Kesler Woodward

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.

My exhibition opening this Friday, July 1, in Anchorage at Georgia Blue Gallery!

Treeline  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

A couple of weeks ago, Dorli and I loaded 13 of my recent paintings in our van and drove them down to Anchorage for my exhibition that will open at Georgia Blue Gallery this Friday, July 1. If you're in Anchorage this week, please stop by the gallery and say hello during the opening reception Friday, from 5-7 p.m.

Treeline is the newest and largest painting in the exhibition, at 4 ft. x 5 ft.  The gallery space is not huge, so the other paintings range from several 3 ft. x 4 ft.  and 3 ft. square canvases, down to a couple of 16" x 20" ones and one 20" x 10".

Treeline is not a scene, but a kind of "group portrait" of some of the individual trees I love growing here, pretty close to the treeline in both latitude and altitude. It was inspired in part by reading a terrific recent book called The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, by Ben Rawlence. It has entire chapters on the fate around the circumpolar north of some of the trees I most love--white spruce and black spruce, downy birch, Siberian larch, Scots pine, and more--and some of the consequences of climate change reflected in their spread or retrenchment, and the lives of those who live in and around them.

Below are just a couple of the thirteen paintings that will be in the exhibition at Georgia Blue Gallery, 3555 Arctic Blvd. in Anchorage. Images of and information on all of the paintings are in past posts on this site, and in my "Available Works" album at the top of the right-hand column of this page. 

Our granddaughter is visiting for a couple of weeks in Fairbanks, so I will only be flying down for the opening reception on Friday afternoon and back that evening, but I'd love to see you if you're in Anchorage and are able to drop by the gallery reception from 5-7 p.m.

Be Still and Wait ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  36" square

 

A Gentle Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2021  Acrylic on Canvas  24" x 20"

It Was Both Light and Dark

It Was Both Light and Dark  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

The light keeps changing in my most recent paintings. It breaks in rich hues over a dark horizon in one, suffuses the sky with glory in another, and is eerie in a third. I'm not sure what this is all about.

The trees of the northern forest are, as always, the foreground and setting for these new paintings, but even more than most of my work, they are about the light. I don't set out to make paintings about mood, about the state of the world, or even my own state of mind in these fraught times, so I'm puzzled when I finish a painting and regard it, wondering what it has to say to me, and what it might say to others. 

Vault of Heaven  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 48"

For the past two years I've made paintings about twilight--trees and the forest as they emerge or begin to disappear at every stage of dawn and dusk, and sometimes as they glow softly in the night. The liminal hues have almost invariably been muted, and I didn't intend Vault of Heaven to be that different. Somehow, the color got away from me, as I built the sky with layer after layer of transparent washes, and I was shocked by the resulting atmosphere's sensual brilliance. I thought hard about softening it, muting it, but I couldn't bring myself to give it up.

Sentinel  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on panel  20" x 16"  

Sentinel is much more muted. It presents a similar scene, but a very different mood. Its eerie light, as well as its composition, may have something to do with my having started it just a couple of days after the invasion of Ukraine, but that wasn't my conscious intention. 

Sentinel is painted on a cradled wood panel of a sort that I enjoy using from time to time. These archivally primed panels are very smooth, with none of the "tooth" of woven canvas. I like to have a surface that "talks back" to me a bit as I paint, so I almost invariably find myself roughing it up, and in this small painting, I worked the sky extensively, layering and scraping it repeatedly. The process resulted in a different kind of illumination in the pre-dawn sky--distant lights seen through darkness.

New Paintings in a New Year

Be Still and Wait  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

I love the winter, and 45 years after moving to Alaska, I have yet to see it start snowing and wish it would stop. But about this time every winter, I look at the most recent paintings I've made and realize that I must be craving color. As I've said many times on this site, I never know what I'll paint next until I actually begin a new painting, but I can't help  noticing the burgeoning light, the open water, and the rich, brilliant colors that have once again found their way into my January and early February paintings.

As usual, I didn't really know what Be Still and Wait was about until it was done. But as soon as I'd finished it and sat across the studio looking at it, lines from "East Coker," one of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" came immediately to mind, and the title arrived fully formed. I've made paintings inspired by those poems for more than half a century, and it seems there may be more to come.

