Kesler Woodward

New Year, New Work, New Shows, News

Light in the North  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   acrylic on paper   20" x 28" (image) 30" x 37" (frame)

It's a new year, but the pace of the last few months is the same. On January 6, I opened the third exhibition of my work in three months, at the Blue Heron Art Gallery, run by the Vashon Arts Alliance on Vashon Island, Washington. On February 3, the big Boreal Birch traveling exhibition of my paintings, Barry McWayne's photographs, and Margo Klass's constructions arrives from the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, where it's been since early November, and opens at Well Street Art Gallery here in Fairbanks.

My exhibit on Vashon Island, a short ferry ride from downtown Seattle, was with noted Pacific Northwest photographer Paul Bannick, whose extraordinary photographs of birds in their habitats have won national awards, were shown recently at the Burke Museum in Seattle, and are featured in his own beautiful book The Owl and the Woodpecker. The show opened on January 6, and on January 8, Paul and I gave a talk about our work to a sold-out crowd. We had a fun conversation about how we work, moderated by Mike Feinstein, who with his wife Gerry organizes an annual lecture series with visiting artists, writers and others for the Vashon Arts Alliance. 

One of the great pleasures of the Vashon exhibition was seeing at the opening and talk many old friends who have settled in the Pacific Northwest--friends who came from all around the Seattle area and as far as Portland. It was especially meaningful that my son Eli and his family--Becca and their daughter Sage--who live in Seattle, were able to come. It was a pure delight to get to carry Sage--my now 4-month old granddaughter--around to look at each of my paintings at her first art opening.

I have resisted, with some difficulty, imposing pictures of my beautiful granddaughter on readers of my blog, but her appearance at my opening gives me an excuse to share my delight in the company of her and her wonderful parents.

It also gives me an opportunity to more formally introduce my companion Dorli McWayne, whom a few attentive readers have already noted my mentioning in posts in the past few months. Dorli and I have known each other for more than 30 years, but until the death of her husband, my close friend Barry McWayne, just two weeks after the death of my wife Missy, I knew her only as his wife, and we had literally never had a substantive conversation.  In the year and a half since the almost simultaneous, sudden and unexpected losses of our beloved partners, we have--with equal parts surprise and joy--found each other, and we are enjoying beginning work on the puzzle of melding two large households and two extraordinarily busy lives.

 Madrones  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image) 20" x 17" (frame) 

For the Vashon Island exhibition, I included several images from the Pacific Northwest, from the colorful madrone trees which I have long admired and have painted often before to scenes from the Skagit River Valley and the North Cascades.

The new Alaska images in the show are all about light. I talked, in my presentation at the Vashon Arts Alliance, about how lucky we are in this part of the far North to have, even in the depths of winter, hours each day of the kind of twilight that people of all cultures and places find magical. In the high latitudes, the sun wheels around the sky at a shallower angle than in more southerly lands, and both nightfall and daybreak are preceded and followed, year-round, by growing or lingering, ever-changing crepuscular light.

As we once again this year pass by Epiphany in deep cold and begin to hurtle toward the equinox and on toward constant day, I am grateful for new light in the North.

December Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   acrylic on paper   6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)   17" x 20" (frame) 

 

Birch Woods for Denali

Birch Woods for Denali     ©Kesler Woodward 2010     Acrylic on Canvas     2 panels - each 48" x 60"

Nineteen years ago, Missy and I took our son Eli to Denali Elementary School in Fairbanks for his first day of kindergarten. That day, I asked his teacher Katie Brown whether I could come in to read a story to the class once a week. Little did I know, that day, that I'd still be reading to that kindergarten class every Wednesday I'm in town, almost two decades later. It is, quite simply, the most purely unalloyed joy of every week in my life. 

Katie Brown is a remarkable teacher, whose main mission in life seems to be trying to catch one of her students doing something good, something well, something right, and reinforce it. And Denali is an extraordinary public school--perhaps not unique, but certainly rare in Alaska or anywhere else, in its stability, sense of shared purpose and mutual encouragement, and delight in its mission. I got to know all of Eli's elementary school teachers well, reading to each of his classes weekly as he continued through the sixth grade. Five of those seven teachers are still there, almost twenty years later, along with many of the staff who helped make his elementary school experience such a rich and rewarding one. When he moved on to Middle School, I stayed, reading to Katie Brown's kindergarten class, and for several years now to another of Eli's wonderful teachers, Sharlee Reabold's, second grade class as well.

