Kesler Woodward

Leaves, A Young Birch, and...Tiles?

Dancing into the Dark  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  48" x 60"

I always seem to be at least a season behind in terms of what I'm painting. It was 27º below zero last night in Fairbanks, two weeks before the winter solstice, and I'm still painting fall leaves. I'm not wishing it were still September. I love this time of year, with its crystalline air and peach-colored light. But in my studio, I'm clearly still ruminating on the meaning of the bright fall leaves I so admired three months ago.

I've been thinking a lot about the fact that the leaves are most beautiful and brilliant as they are about to fall and crumble into dust. That and other, related things were much on my mind as I visited nearly daily this September a fascinating field of young birches in a research plot within the 2000-acre University of Alaska Fairbanks campus arboretum. There, my friend Dr. Jan Dawe, a research professor at UAF, is conducting in cooperation with other UAF researchers and classes from K-12 Fairbanks schools a long-term study on the effects of Fairbanks' lengthening growing season on growth characteristics of Alaska birches. Jan has repeatedly invited me to spend time in the research plot, to help characterize the visual changes in the young birch saplings as they grow and to respond to what I'm seeing there in my work.

This fall I took up that offer in earnest. As the leaves changed color in preparation for the coming winter, I began looking much harder at individual parts of the young birches than I ever have before. I peppered Jan with questions about what I was seeing throughout the plot, but I also "adopted," as a focus of my looking, a particular sapling which I'll visit as often as I can throughout the coming year and beyond. The large canvas Dancing into the Dark, which I've worked on for nearly a month, is my first painterly response to those visits. It's not only a collection of observations about parts of that tree and its falling leaves, but as so often in my work, a personal rumination on life, growth, beauty, strength, vulnerability, and change.

Droplets  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  oil on canvas 20" x 16"

More fall leaves. I'm almost the antithesis of a plein-air painter. It takes a long time for what I see to settle into my consciousness deeply enough to decide I have something personal to say about it--something more than, "Isn't this pretty?" I relate strongly, in this respect, to the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's famous comment, "I paint not what I see, but what I saw." 

This is actually a leaf that I saw three years ago, alongside the rough, slow road that leads from Chitina to McCarthy. It had rained the night before, but the fall morning Dorli and I drove the road was cold, crisp, and clear, and everything was bright--from the fallen autumn leaves to the rocks on which they fell.

I knew then that this leaf, and the raindrops on it, were beautiful, but I didn't know until very recently what I wanted to say about it. It took three years of living before I had a real inkling of what that image meant to me.

Brilliant  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  16" x 20" 

This fall, as Dorli and I ran the trails through the forest and along the ridgetops near our home, equally brilliant leaves from aspens and birches brightened our path. When I brought some of those leaves back to the studio to paint, I found their torn places, their mottled skins, and their final gasps of glory more poignant and more beautiful than ever before. 

And finally, for this time, something entirely different...a new kind of collaboration... I have been talking for some time with my friend Nancy Hausle-Johnson, an extraordinary maker of artwork in ceramic tiles, about the possibility of our collaborating on a public art project. I have admired her work for years, and when I raised the possibility of having her make a work in tile based on one of my images, to propose for a public art commission, she was enthusiastic about the prospect.

We decided to do a couple of test pieces together, and the results were even more rewarding than either of us had imagined. Nancy made one larger and one smaller tile based on existing images of mine--not reproducing them, but interpreting them in her own medium. The tiles she produced are one-of-a-kind interpretations, not in any way reproductions.

We'd thought that we might sell these test pieces, if they turned out well. It's a sign of how delighted we were by what she produced that I purchased the larger one from her to keep, and she purchased the smaller one from me to keep as well.  We are excited to find a public art competition to which we can apply, in the hope that we can make a really large-scale work of this sort. Wish us luck!

     

 

The Pleasures of Spring

Birches Bare  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas   48" x 60"

I worked on the large canvas Birches Bare for more than a month. Like many of my recent images, it's part of an ongoing "conversation" between my paintings and a series of poems by my friend, former Alaska Poet Laureate Peggy Shumaker.  She writes a poem, and I make a painting in response to it. She writes a poem in reply to that painting, and I paint in answer to it. Each painting or poem is a response to the last. The exhibition we'll have together at the Alaska Humanities Forum in Anchorage in September will afford an opportunity for visitors to eavesdrop on that yearlong conversation.