The Woods in Winter Dream About Spring  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 20"

The colors in The Woods in Winter Dream About Spring are even brighter, and less literally real. This is a scene at the heart of the 2-acre study compound of trees from throughout the circumpolar North, planted by researchers at the University of Alaska almost 60 years ago, that I have been avidly exploring and getting to know for the last year. Granted access to that compound last spring, 40 years after seeing it for the first time, when the trees were just saplings, I am visiting it every week, trying to get to know every tree.

It's as much a delight to be in that exotic boreal garden on my snowshoes, making new paths in more than 3 feet of utterly pristine, unbroken snow, as it was to see two varieties of birches from Finland leaf out in spring and two kinds of larches from Siberia turn golden and drop their needles in the fall. I was in that garden last week, and it occurred to me that perhaps the spruces at the heart of it are craving color as I am, dreaming in their slumber about the riot of spring, summer, and fall. 

Tomorrow to Fresh Woods  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on canvas 24" x 24"

Tomorrow to Fresh Woods is, for me, about not just the beauty of bare branches against the sky in the twilight, but about looking ahead to light, on the other side of anxious times and loss. Its title comes from one of the last lines of  English poet John Milton's famous 17th pastoral elegy "Lycidas." 

My wish is for more light, for all of us, in the new year!

Summer Night

Summer Night ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  36" x 36"

It has not been dark here for weeks, and it won't be again until August. The dramatic burgeoning of daylight has nearly reached its annual zenith, and as usual I'm enchanted by the beauty of the summer night. This year even more than most, I've found myself looking up, especially in the evening, at the treetops and the sky. The light of every season here is remarkable, the low angle of the sun at this latitude giving us hours of twilight even in winter, but it is the soft, ethereal light of summer evening, when the sun just ever-so-slightly dips below the horizon at midnight, that seems most wondrous.

I don't usually post images of my paintings in their frames, but I did this one because I so appreciate and want to acknowledge the company that has custom-made all the frames for my paintings for more than 25 years, Metropolitan Picture Framing in Minneapolis. I discovered their frames at a museum conference all those years ago, and I knew that they were what I'd long been seeking--beautifully crafted, elegant "floater" frames that were more than nice enough for display in museums, but clean and simple enough not to distract from the paintings themselves. I order them by phone, and they make the 2 1/2-inch deep frames to my specifications--ash wood, pickled-white finish, black-painted interior, pre-drilled holes for the screws that secure the painting's stretcher. They are shipped in sections, with wedges that enable me to put one together in minutes whenever I need it. For a quarter century, I have called their number and Lea Ann, in the same welcoming voice, has answered, "Hi, Kes. What can we make for you, and when do you need them?" It was a great comfort to me when I received an email just a couple of weeks ago, saying that they'd returned to work from their pandemic shutdown, were all well, and were fully back in business.

The Buried Giant  ©Kesler Woodward 2020  Acrylic on Canvas  30" x 40"

The Buried Giant is named after a favorite novel of mine by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author best known for his novel The Remains of the Day. As usual for me, the title came after the painting was completed, when the atmosphere in the painting reminded me forcefully of the fog of forgetting which is at the center of that strange story. You'll have to read the wonderful novel to understand the reference, and I hope you will. I will just say that the painting was not intended to be "about" memory and forgetting, much less about that novel, but it seems to me very much in keeping with it, and is perhaps in subconscious response to this strange pandemic time.

Crown ©Kesler Woodward 2020 Acrylic on Canvas  20" x 16"

Bare treetops about to leaf out in the lengthening days of spring, imaginary mist, the light of the summer night... I have so little say over what I paint. All I can do is go to my studio each day, begin to work, and see what happens there.  

Fall Comes Like a Fire

Morning Journal ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 24"

Much of the time I'm painting images that are out-of-season. In summer I often long for the hush of winter, and I paint snow scenes. And as much as I love the winter, after being enveloped in whiteness for six months I find myself dreaming of the brighter colors of spring. But the fall, which turns the boreal forest from green to gold in a few short weeks, captures me every year. Two new paintings are personal responses to that glorious blaze.

Like a Fire ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas 20" x 16"

The smaller painting Like a Fire addresses that notion directly. It's a scene from early September, just a stone's throw from my studio. Our bright fall leaves are mostly yellow, but a handful of aspens turn orange and red on occasion, and a few weeks ago I was struck by how much the rampaging transition to fall, with whole sections of trees still green and other boughs blazing yellow, orange, and red, looked like sudden flame engulfing the forest. 

