Kesler Woodward

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." 

A Busy Autumn and Small Pleasures

Blind Slough, Petersburg

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

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

17" x 20" (framed)

I haven't posted an update to this site in some time, but I have been busy. Since my last post in early September, I have:

-- Had an exhibition of 27 of my recent paintings at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks.

-- Sent two new paintings to a group exhibition at Collins, Lefebvre, Stoneberger--the gallery that represents my work in Montreal, Canada.

-- Worked on new paintings for three upcoming invitational exhibitions--a show of narrative paintings at MTS Gallery in Anchorage, a show of works loosely defined as "masks" in Fairbanks, and an exhibition in Kenai, reflecting on 50 years of Alaska Statehood.

-- Made a presentation at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Fairbanks, on the role of artists in the establishment and development of Denali National Park, another at an Alaska Historical Society Conference in Anchorage on the way visual arts in Alaska have grown and changed in the fifty years since statehood, and participated in a panel following that conference discussing challenges and potentials for Alaska's next fifty years.

-- Made weeklong field trips to two very different places new to me, one to Larsen Bay and the Karluk River on Kodiak Island in Alaska, and another to the marshes, beaches, pine and palmetto woods of northeast coastal Florida near Jacksonville.

-- Completed the several small paintings posted here, reflecting on my summer visit to Petersburg, Alaska and the unfolding of one of the most beautiful autumns I can remember in Fairbanks. 

Silver Light, Sandy Beach, Petersburg

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on paper

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

17" x 20" (framed)

As usual, it has taken some time for the rich experience of being in a particular place--in this case Petersburg, Alaska in July--to percolate to a level in my consciousness from which I felt I had something to say.  In the last month, I've made three small paintings reflecting on my few days there.

The first day I spent with the group for whom I conducted a painting workshop in Petersburg was at Blind Slough, a lovely spot that I had last visited eighteen years before, and we had an overcast but beautiful day.  The second full day of painting was at Sandy Beach, and as I noted in an earlier post, it was cold, windy, and rainy--classic Southeast Alaska weather that I remember very well from our years living in Juneau in the 1970s.  I loved then, and still love, the silvery light in Southeast Alaska, which just deepens the colors of the rich intertidal zone of the rocky-more-than-sandy beach.

Sandy Beach, Petersburg

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Acrylic on paper

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

20" x 17" (framed)

Until I painted my own ski tracks gleaming in the low sun on local trails last winter, I hadn't thought much about how seldom I have acknowledged in my Northern landscapes traces of civilization, the passage, habitations, or contrivances of the people who live here. 

Though it's always hard for me to predict what I'll do in the studio next, I'm finding myself thinking more and more of how I can recognize that presence.  The houses seen from Sandy Beach don't diminish the setting, and it seems important, somehow, not to ignore their presence. People live here, in the scattered outposts of this still-remote wilderness, and the way we live is as much a part of this place as the setting that draws and keeps us here. I can't help but think that this is fertile ground for me to explore.

Many hundreds of miles north of Petersburg, in Interior Alaska, we had a cold and rainy summer that reminded me a little of Southeast, but it gave way in September to one of the most beautiful autumns I can remember, with a month of bright blue skies, warm sunny days and crisp fall evenings.  Creamers Field in Fairbanks, a former dairy farm turned wildlife refuge, is one of my favorite places in the fall.  The grain fields are full of thousands of geese, sandhill cranes, and other waterfowl, the colors are gorgeous, and the farm fields are pastoral in a way that calls out to my rural, agricultural upbringing. 

Fall, Barns at Creamers

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on paper

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

17" x 20" (framed)

And so, though I've painted the fields and woods at Creamers many times in past autumns, this year I found myself for the first time including the barns, and a few of the geese taking flight southward. I think it's the contrast between the picturesque, rural setting and the permafrost-laced surrounding boreal forest and wetlands that makes us cherish this refuge--practically in downtown Fairbanks--all the more.

