Kesler Woodward

Travel and Work

I've just returned from a weeklong artist residency on Orcas Island, Washington. My stay in the beautiful Kangaroo House Bed and Breakfast there was the prize for being chosen 2012 Artist of the Year by Artsmith,  an Eastsound, Washington-based arts organization that provides residencies, literary events, and exhibition, performance, and publishing opportunities for artists and writers. 

The week exploring relatively remote, sprawling, lake- and mountain-filled Orcas Island from this peaceful, comfortable base was both restful and energizing, and will lead, in time, to new work. I am deeply grateful to Jill McCabe Johnson, Director of Artsmith, and to her and her husband Charles for their great breakfasts, warm welcome, and care during the week on Orcas.

As always when I travel, especially to new locales, I tried on Orcas to focus on being in the place, getting to know it, rather than making images of it. I try as hard as I can not to even think about what kind of images I might make, but instead give the place itself my full attention, explore it as fully as possible. I sometimes do sketches, and I do take photographs for future reference, so that when the time comes I will get the shape of things exactly right, but I don't try to do work about the place while I'm there.

I know from past experience that if I work from life, I will spend a lot of time responding to the landscape's prettiest, most superficially attractive aspects, and that it is much better for me to give all my attention to the place itself. I pay attention to what it looks like, of course--its weather, its light, its topography--but just as much or more to what it makes me think about, how it relates to what I've been reading, how it feels to be there. I am ultimately, always, trying to make work about what it felt like to be in a place, more than what that place looked like.

Weeks or months, perhaps as much as a year from now, I'll go up to my studio one morning, and I'll realize that the experience of being on Orcas Island has trickled down into my consciousness deeply enough that I have something more personal to say about it than, "Isn't this a pretty place?"  Then I'll marshall my images, and more importantly my memories, and I'll try to distill on canvas or paper something that gets at that feeling. I have no idea what those images will be. The only thing I know is that they won't look anything like the photos I took this month of that pretty place.

 

 

I tend to think that unless I'm in my studio, painting, then I'm not at work, so it's important to remind myself that both getting out every day into the great boreal forest that surrounds my home and traveling to new places are parts of my work as well.  In the last year, I've spent time in many other parts of Alaska, and in North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, and Arizona, and images have come from or will come from all of them.

On my studio wall, in drawers and sketchbooks and elsewhere, are lots of images from past travels--oil pastels and paintings on paper from riverbanks near Fairbanks to Denali National Park in Alaska, Congaree National Park in South Carolina, a bridled titmouse at Patagonia Lake in Arizona, and many more. These are not currently framed and hanging in galleries, and most don't even appear on the "Available Works" section of this website, but they are an essential part of the weird, idiosyncratic way in which I seem to need to work.

So, for example, I have made two trips to Juneau in the last year--more than 600 miles from Fairbanks and a world away in climate and ecosytem. I taught a weeklong workshop there last June, and I went back down in November for the opening of our Boreal Birch exhibit at the Alaska State Museum.

The June trip afforded me the opportunity to get out with artists from the Plein Rein group of plein-air painters into some of my favorite landscapes anywhere. I didn't paint while I was there, but focused on my teaching and on being in that wonderful place with those terrific people. Many months later, well into winter, I made images based on that experience--not the images I would have guessed I would make, when I was there, but of moments and places that seemed to need to be painted when the time came.

Three of those images--a raven sitting on rocks below the tidal waterfall at Amalga Harbor, silvery light off the water filtering through the Southeast Alaska rainforest, and Mendenhall Glacier, which I hadn't painted since I lived there more than 30 years ago--have just this month migrated from my studio wall to my framer, on their way to the Juneau City Museum.

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Paintings will almost certainly come from the November trip, as well, but I don't know when. All I can do is go to my studio and work. What happens there, what I need to paint, only reveals itself to me in its own time.

A North Carolina Exhibition

It has been some time since I've posted new images and commentary here--not because I've had nothing new to share, but because I've been so busy that I haven't had time to share it. The last couple of months have been full ones on many fronts.

The views here are of my February exhibition at Christa Faut Gallery in Cornelius, North Carolina--just north of Charlotte. John Ruck, the gallery owner, did a beautiful installation of the seventeen paintings I sent--ranging from one as small as 5 x 7 inches to five that were 4 x 5  feet--in the gallery's beautiful space. It was a great treat for me to show a large body of my new work in the South, and especially nice that the gallery is so near Davidson College, my undergraduate school. Former professors, friends from the area, and other friends and family from South Carolina to Virginia and Washington D.C. drove or flew in for the opening reception, so in addition to a solo exhibition, it was a lot like a reunion.

Retired Davidson College English Professor Gil Holland and his wife Siri--longtime friends and collectors of my work.

Davidson College is where I fell in love with art, where I became a painter, and where I became, essentially, the person I have been all my adult life. It was a great pleasure to return for the first time in many years to the campus that I loved, and love, and to revel in the flood of memories engendered by the place and the people who are still there.