Tim Doran, who took over as Principal when Eli was in first grade, is still the Principal today, and his leadership has unquestionably fostered and helped sustain the school's continuing spirit and sense of close community. So I shouldn't have been surprised, even though I was, when he approached me several months ago to say that he wanted to commission a large painting for the dramatic two-story stairwell on the south end of the building--a space which is not only beautifully lit by big, high, southern and eastern windows, but is visible through those windows, especially on dark winter days, as the school is approached by road from the south. 

Tim wanted birch trees, birch forest--my signature subject matter--and I was happy to oblige. When the two 4' x 5'  paintings I've just finished are installed side by side, a foot or so apart, high in that space, I hope they will look like windows themselves, into the heart of the great boreal forest that surrounds both the school and the Fairbanks community.

Denali Elementary is full of brightly colored, wonderful art of all kinds, ranging from student work, to historical paintings purchased in the 1950's, to stained glass, sculpture, murals, mobiles, and more, some but not all of it commissioned through Alaska's Public Art Program when its new building was completed just a few years ago. Tim was able to find funding for my paintings through fundraising and the support of his PTA, and I am deeply honored that I will have a major piece of my artwork permanently enshrined in this remarkable place.  

 

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.

  

Smith Lake Sky

Smith Lake Sky

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on canvas

36" x 48" (image)

37 1/2" x 49 1/2" (framed)

Smith Lake, in the 2000-acre arboretum that is part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, is one of my favorite places, a place I have painted nearly every year for more than a quarter century. The arboretum, which contains fields, woods, research areas, and a network of trails, is a fantastic asset to the University and the community. Smith Lake and two other, smaller ponds provide habitat for a dozen or more species of migrating waterfowl in the spring and fall. Cross-country ski trails cross all three bodies of water in the winter. The Equinox Marathon trail leads through the forest. Owls call from the trees. In 1992, when the snow and deep cold came so early in September, and stayed, that caribou which normally winter in the foothills of the Alaska Range migrated north into Fairbanks instead, these woods harbored a small band of them all winter long.

Fall is my favorite time around Smith Lake, and every year I find myself walking its shores in late August and early September, marveling at the reflections of the dark spruces in the water, the bright gold leaves of the birches on limbs and the ground, and flocks of swans on the lake itself.  This fall, though, I found myself looking up--at the sky.  I've been looking into the sun, and upward toward the sky, a lot this last couple of years, and so it's not surprising that I would find inspiration in it here. In the hard white of winter, it's a great delight to go to my studio and paint the brilliant sky and intense colors of fall. 

Canopy Mosaic on View to Travelers at the Anchorage International Airport

The newly renovated, completely rebuilt "B" Concourse at the Anchorage International Airport was opened to travelers in early November.  You do have to be traveling in order to see the artwork, as it is beyond the security screening area. But screening for the two main concourses was moved to a new location, and now travelers heading out on any of the major airlines from Anchorage have to pass under the ceiling mosaic, on their way to their gates. The artwork is located just past the screening area, at the junction of the "B" and "C" concourses.

I have posted many images here already of the mosaics in production and in installation, but none of the finished work in the finished space.  Anchorage sculptor Sheila Wyne--my partner on the project--and I hired Hal Gage, one of Alaska's best, and best-known photographers, to document the work, and I am pleased to share here several of my favorite of the many images he produced for us.

The artwork is ©Kesler Woodward and Sheila Wyne, and all of the photographs in this post are ©Hal Gage.

     

A New Look

A quick note to comment on the new look for the weblog.  I realized I had grown tired of the bright green background and same old look, so decided to go for a new, cleaner design with the kind of white background that I generally prefer for my paintings.  Realized, too, as I looked at the templates available on Typepad, that I could use one of my paintings for a banner. The new banner shows a portion of one of my paintings of the Alaska Range from the Denali Highway, Denali Highway, September.  The painting belongs to Morris Communications Company, which has one of the largest collections of my work, and hangs in their corporate office in Augusta, Georgia.  Here's an image of the whole painting: 

 

Denali Highway September

©Kesler Woodward 2000   Oil on canvas   36" x 90"

I'll have images of new work up soon, along with professional photos of the Canopy mosaic at the Anchorage International Airport.  I'm currently a couple of weeks' work into another painting looking up through the trees--this one from the forest near Smith Lake in the 2000 acre arboretum adjoining the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. And working on a proposal for a large project for Denali Elementary here in Fairbanks, where I've read to the same kindergarten class every Wednesday morning I've been in town for eighteen years. 