I decided to show the small paintings in this post in their frames, this one time, as examples of the way I frame my works on paper.  Framing is a vexing issue for me.  For years, I used nothing but the simplest possible, metal or square-section wood frames with plain, white mats.  But as my work became more expensive over time, more and more of my collectors not only expected something nicer and more substantial, but often had historical paintings in their homes with much more elaborate frames, and the simple, almost severe look of my frames seemed out of place on their walls. I struggled and worked with various framers for a couple of years, before settling on these materials and design, which are just clean and simple enough for me, but solid and rich enough not to look out of place in collections that include historical work. 

For my paintings on canvas, I still use very crisp, modern, pickled-white maple floater frames that I custom order from Metropolitan Picture Framing in Minneapolis. But as I acknowledged in a post a couple of years ago, I do on occasion order hand-carved, gold-leaf frames for collectors who really want them. I was surprised, when I first ordered such a frame for one of my canvases, that the quite contemporary color and style of my painting worked comfortably in that more elaborate setting, but as with the works on paper, I was able to find what seemed to me a good fit both for my desires and those of the collector.

Tanana September

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil pastel on paper

13" x 18" (image)

I thought it might be fun to include here as well a couple of the oil pastel studies I did this glorious fall, sitting on the bank of the Tanana River one day and beside one of the numerous ponds surrounding the Fairbanks airport another. My oil pastel studies are much freer, much quicker and even more subjective in their color and handling than my other work done on location. I do think of them, and treat them, as finished works, and am no less determined to bring them to satisfactory conclusion, but something about the oil pastels makes me attack the scene before me with greater abandon, and what I learn from grappling with the rawer, blunter, more direct medium and working more quickly goes into the work I do later in the studio.

I tend to work alternately in formats that are either quite small or fairly large, and I find that when I've finished a very large painting, sometimes battling it for a month or more, I often want to work very small, on images that I can bring to fruition in days rather than weeks.  And when I've completed, as I have in the last couple of months, a number of small works, I find myself craving the sustained challenge of something large, more daunting in scale and calling for sustained, patient will to bring to fruition. I suspect that's where I'm headed next.

Airport Pond, September

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil pastel on paper

6 1/2" x 8"  (image)

Birches and Small Epiphanies

Birch Couple

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on canvas

36" x 48" (image)

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

Once again, I find myself painting birch portraits. I turn to other subjects again and again, but always, sooner or later, return to the individual birches in the boreal forest that surrounds my home. 

Since returning from Denali Park in mid-August, I have been wandering through the woods, watching them turn dramatically, rapidly, day by day, to autumn. Already, the leaves are mostly golden, and the ground is covered with those that have fallen.  The understory is bright with the reds of rosehips, highbush cranberries, and their brilliant leaves. The musty smell of the cranberries permeates the air in the forest, and drifts from it.

For me, as for many others here in Interior Alaska, this is a favorite time of year.  Despite our awareness that it will all-too-rapidly climax, fade, and give way to the long, hard winter--or perhaps in part because of that knowledge--we revel in the brilliance of the season and its fleeting glories. And so day after day, I walk in the woods, and then I return to the studio and I paint the beautiful, individual, striking trunks I find there.

August Birch

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on paper

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

20" x 17" (framed) 

The sun, as we rush toward the autumn equinox and equal parts daylight and dark, is still bright in the forest, and the trees are luscious, sensual in the warm fall light.  I think of them as bodies, their skin soaking up the warmth of the fading summer and reveling in the chiaroscuro of light and shadow while it lasts.  

I am still getting to know the few hundred birches that surround my home, and as Missy and I planted scores of shrubs on the bank behind our house, and a dozen lilacs at the woods' edge, I kept wandering into the grove to see new trees in new light.  The birches around us are tall and thin, swaying deeply in the sudden winds that blow when fronts come through.  Chickadees and redpolls, juncos and white-crowned sparrows flit ceaselessly from the branches to my feeders and birdbath. Flickers are nesting in a standing, broken-off trunk, and robins reared young this summer in a high nest nearby. We see downy and hairy woodpeckers almost every day. 

