Kesler Woodward

Commissions

A Beautiful Lady  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on paper  24" x 30" 

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate doing commissions? When I go to my studio to paint, I never worry about whether people will like what I do. I paint what I want, and I figure there are 7 billion people on the planet, and someone is bound to like and want it. The problem with commissions is that as soon as I undertake one, that 7 billion number shrinks to one individual.

I only ever agree to paint on commission something that I would want to paint anyway, but knowing that it needs to please one person is a great source of anxiety for me. I worry inordinately whether he or she will like it, and I have bad dreams about their being disappointed. That has never happened, or if it has, those for whom I've undertaken commissions have been kind enough not to say so, and good enough actors that I couldn't tell. The anxiety is awful for me, however, every time, and I try as hard as I can to avoid putting myself in that position.

Nevertheless, sometimes I give in...usually for dear friends to whom I can't say no. Two recent portrait commissions were just such cases. A Beautiful Lady is a "portrait" of a beloved, and now lamented, chokecherry tree on the lawn of a longtime friend. As chokecherries here tend to do, it flourished for years, but finally grew too large to support its own weight, and it split apart over the past two years.

My friend asked me last fall to consider painting a portrait of it for her, as her husband was urging her to cut it down, and she knew that it was the right thing to do. I put it off until this spring, when she called me again and said they were going to cut it down that day. I'd seen "The Lady," as my friend fondly and invariably called it, last year in its fall splendor, and I saw it one last time this spring, as it gamely gave birth to new leaves. A Beautiful Lady is a tribute to that lovely tree and my friend's love for it...a composite of some of its gorgeous bark and branches, with leaves from its last glorious fall and its last indomitable spring.

   

Bruth ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on paper  11" x 9" and Al ©Kesler Woodward 2008 acrylic on paper, 11" x 9"

And speaking of beautiful ladies... Less than a mile from that chokecherry tree lives a woman whose family has been my surrogate Fairbanks family for 35 years. Bruth George and her daughter Katie Sanders took a class from me at the University of Alaska that long ago, and when Bruth and her husband Al invited me to their home for the first time, that winter, I immediately felt as if I'd come home. My late wife Missy and I were a part of family gatherings with them on so many holidays and family birthdays for years, and since Missy's passing, they have embraced Dorli just as thoroughly. The George family is an irreplaceable part of the fabric of living here, for me. 

When Kate, Bruth's granddaughter and Katie and Phil Sanders' daughter, was about to celebrate her marriage to her own beloved Ross this summer, and she said what she really wanted was a portrait of her grandma Bruth, how could I say no? It was a privilege to get to paint this little portrait of Bruth, and I did it in the same medium and size that I painted Bruth's husband Al almost ten years ago, shortly after he passed away. I hope that I captured at least a little of Bruth's indomitable spirit, which continues to shine in her thoughtful eyes. 

New and Different

Aurora Betula  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  48" x 48"

In a moment of weakness a couple of months ago, I responded positively to my longtime friend Yolande Fejes' invitation to be included in a group exhibition she's hosting of artwork about the aurora--the "Northern Lights"-- at her Alaska House Gallery this March. Friends were surprised and amused to hear that I'd accepted that invitation. For many years, I taught a graduate Northern Studies course at the University of Alaska called "Visual Images of the North." In this course about the art of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and northern Russia, one of the lectures I gave each semester was titled "Trying to Paint the Aurora." I showed more than 100 paintings, drawings, and prints of or about the aurora, from medieval times to the present, concluding that no one had ever done an entirely successful one. I always told my students that if the great 19th Century American landscape painter Frederic Church couldn't do it, we probably couldn't either, and perhaps we should leave the aurora to God.

As the time for the exhibition neared, I dithered with increasing anxiety about how I might respond to the challenge I'd accepted, and it wasn't until one day a couple of weeks ago, on one of our regular morning runs through the birch forest, that an idea came to me. Aurora Betula is the result. 