 

A Busy September

Late August and all of September were exceptionally busy for me, not only working in the studio, but traveling for work and exhibitions from Anchorage, Alaska to Aiken, South Carolina. As I indicated in my last post, the installation of Canopy, the mosaics in the Anchorage International Airport, was completed in mid-September, but just as the final sections of mosaic on the column were being installed, Missy and I had to fly to South Carolina for an exhibition of my work at the Aiken Center for the Arts.

  

This was an unusual show, organized by one of my high school classmates, Linda Prior Hunley (on the right in the photo), on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of our high school graduation.  Along with my work, it included a number of Linda's extraordinarily beautiful, large-scale charcoal drawings based on bones and other natural forms, and the abstract bronze sculptures of another 1969 classmate, Esther Randall (on the left in the photo), who currently teaches in the Art Department at Eastern Kentucky University. Despite the lack of any obvious reason for our combination other than our high school graduating year, our work was surprisingly complementary. Esther's tall, thin, elegant sculptures punctuated the spaces between panels of my work and occupied the center of the gallery space in a dense grouping, and my brightly colored paintings and Linda's similarly large, but richly monochromatic drawings faced one another across the beautiful old wood floors of the downtown Aiken art center. 

It was a huge treat for me, not only showing with artists whose work I admired, but for the first time in the town where I was born and grew up. My family has lived within miles of the farm I grew up on since well before the Revolutionary War, and my father, both my brothers and their families, and many cousins are still nearby, so we get back often, but I have had almost no contact with anyone in my high school class in forty years, most of it living in the extreme opposite corner of the continent in Alaska. Moreover, in high school I was strictly interested in math and science, and making art had never crossed my mind. So it was a surprise to many of my classmates who attended the exhibition reception or the 40th class reunion, held in the same space a couple of days later, that I had made a career in art. 

Thanks to the flexibility and cooperation of the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia and its director Kevin Grogan, the Aiken Center for the Arts Director Kristin Brown, and Linda Hunley's willingness to make all the arrangements and transport them, I was able to include in the exhibit two of my large Southern paintings from the Morris Museum's permanent collection. To go along with those two substantial works, I sent eight smaller, new paintings--six Southern scenes and two images from Denali National Park in Alaska. The new Southern scenes included longleaf pine canopies from Aiken's Hitchcock Woods and Congaree National Park (near Columbia, South Carolina), a view of the fall forest colors reflected in a quiet cove on nearby Lake Murray where my father lives, and the marvelous tunnel of ancient live oak trees that extends for more than a quarter mile along South Boundary Avenue in Aiken. 

Above: Harbor Watch, Lake Murray Acrylic on paper, 6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image) 17" x 20" (framed)

Left: South Boundary Acrylic on paper, 6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image) 17" x 20" (framed) 

It was kind of surreal, working with the craftsmen from Munich on the final grouting of the mosaic column in the Anchorage International Airport until just an hour or so before Missy and I caught an all-night flight to South Carolina, arriving just hours before the reception for this exhibition in a place so different in every way. But it was a great delight to show my work to friends and family in my home town, to see and visit with classmates I haven't seen in forty years, and to remember that no matter how firmly I identify myself as Alaskan and am tied to this place, I will always be a Southerner as well.

Portraits

 Chris and Margie Jay Oil pastel on paper, 28" x 40" (image) 36" x 48" (framed)

As if the mix of installing enormous mosaics of the boreal forest in the Anchorage International Airport and exhibiting watercolors of longleaf pines and live oaks in South Carolina weren't diverse enough, my other major activity in September was completion of two large portrait commissions. Chris and Margie Jay are an Anchorage couple that I'd never met before they asked me this spring to work on their double portrait, but in the course of a day's visit with them in Fairbanks and corresponding with them over the months during which I was working on their images, I feel like we became friends.

It was an interesting and different challenge for me, doing as a commission portraits of people I hadn't met before. I have written here about how anxiety-provoking commissions are for me--having, instead of potentially the whole world as an audience, needing to please only one collector, somewhere, an audience of one (or in this case, two).  Portraits, as anyone who has ever done one for someone else can attest, are even more fraught.  But I was excited as I watched their images come to life in oil pastels on my large sheet of heavyweight paper.  

It still seems like a miracle to me, each time I do a portrait, the way the person's personality takes shape through the simple act of careful attention to his or her features. Clearly, who we are really is written in our faces, the set of our mouths and the light in our eyes, and though as I've said before, I couldn't possibly try to paint "personality" directly, it invariably emerges in the course of doing the work. 