With the onset of fall, we also hear, far above the forest canopy, the creaking call of cranes, the honking of long skeins of migrating geese, and regularly this year, the haunting trills of solitary, passing loons.

August Birch is just one of several oil on paper paeans of praise to individual birches in our little grove that I've painted this early, glorious fall.

 

Trail at Twilight

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on board

8" x 10" (image)

11" x 13" (framed) 

For many years, I couldn't wait for winter to arrive. I longed each fall for the first snow on which I could ski, and I reveled in the number of times I could ski on my birthday, in early October.  I'm more patient now, in part because I've learned deep in my bones how long that winter will be, but also because I've come to enjoy each season in its turn.  

So I don't long for winter, but I don't dread it, either.  I have been surprised to find myself in the studio this month not just celebrating the fall, but anticipating being back on the trail above my house, skiing through the low-sunlit forest at dusk, with the early winter sun blasting its way through the trees.  It seems all I can do is climb the stairs to my studio each morning, change my clothes, and begin to paint.  It's not until I see what happens there that I learn what's on my mind and in my heart. 

Chena Ridge Birch

©Kesler Woodward 2008

Oil on canvas

20" x 16" (image)

21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed) 

Fresh Air

I spent last weekend in one of my favorite communities, Petersburg, Alaska, conducting a painting workshop for sixteen local artists of varying ages, backgrounds, and experience. Organized by the "Fresh Air" group of plein-air painters in Petersburg, the workshop was to introduce new ideas and methods for painting directly from life in the outdoors.  These are just a few of the participants, posing with their paintings after a final critique at the end of the first full day of the workshop. 

Most of the members of the Fresh Air group, who have painted together for years in all weathers and seasons, participated along with a number of other local artists. It was a wonderful weekend with an extraordinary group of people. I don't know whether I was most impressed by their dedication, talents, enthusiasm, and hospitality, their willingness to try new things, their flexibility in the face of changing weather and my crazy artistic demands, or their mutual support of one another.

As I usually do in these workshops, I talked about and showed images of my work the first evening, meeting them and letting them know who I am and where I'm coming from artistically, explaining that I don't do demonstrations (and think they're evil), and going over the plans for the next two days. On Saturday and Sunday, they painted all day long in two gorgeous settings--Blind Slough and Sandy Beach. I gave them challenging exercises/assignments, and then went from one to another, working with each individually on ways that they could think differently about outdoor painting, get beyond their comfort zones, discover new ways to connect to their familiar surroundings, make images that were more personal, more individual, and more responsive to that day, that place, that weather and light, and what they saw there and felt about it. As I told them over and over, it seems to me that most plein-air painting deals with eyes and hands, and I wanted them to work at least as much with their heads and hearts.

They did. They were so game--artistically and in every other respect. This is an image of Joe Viechnicki, perched and hard at work in the makeshift shelter he constructed from a branch and a tarp in order to paint the stream rapids entering the waters of the Inside Passage by way of Sandy Beach on a cold, rainy, blustery Southeast Alaska summer day. Other members of the group showed the same kind of determination (and good nature--notice the broad smile on Joe's face in truly uncomfortable conditions) as I gave them task after task designed to make sure they tried new things and worked in unexpected, unfamiliar ways.

I taught painting workshops in Petersburg 16 and 18 years ago, and now, as then, I was knocked out by the vigor of the town, the dedication of its artists, and the good will of the community. This year, as before, I stayed with our dear friend Polly Lee, one of Southeast Alaska's best known potters and painters, an early State Arts Council member and arts leader who has been an inspiration to Alaskans on artistic and other fronts for decades. She, some of the painters in this workshop, and many others in the Petersburg arts community are responsible for the growth of a thriving arts council, museum, an amazing amount of public art, and more in this island community of only about 3000 people.

