Kesler Woodward

New Works Ready for a New Exhibition

These are just a few of my new paintings in the studio, awaiting transport to Well Street Art Gallery here in Fairbanks for an exhibition with 3 outstanding artist friends--Todd Sherman, Jim Brashear, and Bonni Brooks--all of whom live on our short street. "Merlin Lane Artists" opens this Friday, September 6, from 5-8 pm at Well Street Art Gallery in Fairbanks.

Todd, Jim, and I were colleagues for many years in the University of Alaska Art Department, and Bonni, another longtime friend, is an extraordinary tapestry weaver. We all now live just a few doors apart in Taiga Woodlands, a forested subdivision in the hills overlooking Fairbanks, and we thought it would be great fun to show our very different work together. 

A Few Acres of Snow ©Kesler Woodward Acrylic on Canvas  54" x 84"

At 4 1/2 feet by 7 feet,  A Few Acres of Snow will be my largest painting in the exhibition. This big, celebratory scene of winter in all its glory was the centerpiece of a solo exhibition of my work in Montreal several years ago, but I have never shown it in the U.S.  I am excited to have it back and to show it here. The fun title, suggested by the gallery in Montreal, is what the 18th Century French writer Voltaire called Canada in his most famous work, the novella Candide.

 

Mysteries  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 24"

Right now, summer is waning after months of continuous light in Interior Alaska, and darkness is beginning to steal back into the late hours of twilight. There is richer color in the clear evening skies, and real night is trying to slip in around the edges. I'm always intrigued by the mystery and wonder of that inexorable invasion.

 

Celestial ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

The stars, which I've missed all summer, come back in September.

 

Snow Music ©Kesler Woodward 2024 Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 30"

And the coming snow is on my mind. I love the months of continuous summer light, but as the days get rapidly shorter, I begin to look forward to the first falling snow. It is only truly dark here for brief periods in the spring and fall. When the last snow disappears in late April or early May, and it's not yet light all night, we have darkness for a few hours each evening. Again in early autumn, when the days grow shorter and the nights longer, for a little while we have real darkness. But soon, the brilliant white snow will start to settle softly not just on the trails and forest floor, but on every twig and branch in the woods, and every bit of ambient light from the moon, the stars, or the lights of our homes is reflected and multiplied a thousandfold. It is never truly dark here in winter. In Snow Music, I'm dreaming in the fall about the colors of winter.

 

Merlin Birch  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  20" x 10"

And birches...always more birches...

Whether gathering wild lowbush cranberries (lingonberries) in our own wooded yard or running with friends on the endless forest trails that lead from our back door, I am surrounded by the birches I love. I can't remember a year when I haven't painted some of their portraits.

I go back and forth between painting in oils and painting in acrylics. The ethereal light of the northern sky seems to me to require the myriad thin layers of transparent acrylic I employ to try to capture some of its magic. But the bark of the birches, just as beautiful but marked by scars, peeling layers of growth, and other events in their lives, is more physical. The life of a birch is written not just in its form, but in its "skin," and celebrating that this year has seemed to me to call for the greater sensuality of oils.

 

 

 

 

Woodland Neighbors  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  24" x 30"

Twins  ©Kesler Woodward 2024  Oil on Canvas  30" x 24"

Crystal and Kept

Crystal and Kept  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas   48" x 60"

Late winter/early spring is a time of mixed emotions for me. I am excited by the burgeoning hours of daylight, of course, but I'm always sorry to see the snow go away--first lose its deep, crisp purity and then raggedly retreat. 

A major consolation for the messiness of spring thaw for me is the occasional appearance of something called "ammil," a British word I learned long ago for the fleeting glitter of ice that frequently forms on bare twigs when freeze follows thaw. Somehow, having a word for the phenomenon encourages my noticing it. The more steeply rising and rapidly strengthening spring sun steals these little glints almost as soon as they appear, but for me they are always a welcome gift.

The beauties of early spring are subtler than those of winter, sharper and shorter-lived, but they are real. They make me think about the lines in Seamus Heaney's poem The Singer's House - "So much comes and is gone / that should be crystal and kept."