 

 

 

 

 

Dooryard Birch ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Pen and ink on BFK Rives paper  15" x 10"

Since finishing these bright fall paintings, I've heeded the note to myself I posted some time ago in my studio, saying "Draw more!" In Dooryard Birch I revisited my current favorite tree, just steps from my studio door. I made a drawing of it several months ago with bold strokes of pen and ink. In that summer drawing, I tried to capture some of what I saw as that birch's remarkable vitality and strength

So what would it look like, I wondered, if I tackled drawing the same tree with a thinner pen, and searched for different parts of its personality? The new Dooryard Birch is the same section of the same tree, drawn from the same angle, at the same size, but in it I've tried to capture a little of that still young-and-growing tree's delicacy, its vulnerability, and a different element of its sensuality. I honestly don't know how much of those qualities come through in the finished drawing, but this is the way I think about my work.

 

 

Unfurling ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Pen and ink on BFK Rives paper  15" x 10"

As usual for me, one painting or drawing leads to another, and another, so for now I'm still drawing portraits of some of my favorite trees in our own yard. I just go to my studio every day and go to work, so I'll simply continue until another image calls. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rubenesque ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Pen and ink on BFK Rives paper  15" x 10"

Changing Seasons

Persephone  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  36" x 24"

Spring is an especially dramatic time in Interior Alaska. In a matter of just a few weeks, daylight soars from wan and short to brilliant, and night disappears. One day in early May, all the trees on the hillsides leaf out, and from one day to the next the landscape changes from bare to green. The delicate yellow- green of those newborn leaves deepens within another week, and it's early summer. 

I almost always make a painting or two about this overnight transformation of the forest, as after four decades of seeing it happen, I'm still startled and delighted by it every time. Persephone, just completed last evening, is my this-year's response. When I began this painting a week and a half ago, I thought I might call it Primavera, but as it often does, the image took on a mind of its own, and when I finished it and pondered what it was about, I realized that it had turned into Persephone. 

 

Golden Hour  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

In April of this year, before the new leaves appeared, but when the trees were often bare of the soft snows that rest on every branch throughout six months of winter, I found myself paying particular attention to the spare beauty of their crowns in the golden hours of twilight and dawn. I've painted the forest in countless ways for more than four decades, so I'm always surprised when I find myself noticing a different aspect of it. Like True at First Light, which I wrote about in my last post, the three smaller new paintings I've completed since then are explorations of the intricate tracery of bare treetops, punctuating golden sky.

 

 

 

Susurrus  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

I almost never set out to paint a "series." Usually it's just as with this run of four paintings--different ways of looking at, thinking about, and depicting something I've noticed and want to explore and/or celebrate. I make a painting, and in the course of doing it, I realize there are other ways I could do it, and other things I have to "say" about its subject. I do another, and then often another, realizing each time I finish one that there are other things I want to say, and other ways to say it. When the impetus runs its course, at least temporarily, I often look up and find my studio full of a "series" of related works.

This series was interrupted by this year's glorious budburst of green, but it's given me yet another aspect of trees to explore in the months and years to come.

 

Gloaming  ©Kesler Woodward 2019  Acrylic on canvas  16" x 20"

 

Genesis

Genesis  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  Acrylic on Canvas  48" x 60"

For more than half a century when I've walked in the woods, I've rearranged random landscape elements into patterns. Long before I made my first real painting, or ever gave art a second thought, I regularly picked up rocks and leaves and sorted them by color, leaving circles or other patterns on the forest floor. I didn't think of it as making art.  I just felt a need to impose little bits of order on the chaos.

Forty years ago, my MFA thesis exhibition included on the floor of the gallery large arrangements of rocks with quartz dikes in them, the bright white lines in the different-sized rocks carefully touching edges to form continuous circles and squares.  The paintings and prints and drawings in that exhibition reflected on that impulse to impose order where none is apparent. There was a 5' x 7' painting of a starry night sky in which I carefully plotted the positions and relative brightness of hundreds of stars as they appear in the real night, on which I imposed constellations that the ancients "found" in that random arrangement of stars, and new ones I made up.

I continued for years after to make patterns on the forest floor, whenever and wherever I went, still not really thinking of it as art, but finding it deeply satisfying. When the British artist Andy Goldsworthy came to worldwide prominence some years later, doing everything I'd done and far more, far better, and much more elaborately, and photographing the results beautifully, I loved his work, but seeing it in books and magazines everywhere spoiled my enjoyment of making such arrangements myself, and I quit doing it altogether for a long time.