Betula, of course, is the scientific name for birches, and my initial thought was that it might be nice to make a little fun of my own obsession with birches and the boreal forest as a subject. Some of my favorite auroral images date back to medieval times, long before scientists learned the real cause of these beautiful, ghostly lights in the night sky. Early artist-observers imagined them as the light from celestial battles, Valkyrie maidens escorting fallen warriors to Valhalla, mythical celestial foxes with their tails on fire, and other wonderful, fanciful explanations. Why, I thought, couldn't they be supernatural birches, sheltering the earth and the more earthbound spruces below in a heavenly arc?

I had no idea what fun it would be making such a painting, and I'm grateful to Yolande and Alaska House Gallery for the challenge that prompted this big, fanciful, celestial scene.

Margo  ©Kesler Woodward 2016  Oil pastel on paper  40" x 32" 

Unlike auroras, portraits of friends are something I have done before, but not for a long while. More than a decade ago, I had a solo show of a dozen or more large (more than four-times life-size) oil pastel portraits, but I've only done a handful since--one every few years. In that first batch of portraits was one of my longtime friend, extraordinary writer Frank Soos, and it hangs on the wall in the living room of the beautiful home he shares with his equally extraordinary artist wife Margo Klass. Every time we've gone to dinner there, I've looked at it and thought I should do one of Margo, too, so in December I finally did.

The same size and medium as the one of Frank, it's handled in exactly the same way--very abstract up close, and somewhat expressionist in color, but quite realistic, from far away.  I don't know whether they will hang the two together, but I'll enjoy knowing I've tried to bring not just one, but both of their images to life in my own way.

Different Kinds of Portraits

Darlene ©Kesler Woodward 2010 Acrylic on paper 28" x 20" (image)

Several years ago, I painted a considerably larger-than-lifesize acrylic on paper portrait of my good friend Len Edgerly, who with his wife Darlene splits his time between homes in Denver, Colorado and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Len has had his portrait framed and on the wall of their Denver condo for more than four years, and I've enjoyed seeing it every time I've visited them there. When I was in Denver last summer, they decided it was time they had one of Darlene as well, the same size and medium, and I've just completed it in the last week.

I've known and been crazy about Darlene for more than ten years now, and so it was a delight to work on her image. As always, I was amazed at how quickly her personality came to life as I started finding my way through her features. Darlene's lively, bright spirit shone from her eyes within hours of beginning the painting, and it just continued to grow as I worked my way into her beaming smile. It still seems like a miracle to me, this coming-to-life that happens as portraits grow on the page.

You can see my portrait of Len and read my original comments about it here, in my Sept. 14, 2005 post on this blog.  Those who regularly enjoy Len's outstanding weekly podcasts featuring news and interviews about electronic book readers, The Kindle Chronicles and The Reading Edge, or who frequent his blog, may have already noticed his portrait in the background of photos of him in his living room, and have almost certainly enjoyed some of Darlene's own wonderful commentary in his podcasts.

Young Birch Portrait ©Kesler Woodward 2010 Oil on board 10" x 8" (image) 12 1/2" x 10 1/2" (framed)

I have noted in previous posts how nerve wracking it is for me to do work on commission, and how portraits are especially fraught with anxiety in that regard, so it was a great relief and pleasure, two days after shipping the painting to Len and Darlene, to get Len's e-mail message with the subject heading, "We Love It!" 

One of the many nice things about painting birch portraits is that birches are much less worrisome subjects. As I've written and talked about often, I paint them not only because they are among the most beautiful things I've ever seen, but because they give me great freedom to do the things I want with paint. These "portraits" are of real, individual trees, but they truly are abstract paintings that happen to look like birches.