Grandfather  ©Kesler Woodward 2023  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

A new friend, Frank Keim, took me on a several-hour walk last fall from his home just north of Fairbanks to an extraordinary local remnant of old-growth forest. He calls it "The Legacy Forest." It's more than 100 acres of woods I'd never visited or heard about, just minutes from my own home--filled with some of the oldest and largest spruces, aspens, and birches I've ever seen in Interior Alaska. Somehow, this patch of forest escaped the felling of nearly every mature tree in our area in the early 20th Century Gold Rush, to fuel the riverboats that brought settlers and supplies to our part of Alaska. Just as miraculously, this swath of Legacy Forest has dodged destruction by lightning-started wildfire for more than a century and a half. 

The enormous white spruce in my painting Grandfather is only one of hundreds of giants in that forest, and not the largest, but it is the one that struck me most, framed in rosy autumn light by curtains of deciduous trunks and boughs. Walking those woods with Frank--a wise and thoughtful leader for more than half a century in local preservation efforts and appreciation of the boreal forest and all that lives in it--was a privilege and a pilgrimage.

Flurries at Vespers  ©Kesler Woodward 2023   Acrylic on canvas   20" x 20"

I so often find myself painting out-of-season. What we call Green-Up happened here this year on May 16--the birch and aspen leaves unfurling in their annual budburst, turning the winter-bare trees that surround Fairbanks to carpets of green hillside in a single day and a half. It is an altogether magical transformation that I dearly love, and I have often painted the newborn yellow-green leaves and trees bedecked by sudden summer. But this year I found myself just two weeks later painting bare trees and evergreens at the hour of Vespers, softened in their silhouettes by flurries of snow. 

I never know what I'm going to paint until I'm about to begin work on a new canvas. I'm happy that it's light all night now, and that it won't be dark until August, so I wonder why I chose to paint the falling snow that has just gone, and which will return soon enough, not long after deep twilight like this returns to the North.

The Snow and the Stars Come Back in September

The Snow and the Stars Come Back in September  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  acrylic on canvas 24" x 30"

Dorli always says that as each season arrives, I say, "This is my favorite," but right now I'm feeling especially grateful for fall. I do love the 24-hour light of summer in the far north, but after several months of it, I begin to miss the darkness. I'm happy when September comes and brings with it the full reappearance of the stars and the first flakes of falling snow.

Forty-five years after settling in Alaska, I'm no less excited each fall when the first snow arrives. That excitement is something I've painted many times. My big painting of a first autumn snowfall on Smith Lake, a large lake in the woods on the University of Alaska campus, has greeted me and every other visitor to Fairbanks arriving on Alaska Airlines for two decades, and each and every time I deplane, it's a welcome sign for me that I'm truly home.

The setting for this September painting is the much smaller Ballaine Lake, also on the University of Alaska campus. Unlike Smith Lake, it's readily visible alongside Farmer's Loop Road, and I drive by it nearly every day on my way to the university or to town. I note the swift progression of its freezing every fall, and I watch just as attentively as that little lake slowly, reluctantly gives up its ice cover each May. 

The reappearance of the full panoply of stars in September is for me just as welcome, and I love it when the first bright flakes of snow join those little lights in the sky.

Equinox ©Kesler Woodward 2022  acrylic on canvas 20" x 16"

We Alaskans and others in the far north around the world make more note, I think, of the turning points of the year--the equinoxes and solstices--than do most of those who live in latitudes where the changes are less dramatic.

The autumnal equinox is important for me in all sorts of ways. It's the time of the crazy-hard Equinox Marathon we run here each year--the epitome of what we call "Type 2 Fun"--fun in retrospect.  And it marks here in Interior Alaska more clearly than the vernal equinox or either of the solstices a dramatic change of weather and season.

This year, as most, the equinox came at the absolute peak of fall color in the birches and aspens. I've often painted that riot of color, but this painting marks a subtler, yet unmistakable change in the quality of  light. I've tried to capture some of that light on Ballaine Lake, as the world balances on its swivel point in the annual contest between darkness and light.

Last Big Painting for 2019

Snow Country ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 60"

There will be drawings, and perhaps even another small painting, in the few weeks remaining in 2019, but Snow Country will be my last big painting of the year. It's a view of Mount Dan Beard from the Sheldon Hut, a tiny cabin perched on a 200 ft-high rock outcropping at 5000 ft elevation on the Ruth Glacier in the Alaska Range. Dorli and I spent 5 days there with two friends, several years ago, and it was easily the most spectacular place I've ever been. Just seven miles from the summit of Denali, it is a world of perpetual whiteness, punctuated only by rock outcroppings too steep for the snow to ever cover completely.