 Twins Oil pastel on paper, 28" x 40" (image) 36" x 48" (framed)

I have looked forward for several years to painting a portrait of these twins--a commission from the husband of one of them.  They live in different cities, but as all the other twins I've known, are extremely close, very connected. Before I began work on this portrait, I had met them individually, but we had never been able to get together in the same place, so I had never seen them together.  Seen individually, they are nearly impossible for me to tell apart, but together, I know in a glance who is whom. I was very excited to see how their close similarities and yet significant differences would manifest themselves in my image of them.  

As with the portrait of Chris and Margie Jay, and as is generally true of all the portraits I've completed to my own satisfaction, I am happy with not just the likenesses, but the images as works of art. I don't know how many more portraits I will ever do.  I didn't expect to do any more after the first group of them I did several years ago, but I keep returning to them, from time to time.  But it is absolutely essential to me that any portrait I do be a work of art first, and a likeness second. The likeness is essential, but I want the same things from these pictures that I want from all of my paintings. A tension between abstraction and representation.  A focus on abstract marks, color, texture, and surface up close. A convincing, arresting representation from a distance. And a unique, personal point of view.

The scale of these images is important.  It's important to me that they be considerably larger than life size. As always, when I did these, I wished they could be even larger.  Even with two in a single image, they are about twice life size, and at 3 ft. by 4 ft., framed, they are pretty imposing on the wall. But that scale seems integral to how they work as paintings, and I hope that when people see them, they will be intrigued with them as works of art at least as much as they are by their likenesses.

Canopy - The Anchorage International Airport Mosaics

A quick note about the Anchorage International Airport mosaics that I've included so many images of in recent posts. The concourse where they are located is nearing completion and on November 1 from 2-4 p.m. there will be a public open house not just for our mosaics, but for the newly renovated concourse and all the new public artwork that has been installed in conjunction with that huge project.  More detailed information on the open house will be posted on the Alaska State Council on the Arts website in mid-October, but keep that date and time in mind.  I will post another brief reminder here on my website as soon as detailed information on the event from the Alaska State Council on the Arts is available. 

Canopy Column and Ceiling Mosaics Complete

Installation of the Canopy ceiling and column mosaics is finally complete, and work is nearly done on the new concourse where they reside at the Anchorage International Airport. 

In about a month, the huge wall that has separated the major B Concourse construction site from the C Concourse and the rest of the main terminal for two years will come down, and passengers will walk by our mosaic column and beneath the Canopy ceiling.  

Installation of the mosaic sections on the 9 1/2 ft. tall, 2 1/2 ft. diameter column was quick, in comparison with the huge mosaic above. It took Herbert, Daniel, and Erik only two days to install the column's mosaic sections. The ceiling has no grout separating its 750,000 or more individual, close-fitting tesserae. Because the column's surface is curved, however, slightly spreading the gap between adjoining pieces, and because it is touchable by passersby at ground level, it got a solid, dark gray grout. The darker lines between the pieces not only give it an even greater sense of solidity, but enhance its already somewhat more abstract design. 

From the start, our concept was to make the column intriguing from a distance, beckoning for closer investigation, but not a realistic "birch trunk." Our hope is that passengers will see this single mosaic column as they come out of the security screening area or head from their planes toward this junction of the two main concourses, and will want to examine it more closely. Only when they get near to it will the ceiling come into view, and we hope that the dramatic appearance of the forest canopy overhead will not only reveal the column's reference, but surprise and delight all who walk beneath it.

I took hundreds of photographs during the nine days I spent on site during the installation, and I have tried to give some sense here of the complex logistical process of installation itself, as well as the scale of the imagery and the richness and density of its surface. The images below show Herbert, Daniel, and Erik installing some of the last sections of column mosaic and beginning the grouting process.

What I have not been able to convey, I realize, is the overall impact of the piece, or how it looks as a whole. We have already begun work with a professional photographer who will document the finished artwork thoroughly, and who will "stitch" together digital images of the ceiling in order to show it in a single view with minimal distortion. 

When that is done, I will post some of those images here on the website. But believe me when I say that you'll have to walk through this terminal, approach the column from a distance, and have the ceiling suddenly loom overhead as you traverse the two-story, clerestory space to appreciate its full impact. 

A Busy Month

As exciting as the mosaic installation process has been, it's far from the only thing I've been working on in the last month. In my next post, I'll share some images of and comments on an exhibition of my work that just opened last week in South Carolina, and the two large double-portrait commissions that I've completed in the last six weeks.  

Here is a sneak preview of my work on view in September at the Aiken (South Carolina) Center for the Arts.

Mosaic Installation Continues

Yesterday afternoon Daniel installed the final section of ceiling mosaic on Canopy. We are more than two weeks into the installation process, and the monumental ceiling image is finally complete.  Over the next several days, Herbert, Daniel, and Erik will complete the final cleanup and touch-up work on the ceiling and install the mosaics on the 9 1/2 ft. tall, 2 1/2 ft. diameter column that will lead viewers' eyes to the panorama above. 