Even large, mature Alaska birches have a surprising range of color in their bark, but the young trunks, especially, are a riot of hues. After more than 30 years of painting them in every locale and season, I'm still amazed by their variety, and still learning about the way latitude, light, time of day and time of year, soil and surroundings affect their appearance. Young Birch Portrait is the latest in the growing series of birch portraits I've been doing since the first of this year. I'm already thinking and feeling my way toward the major exhibition on Alaska Birch that fellow artists Barry McWayne, Margo Klass, and I, along with University of Alaska scientist Kimberley Maher, will be mounting at the Pratt Museum  in Homer, Alaska in July through September of 2011.

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. 

Missy

Missy

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Oil pastel on paper

40" x 28" (image)

Five years ago, I did a number of large--several times life size--oil pastel portraits of friends and family. As usual, I didn't set out to do a series at the time. I just took a notion one day to do a large portrait of our son Eli, and was shocked by how much presence it had, and how much of him there was in it when I completed it. Similar portraits of our niece and goddaughter Patricia and a number of longtime friends followed. I ended up showing the entire group of them in an exhibition at Well Street Art Gallery here in Fairbanks, and everyone seemed surprised and delighted by them. The Anchorage Museum purchased the one of Jean Flanagan Carlo, and the University of Alaska Museum acquired my self-portrait. Most of the rest went to the people depicted, purchased by themselves or, more often, their spouses.

I did a portrait of my wife Missy at the time. It was, I still think, a wonderful picture, as a work of art, but it was all-too-accurate in what it captured. It was done within weeks of the unexpected death of her youngest, much beloved sister Cornelia, and though Missy smiled gamely from the 4 times life size oil pastel image, it was ineffably sad. When our dear friend Dale Fairbanks saw it the first time, she burst into tears. It has been put away ever since. Periodically, I get it back out and look at it, and each time it nearly breaks my heart.

I've wanted to do another ever since then, to try to catch her in a happier state, and as our 38th wedding anniversary approached this year, I finally did. Doing it and seeing her reaction to it made this an exceptionally meaningful anniversary. 

I do these portraits in exactly the same way I do my much more frequent "birch portraits" of individual trees. From a distance, and especially in reproduction, they are very realistic. Up close, at the proximity from which I work on them, they are completely abstract--a welter of color, surface, painterly materials. As always, I want to have it both ways. As I've noted before, of course, likenesses of people are much less forgiving than portraits of trees. All kinds of liberties can be taken with the proportions, placement of features, and all else in images of tree trunks, and they still look like birch trees. The challenge with the people portraits is to maintain that same kind of tension between representation and abstraction, while working much more slowly and carefully to put all those abstract marks in exactly the right place. It continues to shock me, how vividly the personalities of the individuals inhabit these pictures. There's no way I could even try to paint their "personalities." I just have to observe very, very closely everything in their faces, and try to record it all as faithfully as I can, all the while focusing an equal amount of attention on the materials with which I'm working. If the sitters "inhabit" these pictures, it's because who they are shows in their faces, and as I've told people a number of times, I've learned something new about every person I've painted, in the course of doing their portraits.

Next month, a couple from Anchorage who are both celebrating milestone birthdays this year are going to come to Fairbanks so I can meet them, spend a little time with them, take photos of them in my studio, and work on portraits like this one, or even larger. It will be the first time I've painted people I don't know, and I'm very curious to see what that will be like. And another challenge that I'm especially looking forward to, eventually, is working on a double portrait for a friend in Denver. His wife is a twin. I know her, and have met her sister, though in a different city, and have never seen them together at the same time. Seen separately, I can't tell them apart. We haven't found a time yet to all get together in the same place, so I can look hard and make some studies, but that is a prospect that I'm eagerly looking forward to tackling.

Congaree Canopy

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

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

20" x 17" (framed)

This year, my Aiken (South Carolina) High School graduating class will celebrate its 40th reunion. I've never been to a reunion, of a high school or college class, and I hadn't anticipated going to this one. But one of my classmates, a very talented artist named Linda Prior Hunley, has organized an exhibition of my paintings, her drawings, and wonderful sculptures by our classmate Esther Randall, to be shown at the Aiken Center for the Arts, where the reunion will be held. So I've been thinking about images of the South. I had a large solo show in 2002 at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, titled Kesler Woodward North and South, that featured equal numbers of Southern and Alaska landscapes, and I have done a few Southern paintings since, but I'm looking forward to working on new ones for this exhibition. 

