and Tanana rivers in the daylight all week long, ogling the low winter sun and wondering how on earth I might capture some fraction of its mystery. We'll see.

In the meantime, I go to the studio and work, and what I find myself working on is, as often in winter, memories of summer.  This is one of the magpies that hung around the East Fork Cabin in Denali Park when Missy and I were there last summer, often pecking at the wooden shingles on the roof in search of insects. In the same way that I find myself constantly wondering at the myriad colors in the bark of young birches, I was amazed at the brilliant hues--both pigments and tricks of diffracted light--in this gorgeous bird's plumage. Painting it several times life-size enables me to explore those colors more fully, immersing myself in the magic of avian finery.

A Geyser of Light

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on canvas

20" x 16" (image)

21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed)

And I don't seem to have run out of fascination with looking into the sun.  I keep thinking that this series of what I still think of as "epiphanies" is going to run its course, but this winter, as last, I'm still in awe of the power of that wan globe of light and its ability to blast its way through the densest forest, turning the spruces every color of the rainbow before geysering through to freedom. 

People often ask me how I know when a series is finished, when it's time to move on to another subject or theme.  I never know in advance how long any series will run. For a long time, the possibilities seem endless, and I can't wait to get to them all. As I'm working on one painting, I find myself thinking, "Well, what if I did it this way, or that way?" or "I wonder if I could do something with the memory of that?" One day, though, sooner or later, I go to the studio to work, and I catch myself thinking, "Well, I wonder what else I could do with this idea?"  When that happens, I know the series is done.  It may come back to life in a different form, one day, with new memories or insights, but there's no point in my trying to come up with a new variation for the sake of variety.

It's very, very important to me that I catch myself in that thought, and that I pay attention to its message.  The most difficult challenge for any artist, I think, is to avoid making copies, and eventually parodies, of his or her own work.  It's almost impossible, and it seems important to be as ruthless with myself as I can about listening to that internal dialogue and acting on it.

Trapped in the Birchbark: A Self-Portrait Mask

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Birch bark, copper nails on wood

20" x 16" (image)

21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed)

How's this for a totally different kind of image? I worked on this piece in mid-December for inclusion in an invitational exhibition of "masks," called "Countenance," that opened the first Friday in January. I don't usually accept invitations to theme exhibitions, unless the themes are already aligned conceptually with what I normally do in my work. I can't just go to my studio, jump the rails of my inner train, and do something entirely different to match a given theme.  I respect and even envy those who can, but it doesn't seem to be within my power.

The invitation to participate in this exhibit, though, came many months in advance, it seemed intriguing, and in a moment of weakness I agreed to participate.  I worked through all the end of November and the first couple of weeks of December on a commissioned painting I had promised for some time. By the time I finished it, I only had a couple of weeks until work for this invitational exhibition was due.  I almost backed out--almost called the curator and explained that I shouldn't have agreed to do something like this, and that I was sure she would have plenty of other work. But my pride and sense of responsibility got the better of me, and I decided I'd at least try.

It was a lot of fun. The most difficult part was harvesting the birch bark. I used to have pieces of actual bark pinned all over one wall of my studio, for inspiration and as models, but I've long since gotten rid of them, and so I had to harvest birch bark in the middle of winter.  I discovered that it was impossible to strip the bark from even the oldest standing dead trees in the forest around my house, in their frozen state.  I ended up cutting lengths of trunk and bringing them in to thaw beside the furnace in the garage for several days, then stripping large sections, cutting them up, scraping their undersides down, and finally gluing and nailing them with copper nails, in a pattern, onto the solid board backing. Finally, I cut and peeled away sections of the surface, revealing darker underlayers of the bark, to create a stylized self-portrait.  Not exactly a mask, but close enough, I think, and very much about me and my work.  I don't think I'm going to take up making images out of actual birch bark, but it was fun to step completely outside my normal way of working, respond to the theme, and still do something that felt personal and "real."