Posted at 05:31 PM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Denali National Park, Fairbanks, Alaska, Mount McKinley, Pacific Northwest Art | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 06:00 PM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Birch Trees, Birches, Boreal Forest, Denali National Park, Fairbanks, Alaska, Mount McKinley, Pacific Northwest Art | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 11:33 PM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Fairbanks, Alaska, Pacific Northwest Art | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 05:58 PM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Birch Trees, Birches, Boreal Forest, Denali National Park, Fairbanks, Alaska, Pacific Northwest Art | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 08:06 PM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Pacific Northwest Art, Public Art | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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.
Posted at 06:59 AM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Fairbanks, Alaska, Pacific Northwest Art | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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.
Posted at 11:54 AM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Fairbanks, Alaska, Pacific Northwest Art | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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.
Posted at 07:23 PM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Fairbanks, Alaska, Pacific Northwest Art | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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.
Posted at 03:24 PM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Alaska Books, Alaska Poetry, Books, Fairbanks, Alaska, Pacific Northwest Art | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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.
Posted at 12:22 PM in Alaska, Alaska Art, Fairbanks, Alaska, Pacific Northwest Art | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)