Just last month we made a quick trip to South Carolina, and I spent a lot of our brief time there looking at the trees and walking in the woods. As usual, these new images are based not on what I saw so recently, but on a trip two autumns ago, to Congaree National Park. Just a half hour drive from my dad's home on Lake Murray, near Columbia, Congaree preserves the largest remnant of old-growth, floodplain forest in North America. It is a magical place, and it was extraordinary to see record-size old growth longleaf pines, hardwoods, and cypress trees at the height of brilliant, fall color.  These two new little pieces are just a warmup for what I hope will be a strong new body of Southern images.  I'm excited to get to work and see what happens.

Congaree

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

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

17" x 20" (framed)

Two New Portraits

Dale Fairbanks
©Kesler Woodward 2006
Oil pastel on paper
38" x 28"

These two newest portraits are of our dear friends Dale and Bill Fairbanks, who moved to Florida from Alaska in 2003.  Dale, whose solo exhibition at the Anchorage Museum last November I profiled on this site (see that post) , was one of Alaska's boldest and best abstract painters, and she has continued to produce outstanding work in her studio in Pensacola, Florida, when she and Bill aren't engaged in preparation for hurricanes or repair in their aftermath. (You can see her work at her website, originally created by my son Eli, at www.dalefairbanks.com.) 

Bill, a very successful financial adviser in Fairbanks, and my hunting partner for a number of years--we were at his moose camp on the Tanana River on Sept. 11, 2001--is now making extraordinary handmade, one-of-a-kind furniture pieces that are as sculptural as they are functional.

I have wanted to do portraits of them since before they left Alaska.  When we visited with them at Thanksgiving, in Anchorage and La Conner, we agreed that I would give it a try, and I have had a wonderful time working on these for the last several weeks.

Bill Fairbanks
©Kesler Woodward 2006
Oil pastel on paper
38" x 28"

Like almost all the portraits I have done, these are large--about three times life size--and are handled in exactly the same way I do my birch "portraits" and other paintings. So while they look very realistic from a distance, up close they are very abstract, and at least as much about the colors and textures and marks as about what those marks are describing.  It's a mystery to me how so much of the character of the people gets into the portraits, as I not only don't think about that or try to put it there, I wouldn't even know how to begin to do so.  All I try to do is keep the handling loose and expressive, while focusing just as hard as I can on getting it "right," making it look as much like the person as I possibly can.  It's just like painting birch trees, only much less forgiving, as making the trees a little wider or narrower, or moving the features around, doesn't detract from them, while portraits have to look "right," as well as being interesting as works of art. So I'm always shocked by how much of the individuals comes to inhabit their pictures. It's clearly a testimony to the fact that our character is somehow etched in our features themselves, and it amazes me how just paying very, very close attention to those features brings them to life in the portraits.

New Portrait

Len
Watercolor
28" x 20 1/2"
©Kesler Woodward 2005

The Executive Committee of the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) board of trustees met in La Conner this week, and I decided it would be fun to do a portrait of my good friend Len Edgerly, the current board chairman, to surprise him and them when they arrived and met the first afternoon in my studio. 

It was a great treat to see the look of surprise and delight on all their faces as they came into the studio and recognized him, about 3X life-size, looking at them from the wall.  And especially wonderful, as it always is when people see their own portraits for the first time, to see Len's reaction. 

I hadn't done any more portraits since completing the series of ten even larger (40" x 30") oil pastel ones that I showed at Well Street Gallery in Fairbanks in July, 2004, and I wasn't sure I'd ever do any more.  I never seem to know what I'll work on next until I find myself doing it, but it was so fun, challenging, and rewarding to try to "capture" a little of another friend that I may well find myself doing more.