I get at least as much from these experiences as the artists in the workshops I conduct. It is exhausting, as I work with them, talk with them, and explore art and much else with them from the moment I leave my room in the morning until I retire to it at night. But it's also exhilarating and energizing. I came home Monday feeling refreshed and renewed, having made new friends, full of gratitude for the opportunity to have been a part of this group for a few days, and so optimistic about Alaska's art, artists, and community.

You can see much more of the work of the Fresh Air group of Petersburg painters on the website of members Don and Karen Cornelius, at www.corneliusstudio.com. And you might want to check out the work of two other talented Petersburg artists that Polly Lee introduced me to while I was there. Fiber artist Sue Christensen has a great website at www.sjchristensen.com , and you can see some images of work by painter Pia Reilly at www.takugraphics.com/apreilly.html.

Roasting hot dogs for lunch over one of the fires thoughtfully built and tended all day, both days, by Pete Beckett--husband of workshop participant Carol Beckett.

Last Light of Winter

                             

Last Light-Sun                                                 
Last Light-Twilight

Both paintings ©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on canvas
Each 20" x 16" (image)
Each 21 1/2" x 17 1/2" (framed)

These two new paintings, a commission for friends in Seattle, have proved a fascinating puzzle and good challenge for me over the last month.  The collectors wanted two images of the sort I have been painting in my "Epiphany" series of views of the winter forest, looking into the sun, but they wanted something more specific as well.  The paintings are intended for the same wall, on opposite sides of a table, to function almost as "windows" looking out on a low sun, bright but twilit winter scene.

I painted the one that actually incorporates the low sun first, essentially completing it and feeling very happy with it.  Then I turned to the second scene, which needed to feature the same light, but not be contiguous with the first, since the "windows" are to be substantially separated. Without the dramatic, guttering sun, I knew it had to be subtler, and at least as much about light as about trees, branches, and snow.  I worked on it for some time, and was pretty pleased with it, but kept feeling that I wanted something more.  This is the kind of situation that normally drives me crazy, but fortunately, Missy and I had a trip planned to Germany, where I would work for a week with a company that collaborates with artists around the world to do major glass and mosaic installations.  That trip, and what it may lead to, is a story for another time, but in terms of these paintings, it was a godsend.

When I returned and looked at the two paintings with fresh eyes, I knew that the second one had to have more.  The two canvases needed to work together, but they were to be two paintings, not one painting with two panels, and so each had to have a separate character, while working in concert.  I completely reworked the sky in the second painting, dramatically increasing the left-to-right transition toward twilight, with its eerie colors, and pushing the intensity of the hues in the branches more and more radically.  Up close, it is almost mosaic-like in the complexity of the colors in the branches, the flickering light on the winter forest.

Nearly completing the second canvas necessitated changes in the first, and around and around I went for another few days, finally just yesterday realizing I was happy with both--individually and in concert.  Another day of fixing and adjusting, and they were done.  These are small paintings, but the desire of the collectors for a specific kind of effect, and my excitement at trying to achieve it,  made the entire process a challenging but immensely rewarding one. 

Bright Tracks

Bright Tracks
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on canvas
40" x 30" (image)
41 1/2" x 31 1/2" (framed)

This morning in Fairbanks it's 14º and snowing, for the fourth straight day.  The good news is that I should be able to get back on the ski trail this afternoon, after deciding a week ago that I was probably done for the winter.  Spring is a fitful, often tortuous passage in Interior Alaska.

I realized, working on this painting, how seldom I have included evidence of my own presence, of any human activity, in my paintings of the Alaska landscape.  I think the last time I depicted the tracks of my skis through the snow was a dozen years ago, when I allowed their furrows to cross the slanting shadows of birch trees in a commissioned painting I completed for the thirtieth wedding anniversary of friends.  I have long been attracted to paths, trails, all kinds of passageways through every kind of forest, as both route and metaphor, so it strikes me as odd that I haven't mined that image more extensively.  One of the great mysteries to me about my own work is how things I notice, admire, puzzle over, and wonder about for years never appear in my paintings, and then one day seem to need exploring.