Painting this fairly large canvas was, despite the looseness of the brushstrokes themselves, an incredibly slow, deliberate process. As always, I wanted the scene to be very realistic from a distance and completely abstract, altogether painterly, up close. But rock outcroppings are already so abstract in form that unlike trees, forests, or other subjects that are replete with immediately recognizable silhouettes, capturing the crenellations, snow slides, cornices, and drifts while keeping the paint lively--not just descriptive--was an exacting balancing act. Even more than usual, I had to keep walking away from the canvas to see exactly where I was in the scene, approach and attack a small section of rock, snow, and shadow quickly and freely, make myself stop and walk away to get my bearings again, and re-engage to tease out just a bit more representational form. It was a patient dance of stop and start--slow, almost meditative--and it was especially satisfying to see this very specific, highly distinctive mountain's form emerge on the canvas bit by bit, day after day. 

Replenishment

Replenishment  ©Kesler Woodward 2019 Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 60"

I'm not certain why I've been painting mountains, glaciers, and falling snow for the last month, rather than birch trees and boreal forest. I've been reading and thinking a lot about climate change, and about how the coastal glaciers I began visiting more than four decades ago have almost all shrunk dramatically in that time, but I didn't go to my studio and decide to make paintings about climate change. It's hard--for me at least--to work that way without simply illustrating an idea. I'd much rather discover, after I've made a painting and asked myself what it was about, that I had something to say about it.

I've painted mountains and glaciers for decades, but it's been some time since I turned to them as subject matter, so when I finished this painting, I sat and looked at it from across the studio and asked myself, as usual, "So what was that about?" The snow arrived very late this year here in Fairbanks, as it has for several years now, and I'm sure that the falling snow in these paintings came in response to my perennial eagerness for it. But when I cast about for a title, Replenishment came to mind immediately, and I thought, wryly, that Alaska's glaciers must be longing for it at least as much as I have been.

As soon as it was done, I prepared another large (4 ft. x 5 ft.) canvas and tackled another glacier that I know well, imagining that it, too, must be dreaming of the snow and cold that enabled it to grow and spill from mountaintop to sea, and which it needs, in its season, to continue to thrive.

Glacier Dreams  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

Since my last post, and before making these big mountain, glacier, falling snow paintings, I finished the half-dozen new pen and ink drawings I set out to make of some of my favorite birches in our own yard. I'll get around to having them framed individually, eventually, but for now I'm enjoying having them push-pinned as a group on the painting wall in my studio, where they catch my eye with delight daily, as I paint.  

Six new pen-and-ink birch portraits on the wall in my studio. For titles, sizes, and individual images, click on the Available Works Album at the top of the right-hand column above and then on any of the individual thumbnails. 

New Work and an Upcoming Exhibition

If you're in Anchorage on Friday, June 1, I hope you'll come say hello at the opening of a solo exhibition of my work at Georgia Blue Gallery. Thirteen of my  new paintings will be on view that evening, and for the remainder of the month of June.

Chorus ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 36"

Chorus is testimony to my ongoing fascination with bright, warm color in the white of winter. As I worked on it for many days, I completely forgot, at one point, what season I was painting. I told Dorli one day that the new painting in my studio was starting to come together, and when she asked what season it was, without thinking I replied, "It's a brilliant fall scene," before remembering that it was actually about the chorus of light that transfigures the boreal forest when the sun rises in winter, and I look directly into its glow.

I have more paintings than usual in my studio right now, as I'm about to ship the thirteen newest ones to Anchorage for my show at Georgia Blue Gallery next month. I welcomed a trio of friends visiting from Anchorage to my studio yesterday, and one of them said, "I usually don't like winter paintings, especially this time of year, as they're so cold, but although almost every painting in your studio is a winter scene, they are all full of such warm light." Many of our friends complain bitterly this time of year about the long winters, and the snow that lingers through April, so I'm always glad that both Dorli and I love the winters--however long--at least as much as the summers. I guess for both of us, it's because this, rather than cold and dark,  is the way it looks to us as we run on the snowy trails at first light for almost seven full months of the year.