I am not thinking so much about making a consistent body of work for this show as immersing myself in the conversation. I can only paint what I paint, and the way I paint, but what I'm trying to do is immerse myself in each of Peggy's poems as they arrive. I read the new arrival many times, over weeks, and then one day, I go to work in my studio in response to it. I never know, when I begin, what that response will be, and my surprise at what emerges is one of the chief pleasures of this collaboration.

Birch trunks stand in for people in my work, and Birches Bare--like the poem to which it replies--is a drama. Dark, aggressive branches jut from trunks bright with life but scarred by living. Out of those dark limbs, tiny spring leaves of renewed life bud, slowly swell, and prepare to unfurl, just as they are doing this week outside my studio window.

 

 
Panoply   ©Kesler Woodward 2015   acrylic on canvas   36" x 48"

I started painting Panoply almost five years ago. Struck by a particularly gorgeous birch I saw one day while running in the forest, I decided to compose on canvas, in a vertical stripe, a little song of praise to its exceptional beauty. I put the painting away and tried to forget about it until many months later, when I found myself staring at another trunk on a different trail. I added a laud to the new trunk in a new, slimmer stripe, and I put the painting away again. For nearly five years I've put it away and brought it out, adding canticles each time a new birch pelt struck me with wonder unexpectedly. 

Just this month I filled the last slot on the canvas. I like that it's a kind of five-year chronicle of being surprised by delight.

 

Morning ©Kesler Woodward   2015 acrylic on canvas  20" x 16"

Two small paintings I have completed since my last post represent two sides of the way I'm affected by winter. 

Morning is the view across our front yard as we complete the climb home on the wooded trail behind our house, at the end of our winter runs. The sun rises late, barely east of due south, and it backlights the trees, casting shadows our way as we crest the ridge on which we live. I often stand in the driveway for a minute or more, not so much catching my breath as drinking in those rays.

This kind of light is one of the reasons we not only plan to stay in Fairbanks, but have no interest in "snowbirding"--spending months of each winter in a warmer clime. We'd so miss this ethereal, explicitly seasonal light. 

 

Dreaming in March  ©Kesler Woodward 2015  acrylic on canvas  20" x 10"

Dreaming in March represents another aspect of winter--especially late winter--for me. Though I'm less conscious of it than I am of winter's beauty, by early spring I think every year I'm starved for color.

By March, the Northern world has been blindingly, sublimely white for six months or more, and though it's perhaps my favorite time of year, I think some part of me longs for other brilliant hues. Sooner or later, perenially, I find myself dreaming of, and painting, landscapes filled with the rich chromas of the nearly forgotten fall.

 

It's All About Light

Smith Lake Twilight  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  acrylic on canvas  36" x 24" (image) 

The woods change dramatically in the short few miles between downtown Fairbanks and our home on a ridge overlooking the city. Dense, dark spruce forest lines the lower portions of the road that climbs from permafrost-laden Farmer’s Loop, giving way almost entirely just a few hundred feet higher to aspens and birches that grow in the south-facing, better-drained soils. As I started the steady climb on the way home one evening a few weeks ago, I was struck by the drama of the tops of the tall, dark spruces against the twilit sky.

It’s been a while since I looked hard at and thought about painting spruces against the sky, but something clicked in that moment, and I found myself musing not just on the spruces lining the way home, but on those which grow in profusion on the lower slopes of Chena Ridge, in the forest surrounding Creamers Field, and especially on those in the 2000-acre preserve of woods, ski trails, ponds, marshes, and fields that adjoin the University of Alaska campus. In memory, and soon in fact, I was back on the shore of Smith Lake in those woods, one of the places in Fairbanks I’ve most loved to paint.

Smith Lake Twilight is my latest paean to the way the descending April sun not only blasts through the tops of the spruces, filling the space just above the horizon with white light, but kindles some of the first clouds trying to form cumulus shapes above, in the lengthening days of spring.

 

Twilight Ridge  ©Kesler Woodward 2014  oil on canvas  20" x 10" (image)

Hard on the heels of painting Smith Lake Twilight, I received another unexpected jolt of inspiration. Dorli and I watched on DVD a terrific film made in 2010 by the great documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog and Russian director Dmitry Vasyukov, about the lives of hunters and trappers in a remote village on the Yenisei River in central Siberia.  Happy People: A Year in the Taiga took us through the seasons with Russians who live in a landscape remarkably similar to our own, on a great river much like the Tanana or Yukon.