Bright Tracks combines that beginning journey with the ongoing one of looking into the sun.  This is the trail on which I've skied most days all winter, just yards from my back door, along a remnant of the old Fairbanks Exploration Company ditch through which water was pumped from the Chena River to gold mines in Ester, early in the last century.  It has been one of the chief joys of this winter to be back on that trail, which I walked and skied for the first time more than a quarter century ago, and so even though I'm ready for spring, I'm happy to have another few days of watching the sunlight glint on my tracks.

March

Sun on the Trail
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on paper
20" x 28" (image)

It's March--one of the best times of the year in Interior Alaska. The days are getting rapidly longer. Already, with the early onset of Daylight Savings Time, it's light out until almost 9 p.m., but the snow is still deep and good for skiing, and despite unseasonably warm, even record high temperatures last week, it's mostly pristine, unbroken, all-covering in the forest. 

I continue to paint what has now become an extensive series of views in which I'm looking directly into that ever-brightening sun--paintings that I think of as "epiphanies."   As almost always, I didn't set out to do a series, but began with something I noticed, realized that there were other ways I could do it and other things to explore about it, and one day looked up to find my studio full of paintings on a theme. My friend Len Edgerly asked me a couple of years ago how I know when a series is finished. After thinking about it, I realized that what happens is that one day I find myself, instead of thinking, "Which of my hundred ideas about this do I want to explore next?" thinking, "O.K., what else can I do along these lines?"  When I hear myself ask that latter question, I know the series is done.  Fortunately, by that time, if not before, there's always something else that's driving me crazy that I want to explore.

Smith Lake Sunlight
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Oil pastel on paper
28" x 20" (image)

One of the things I've noticed about March is that every year, I suddenly become aware of skies again.  It seems like all winter long, I'm attuned to the quality of the light, and I watch the changing trajectory of the sun, but the clouds are rarely active or interesting.  It's often overcast, snowing, or perfectly clear.  Sometimes a bank of clouds covers part of the sky, and is moving into the region or out.  But seldom are there active patterns in the clouds, baroque forms and colors that grab my attention, elaborate, complex, ever-shifting structures in the sky.

In March, all those things return, and I'm knocked out, day after day, by the variety and splendor of the display.  Nearly every spring I make images of the sky, usually at dawn or dusk, and I do the same thing again in fall, when twilight and darkness begin to return after months of continuous light. 

So, one day a couple of weeks ago I found myself pulling out my oil pastels--the medium I most often employ to respond directly, explore, react to new phenomena, new places, or sights I haven't thought about for a while.  I hadn't done any of the epiphany paintings of direct sun in oil pastels, and it was a delight to play with the stark light of the bright spring sun, backlighting the spruces that surround Smith Lake, making them darker than ever, and casting flickering, multi-hued afterimages at their margins.

Bright March Light
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on paper
9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image)

Just last week I agreed with a couple from Seattle to undertake for them a new private commission--two paintings of low, bright sunlight breaking through the forest, dematerializing the trees in one panel and casting shadows on the forest in the other.  The two paintings will hang somewhat apart, and will function almost as "windows" in the room where they will hang them, appearing to look out onto a scene that's continuous, but because it's not shown in its entirety,  doesn't match edge-to-edge.  I did something similar for a public art commission I completed several years ago for an upper floor lobby in the Rabinowitz Courthouse in Fairbanks, and found the challenge intriguing, so I'm looking forward to tackling it again in the context of these new "epiphany" paintings.

Thinking about that commission has energized my skiing forays in the woods this week.  I've been looking for sun at just the right angle, for a scene that affords the kind of foreground forest scaffolding I like for the sun to penetrate, and adjoining ground on which the light coming right toward me can cast lights and shadows that are interesting in themselves.  The sun will be lower than in this little study, and the woods almost certainly more open, but as usual, I'm finding new delights while searching for the image in my head. And I hope that also, as usual, I'll end up with an image that does what I wished for, but in a way I'd never anticipated.