 

Taiga Trail ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 16"

One of the things I do like about late spring is the way the shadows of the trees deepen so dramatically in density and definition in the stronger light. Anyone who has spent years in this forest, paying attention to the light that changes not just month by month, but day by day, might well recognize that despite the still deep, unbroken snow on this trail, these are the shadows of spring, not winter.

 

Rampant  ©Kesler Woodward 2018  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 24"

Rampant speaks to my seemingly endless fascination with the individuality of birch trunks, my occasional need to break away from the intricate and tightly-controlled way I've been working and indulge myself in thick, juicy paint, and the way my paintings take on a life of their own as I work on them. This canvas began life as a smooth, almost flesh-pink torso, but without much warning turned inexorably into this far wilder, rawer, scarred-but-proud, still-rampant figure. 

Small Wonders

Last Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Winter seems to arrive later and later here in Interior Alaska, where three decades ago I could usually ski out my back door on my birthday in early October, and the Chena River reliably froze solid in the third week of that month. This year we narrowly escaped having a snowless Halloween for the first time in seventy years. But our beautiful, downy snow is finally here, not only covering the trails, but sitting atop every twig and surface, brightening even the night.

The four small paintings I've completed since my last post are testaments to my anticipation of winter before it came in earnest, and to my ongoing exploration of the mysteries of winter light now that it has arrived. Dreaming of Winter was painted before the first sticking snowfall, when I was engaged in exactly that reverie. Last Light, Gleam, and Glint are ruminations on the subtle but real differences among first light of morning, last light of evening, and the early winter sun's occlusion by beautiful birches at the entrance to the woods.

           

Left - Glint  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

Right - Gleam  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

In both Glint and Gleam, I was determined to have it both ways--beautiful birches up very close, staring us in our faces, with just enough space around them to suggest the particular winter light.

Dreaming of Winter  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"  

Thick and Thin, Tight and Loose

Deep Summer Birch ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  60" x 48" 

Many artists paint diverse subjects, but paint all of them in much the same way. I seem to do just the opposite. I paint trees and woods, rivers and streams, mountains, skies, and above all, light, but the subject of almost all my work is my response to place--how it feels, or felt, to me to be in a very particular place at a very specific time of year, time of day, and quality of light. What changes most dramatically is not what I paint, but how I paint it. For several years now, I've been using thin, transparent layers of paint to try to achieve a certain kind of luminosity that's not possible with thicker, opaque color. When I began doing that 5 or 6 years ago, it was something new to me, and it opened up whole new ways to highlight different aspects of the things I love to paint.

Gradually, too, my paintings have become tighter, more controlled. I begin each painting by laying in an image loosely, thinly, all-over, but lately I've been going in with fine brushes after, "excavating" more and more detail...both representational detail and more abstract, but clearly defined areas of shape and color. 

There is much more I want to explore with those thin, transparent layers, and I'm sure I will return to them, but when I went to work one day a few weeks ago, I found myself missing and craving the kind of thick, juicy paint and sensual surfaces and textures I employed in years past.  

A Cat  Sage Lang-Woodward 2016 acrylic on canvas board  9" x 12"

Also, sitting on a counter in my studio, where I see it every day, is this wonderful little painting my 5 year-old granddaughter Sage gave me for Christmas last year. It's the only work by another artist in my studio, and every time I look at it, I think, "Have I lost my ability to be so bold, confident, and expressive as that?" With Sage's Cat as inspiration, I launched into painting Deep Summer Birch, a big, bold image of a particularly beautiful birch just outside my studio window, and the dense, almost dark summer woods beyond it. I loved pushing the thick, juicy paint around and blending it wet-into-wet again. 

It remains a mystery to me that I have so little control over what I paint, or how I paint it. All I can do is show up in my studio every day and go to work, and so that's what I do. When I finished Deep Summer Birch, I wondered what I might do next. 

Winter's Web  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas 48" x 60"

Winter's Web followed. It usually takes me a long time for the experience of seeing something to settle deeply enough in my consciousness that I know what I want to say about it, so Dorli teases me that I'm always making paintings out-of-season--winter scenes in summer, fall ones in spring. She was surprised that with Deep Summer Birch, I'd actually painted a summer scene in July.