More dear friends (and also collectors of my work), who flew down from Washington, D.C. for the opening reception. David Policansky and his wife Sheila David, both of whom I met in 2001 when David and I were members of the Harriman Expedition Retraced, a 30-day voyage along the Alaska coast from British Columbia to the Bering Strait and the Siberian coast, retracing the route of the last great exploring expedition to Alaska, in 1899.

Sherwood Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

One of the new paintings in this exhibition, Sherwood Forest is an evocation of the returning light in my own backyard, the birch forest through which I ski onto my neighborhood--Sherwood Forest--trail nearly every winter day.   

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. 

Trees North and South

 Birches and Sky

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Oil on canvas

24" x 36" (image)

25 1/2" x 37 1/2" (framed)

Again and again, I find myself painting trees. Birches and Sky is the latest in a series of paintings in which I look up through the canopy of the forest toward the sky. 

Sometimes I wish that I could include here time-lapse movies of certain paintings as they come to life. That is within my meager range of technological skills, but I've been reluctant to do it mainly because for so much of the time I'm working on any painting, it looks horrible to me. I'm loath to share the awkward stages through which every painting goes, and in the end I'd rather it seem as if the final image emerged effortlessly from my brush, dripped fully formed into my composition. One of the things I was aware of in this painting more than most, however, is how much time I spend adding richness and complexity to the surface after the image is essentially done, and how little of that shows when viewing it in reproduction.

If you had come to my studio and looked at Birches and Sky from the doorway, a day or even two before it was done, and then come back when I had just signed it and declared it finished, you would probably have wondered what I'd been doing in the interim.  The painting would look essentially the same from that distance, and photos of the full canvas taken before and after that final push would seem essentially identical, as well. The difference is only apparent when you are close enough to the painting to touch it. The last couple of days involve not so much fixing and adjusting (though there is some of that), but trying to provide rewards for the viewer who looks closely, patiently, for a long time. 

Most of those surprises--things like unexpected, tiny bits of contrasting color and texture that peek out from below parts of every surface, interrupted outlines, variegated hues within areas of dark, almost-blackness--happen in the course of the working process. But I always want more, so when everything is in place, when it looks just right from across the room, I continue to add a touch here, a dash there, paint over a small section with an almost identical color, allowing just the smallest bits of the underlying color to show in and around the new strokes...  

It's the fun part for me, this playing with surface and color once I'm past the anxiety of worrying whether the painting will ever work out, once I know that it's going to be o.k. Eventually, though, I reach a point at which I know I'm not making things better or richer, just different. I realize that I'm going round and round over the surface, having a grand time playing. I stop reluctantly, sign the painting, and move on.

Longleaf Canopy

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on paper

28" x 20" (image)

37 1/2" x 29 1/2" (framed)

Moving on right now means getting to work on the Southern images that I will be showing in an exhibition in Aiken, South Carolina in September. As I mentioned in my last post, that show at the Aiken Center for the Arts will include work by my high school classmates from forty years ago, Linda Prior Hunley and Esther Randall.  Longleaf Canopy is based on one of the photographs Linda generously forwarded me shortly after we agreed to work toward this exhibition.  She was clearly right in thinking that an image looking up through the canopy of the Southern forest would intrigue me, and I have to admit that the venerable, magnificent longleaf pines of South Carolina have a hold on my spirit very similar to the birches of the circumpolar North.

I grew up hearing my father sing the praises of the longleaf pine--how it grows more slowly, especially in its early years, than the loblolly and other pines that have largely supplanted it in reforested Southern woods in the last couple of generations, but is more resistant to fire and disease, makes better lumber, and is an altogether superior tree.  The 90 million acres of longleaf pine forest at the time of European settlement in the South have dwindled to around 3 million acres today, but there has been a rebirth of interest in the preservation and expansion of the longleaf pine ecosystem.  I spent many wonderful days roaming the South Carolina pine woods with my lumberman grandfather as a child, and as a teenager exploring the sprawling Hitchcock Woods that enfold the city of Aiken, a 2000 acre tract that is one of the largest urban forests in the United States.

Sycamore Portrait

©Kesler Woodward 2006

Acrylic on paper

28" x 20" (image)

37 1/2" x 29 1/2" (framed)

I don't think I ever consciously realized until I began to paint them, years later, how much I noticed and loved individual trees when I was growing up.  I know that I never realized how diverse and rich the Southern woods were until I moved west and north and was surprised to find so many fewer species.  Aiken, where I grew up, has parks everywhere, and beautiful sycamore trees throughout.  Their bark, like birch bark, is individual and extraordinary.  

This is a tree on the grounds of the First Baptist Church in Aiken--one of several huge, beautiful sycamores which grace that city block downtown. When I go back to visit family there now, I visit these and other trees I grew up with, and I am grateful for what they did to enrich my appreciation for the natural world, even if I didn't know it at the time.

 

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)