[23 years ago I made this 4 1/2'  x 6 1/2' oil painting, now in the collection of the Anchorage Museum, of an arrangement of lichen-covered rocks that I assembled and left on the shore of Hudson Bay during a long kayak trip in the Canadian Arctic. It's called A Circle of Rocks in the Arctic.]

Every few years, though, I give in to the impulse, because I can't help myself. One recent fall, I noticed a number of atypically bright red aspen leaves on the trail, randomly scattered throughout the yellow, brown, gray, and still-green fallen foliage. Those red leaves simply needed, in my mind, to be gathered into a solid circle. 

I love to paint leaves almost as much as I love painting trees, so when I began thinking again, just over a month ago, about my need to impose order, I started making Genesis, another big painting of such an arrangement, knowing it would take me a very long time and drive me crazy. It did, and it did...but it was worth it, in the end, to see my memory of the little circle of red leaves I'd left in the woods come to life, "writ large," on a ridiculously complicated canvas.

I really do believe the impulse to find patterns and impose order is one of our most basic human traits, and so I think it's no wonder we imagine God's having felt the same need, in the beginning, giving into it, and spending seven days creating order out of chaos.

A Pillar of Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2017  acrylic on canvas  36" x 36"

In all of my work, I try to capture memories of moments...to make images that reflect not so much on what places look like, but how it felt for me to be in them, at particular moments in time.

One afternoon this winter, Dorli and I were walking our dog Sigi along the ridge in our neighborhood that overlooks the Alaska Range, and thanks to the ice crystals and strange optics of our subarctic atmosphere, there was the most amazing pillar of light beneath the low sun. The sun seemed to be balanced atop it, and the column of light was mostly obscured by the forest, but broke through in a few small openings. It was fleeting, magical, and in this painting, done a couple of months later, I tried to capture a little of what it felt like to be at that very particular place, time, temperature, and light. 

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.

New Paintings at Blue Hollomon Gallery in Anchorage

I have just returned from the opening of a show of 15 of my last year's paintings at Blue Hollomon Gallery in Anchorage.  As always, the gallery did a wonderful job of installation and promotion, and it was a great delight to visit with the more than 200 people who came out for my First Friday opening on a 4th of July weekend. The show was enthusiastically received and is off to a good start, but the best thing about opening receptions for me is getting to see and visit with so many friends, many of whom I hadn't seen since my last exhibition in Anchorage, two years ago. 

Imperative  ©Kesler Woodward  2016   acrylic on canvas   24" x 48"

Included in the show were several brand-new paintings that I've finished since my last blog post--among them Imperative, which features a branch of a young birch that I kind of "adopted," and began observing and painting last year, and that I hope to continue chronicling in its growth for some time. This beautiful, unusual tree is part of a grid of birches planted in a long-term environmental study field within the 2000-acre arboretum of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. Dr. Jan Dawe, the Director of the OneTree Alaska program that I've been working with for more than a year now, explained to me that the female catkins which feature prominently in the image are almost certainly a response to stress.

The tree I chose to follow has two main stems, one of which Jan describes as "normal," and the other as a "mutated one." The two stems differ markedly--from the color of their bark and resin glands to the shape and color of their leaves. The darker stem I painted last year (now on view in the OneTree lab on campus) had catkins last summer, but has numerous female catkins--infructescences--this summer. From what Jan has told me, and what I've read, "my" tree may be following a biological Imperative to reproduce itself, in case it doesn't make it.

Several of the paintings in my current exhibition are wondering responses to things I've noticed while working with the scientists at UAF, and as I told a number of people at my exhibition opening last Friday, I'm amazed, and more than a little embarrassed, that I've been looking hard at birches for almost forty years in Alaska and am just now seeing so many new things about them for the first time.

        

Smith Lake Glory  ©Kesler Woodward  2016  acrylic on canvas  10" x 8" and Ridgelight  ©Kesler Woodward  2016  acrylic on canvas   10" x 8"

And though I have more than enough new work ready when each new exhibition approaches, I always want to finish just one or two more pieces before shipping it all to the gallery. I completed Ridgelight and Smith Lake Glory in the weeks just before this show. These little paintings are as much my humbled response to the glorious Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico paintings that Dorli and I tracked down all over the hill country in Tuscany in May of this year as they are celebrations of the beautiful light of Interior Alaska.