With Winter's Web, I returned to my out-of-season norm. The intricate frosting of deep, soft snow that bedecks every branch and twig in winter here is a continual source of wonder for me, and the kind of wet-into-wet, lush paint I'm currently excited about employing seemed perfect for capturing the way bits of bright color in the winter forest are reflected in the nearly all-white woods. Painting Winter's Web had me recollecting the beauty of winter's cold, even as it reached 90º one day here in Fairbanks while I worked on it.

New Year, New Work

Colors of Winter  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas   30" x 40"

Life goes on very much as normal in Fairbanks when it's 50º below zero. On a day last week when the most accurate bank temperature sign in town read -52º F (this picture was on the front page of the local newspaper), and the Weather Service recorded an official -51º F at the airport, I drove downtown through dense ice fog to read to the kindergartners at Denali Elementary, just as I have every Wednesday morning I've been in town for the last 24 years. A few of the kindergartners were a little late arriving, but nearly all showed up, the buses were on time, and classes, business, and most other activities in town went on as usual.  

I did a big grocery shop, hoping the cold would cut down on customers and checkout lines at the Fred Meyer (it did, a bit), took Dorli to the University to teach her classes, and was glad to be able to come home, park my car in our heated garage, and commute the few steps to my studio to go to work.

I painted 10 hours that day, late into the evening, and I was grateful. I was grateful not to have running water in the studio, so I didn't have to worry about its freezing-up. I was grateful for my little wall-mounted Home Comfort propane heater that uses no electricity, has run silently and constantly for almost four years without a hiccup, and keeps my tightly insulated studio toasty at any temperature. And I was grateful, as I am every day, to Alaska's Rasmuson Foundation, whose significant Individual Artist support made building the studio easier and better than it would have been without the support, several years ago.

In the studio that day, and for most of the week before and the week since, I worked hard on Colors of Winter. I almost never do "studies" for larger paintings, but this one grew directly out of a little watercolor birthday card (the image at left) that I made Dorli in November. The two feet of snow that fell at our house between Christmas and the end of the first week in January, and more that has fallen since, surely prompted the desire to do a larger painting based on that little "study."

I love our woods, lit by the low-but-brilliant winter sun, and I love running with Dorli on the new racing snowshoes that she got us for Christmas, on winding trails that are pristine and unbroken when we head out on them at first light. Few things in this life make me happier than seeing snow fall as we run through the winter forest. That simple pleasure is all this first painting of the new year is about. 

Snow at Last...and More Gold

Daybreak  ©Kesler Woodward 2016  acrylic on canvas   24" x 36"

It's snowing outside my studio window as I write this post, but it's been a long time coming, this year. I'm told that this was the first nearly bare-ground Halloween in Fairbanks in 90 years. When we got our first snow of the fall, barely an inch, in mid-October, I started work on Daybreak in anticipation of the glorious views of the low sun from our front door that Dorli and I enjoy at the end of our trail runs all winter. We got a couple  more inches of snow about ten days ago, while I was still working on the painting, and painting it felt like a celebration.  

As I've noted before, in my fortieth winter since moving to Alaska, I do occasionally get just a tiny bit tired of the cold and the dark, but I have yet to ever see it start snowing and wish it would stop.

Evensong (A Golden Nightfall)  ©Kesler Woodward 2016   acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Evensong (A Golden Nightfall) is my latest painting to employ iridescent gold paint, in response to an invitation from Curator Elizabeth Eero Irving to participate in an exhibition next month that she's titled "Gold: The Northern Element." As I said about my three earlier paintings this fall that use gold, I would probably never have even considered employing it if I hadn't been invited to be in this exhibition, but the many extraordinary altarpieces we saw in museums and churches in Rome and Tuscany this spring served as major inspiration for me. The trick, as always with inspiration that comes from works of another era, is finding a way to respond that is both contemporary and consistent with my own way of painting.

As so often in my work, Evensong grew out of a combination of things I was reading, thinking, and feeling. Without knowing exactly why, I began the painting by treating the gold like falling snow, which would fill the canvas with its glints of light against the dark spruces and falling night. I didn't really know what it was about, but I was thinking of calling it A Golden Nightfall. Then, just this week, while taking a break from countless hours of enhancing the shapes of the tumbling, aureate flakes, I read an article in an older issue of the New Yorker about Thomas Cranmer and the 350-year old Book of Common Prayer. When I read author James Wood's description of a precentor's chanting Evensong in a British Cathedral, I realized more fully what the painting was about, and the full title came to me.