It's impossible for me to photograph the entire ceiling at once, so what I've posted here are some images that will, I hope, give you a sense of its scale and drama.  I'll try to put up a few images next week of the column, but I don't imagine that I'll be able to convey adequately a sense of the whole scene. We will have in a professional photographer with greater photographic skills and wider angle lenses, when not only our installation, but the concourse renovation itself, is complete, and I will post images of it then that I hope will do it more justice.

         

     

Erik, Herbert, and Daniel -- very tired after more than two weeks' work on the ceiling installation, but triumphant at having the last ceiling section in place.

Canopy - Installation Underway on Anchorage Airport Mosaics

I am excited to report that the installation of Canopy, the major mosaic ceiling and column for the Anchorage International Airport that I have been working on with Anchorage sculptor Sheila Wyne for more than two years, is underway. 

Sheila, our project partner Bruce Farnsworth, and I met on Monday morning with Glen Fuglestad, Department of Transportation Project Manager for the entire massive airport renovation. Joining us at Glen's office were Erik Breese, an Anchorage artist and skilled craftsman we'd hired to assist the mosaic installers from Munich, and the two master mosaicists themselves. Herbert Hahn and Daniel Heinkelein did virtually all of the fabrication of the mosaic itself, working steadily since last winter and putting in lots of overtime to have it here on time for installation.

Herbert and Daniel had scheduled two days of onsite planning and preparation before beginning to put mosaic on the ceiling, but thanks to Sheila's and Bruce's extraordinary efforts, coupled with those of the Mosaic department and Susanne Tarraf at Mayer of Munich in Germany, the two crates containing all the mosaic sections were through customs and awaiting us on site, along with scaffolding, tools, and everything needed to start work.

Herbert, who has been doing this kind of work for forty years, said he had never reached an installation site with things more ready, and within four hours of seeing the space for the first time, they were installing mosaic.

The packaging, shipping, and organization of the mosaic sections are logistical marvels in and of themselves. All the mosaic sections, as well as work clothes and a box of specialized tools, came in two large wooden crates. Each carefully padded cardboard box within the crates is numbered with the sections it contains, and is keyed to the overall map of entire ceiling image.

Erik mixes the glue and mortar to the right consistency and trowels a thin coat on the back of a section. Daniel or Herbert trowels a base of the same mix on the durarock-covered ceiling, and the section is pressed into place and pounded and kneaded with a rubber mallet to secure it seamlessly. The next piece repeats the process, snugging perfectly with the one before. 

            

As with everything Herbert and Daniel do, it looks easy when you watch them, but Sheila and I both know from having worked on the fabrication with Herbert in the studio in Munich that that is an illusion, built on his lifetime of practice. We feel again, as we did on our trips to Munich, lucky to be working with people who are the best in the world at what they do.

The rhythm of the process is occasionally broken by the need to cut out sections for the sprinkler heads in the ceiling and rebuild the mosaic piece by piece around them, to saw out the section of the image impinged upon by the beam that crosses the clerestory space, by the need for a different kind of scaffolding, or the breakdown and repair of the heavy duty drill used for mixing the cement...a host of little things. But thanks to Sheila's readiness to get and bring anything that's needed on a moment's notice, the extraordinary helpfulness of everyone from PCL--the prime contractor for the project--and all their subcontractors on the site, Glen Fuglestad's support, and Herbert and Daniel's flexibility and experience, the pace of progress is astonishing. 

Barring unforeseen complications, the ceiling may be done in another week, and work underway on the 9 1/2 ft. tall, 2 1/2 ft. diameter mosaic column that reaches from floor to ceiling near one corner of low side of the soaring space. When the construction barrier walls are removed and the newly remodeled areas opened in late September, the column will be visible nearby after coming through Security toward either of the two main concourses in this main terminal, and visible from nearly the entire length of both. 

The ceiling, in its 2-story, clerestory space, is located at the junction of those two main concourses, and becomes visible only as travelers approach and pass under it. Our hope is that the column, a somewhat more abstracted birch trunk image, will intrigue travelers as they approach it, but only become representational as the ceiling comes into view, suggesting a grand canopy of birch forest reaching into the sky. The scale of all this--both the imagery and the logistics--is pretty overwhelming to me. It's been a long time in the planning and execution, but it's all beginning to come together. Keep checking this site. I'll continue to post images and some brief, personal commentary as the installation nears completion.