Never Night

Never Night, poems by Derick Burleson. ©Derick Burleson, 2007. Grosse Pointe, Michigan: Marick Press, 2008.

I am honored that Alaska poet Derick Burleson chose to use my painting  West Ridge October on the cover of his extraordinary new book of poems. Never Night is a wonderful collection of the Fairbanks poet's reflections on life, family, love, death, place, and home, stretching from his childhood on a farm in Oklahoma to the homestead on which he lives today in Two Rivers, Alaska.

Derick, whose first book, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-1994 won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  You can get your own copy of this volume by visiting your local bookstore, clicking on the direct Amazon.com link to the book in the lower right hand column of this website, or at www.marickpress.com.

It has been a great privilege for me to have my paintings associated through publication with the work of several of Alaska's most talented writers. Blaze, published by Red Hen Press in 2005, juxtaposes thirty years of my paintings of birch trees and boreal forest with poems by Peggy Shumaker, one of Alaska's best known poets. 

The product of a long and rewarding collaboration, Blaze was conceived as a conversation between poet and painter, some paintings done in response to specific poems, some poems written in response to my paintings, and other pairings selected by the two of us to question, challenge, reinforce, and enrich perceptions of each.

 

Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace, by Fairbanks writer Frank Soos, was published in 1999 by University of Georgia Press and released in a new paperback edition by them in 2006.  Five of Frank's remarkable essays, ostensibly about fly fishing but at least as much about values and how one lives one's life, are illustrated by a number of my paintings.  University of Alaska Museum designer Wanda Chin created the striking design for this small volume, and the University of Georgia Press produced it exquisitely.

It has been a great joy for me to participate in each of these collaborations, and I hope to do many more in the future.  If there are any of these books you haven't seen, please check them out.  You won't be disappointed.

For more information and details on all of my books, click here to reach the "Books" page on my main website, www.keslerwoodward.com.

Winter Sun

Transfiguration
©Kesler Woodward 2008
Acrylic on canvas
30" x 40" (image)
31 1/2" x 41 1/2" (framed)

I have been especially struck this year by the way my perception of the seasons mirrors the calendar of the Christian Church. I have thought of the recent series of paintings I have been doing, in which sunlight is breaking into the forest, as "epiphanies," which seems particularly apt since I almost invariably start noticing that phenomenon shortly after the January 6 date of the Church's festival of Epiphany.

As I worked on this new painting the last couple of weeks, I have been continuing to ski on the trails in the woods that surround my home. Both on the trail and in the studio, I have been entranced with the way the growing, brightening, yellowing light of the sun on these rapidly lengthening days transfigures the winter forest.  I was somewhat taken aback, then, but utterly delighted, to find us celebrating "Transfiguration Sunday" at my Lutheran church this week.

Here in Interior Alaska, at this time of year, we are somewhat in need of transfiguration--the radical transformation of appearance, metamorphosis, or sudden emanation of radiance that the term refers to in both secular and religious traditions.  Our days have grown to more than 7 hours in length, from less than 4 in late December, but the deep cold is relentless.  It is -40ºF today, as I write.  I skied the trails at -35ºF recently and was comfortable, not just because I have very warm clothes, but because I was working hard--skiing on snow that refuses to melt and glide, more like sand than ice at those temperatures.

As I frequently try to explain to friends Outside, it is not the extremes of cold that are hard in Alaska--it is the relentlessness of it.  In February, after months of deep cold behind us and more ahead of us, it tries to grind us down.  The transfiguration of the landscape by the brightening sun on these lengthening days is a gift that helps us bear it.  So we pass Transfiguration Sunday, on our way toward Easter and the eventual, perennial, miraculous resurrection of spring.