I loved seeing the villagers fish for pike, whitefish, and burbot in those rivers much as I have, and I marveled at the trapper’s patient, competent, solitary maintenance of his traplines and huts in winter, catching sables to support his family back in the village. But a couple of scenes, especially, caught my painter’s eye—twilit vistas with baroque clouds above the rivers at the change of seasons.

This week and last I’ve been in my studio, remembering just such scenes, looking south from hills above the north bank of the Tanana, and thinking that here in the North, it really is all about light.

 

 

 

Light in the Sky  ©Kesler Woodward 2014   oil on canvas   8" x 10" (image)  

 

 

Montréal

We have just returned from a fabulous trip to Montréal, where a solo exhibition of fifteen of my new paintings opened on October 10 at Beaux-arts des Amériques Gallery. The gallery has represented my work for several years, but this was my first solo show there, and it was the first time I'd seen the gallery in person. It's a gorgeous, elegant space in a vibrant section of that great city, and the installation of the work was beautiful.

The gallery shows work by both Canadian and American artists, and it was a treat for me to get to talk at the opening with several outstanding Montréal artists who are represented by them. They produced a beautiful, 12-page catalog for the exhibition, which includes full-color images of all the works in the show, an introduction by gallery owner Jacqueline Hébert Stoneberger, my artist statement, a vita, and a terrific essay on my work by Montréal art critic and writer John K. Grande, who has written extensively for Artforum, Art Papers, Sculpture, Vie des Arts, and many other journals.

I have included here images of a few of the new paintings in the exhibition, and have posted images of all the works--which range from a number of small, 12" x 9" oil on canvas birch portraits to two quite large, 54" x 84" canvases--in the Available Work Album at the top of the right-hand column on this page. 

We were treated royally by everyone associated with the gallery. They maintain a beautiful apartment on the floor above the gallery, for use by artists whose work is showing, and we spent four full days in the city. It was great for me to get to see other artwork in Montréal, and to spend an entire afternoon in the Montréal Gallery of Art, one of the largest and most important museums of art in Canada.  

I have traveled extensively in Canada, visiting nearly every major art museum in Canadian cities from coast to coast, and have curated two traveling exhibitions of work from Canada's Contemporary Art Bank and taught courses in Canadian and other Northern art at the University of Alaska. I have canoed, portaged, and camped in Algonquin Park  in Northern Ontario, visited remote Hydro-Quebec sites in northern James Bay in winter, and kayaked and camped in Hudson Bay and Richmond Gulf.

My view of the North, and the images I make of it, have been much influenced by those travels, as well as by the work of a number of twentieth and twenty-first century Canadian artists. Knowing how important those experiences have been, and eager to add to them, following the exhibition opening in Montréal Dorli and I spent more than another week exploring eastern Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. We drove part of the way out the Gaspé Peninsula, visited museums in Quebec City and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and ran and hiked along the Bay of Fundy and on trails on Grand Manan Island.

As always, I don't know how long it will be before the experience of those places settles deeply enough in my consciousness for me to have something personal to say about them on canvas, but there is no doubt in my mind that new images will come from these latest travels. 

Denali Dreams   ©Kesler Woodward 2013  acrylic on canvas    30" x 40" (image)

Boreal Canopy   ©Kesler Woodward 2013   oil pastel on paper   28" x 40" (image)

Light in the Forest   ©Kesler Woodward 2013   oil pastel on paper   28" x 40" (image)

Commissions, Collaborations, Influences

Eminence   ©Kesler Woodward 2013   acrylic on canvas   24" x 48"

It has been a busy spring, including travel to extraordinary places that will eventually lead to new paintings. Dorli and I walked the spectacular 95-mile West Highland Way in Scotland in May, from near Glasgow to Fort William, and we hiked up Ben Nevis--the highest peak in the British Isles. I know that some of that experience will appear in my work, months or even years from now, when it's had a chance to settle deeply enough in my consciousness that I have something personal to say about it. Meanwhile, before and since our travels, I've been as busy in the studio as ever.

In the weeks before we left for Scotland, I completed and delivered Eminence, a commission for a prominent Alaskan law firm with offices in Fairbanks and Anchorage. When a Managing Partner in the firm contacted me late this winter, he wrote, "I know from your blog that you hate doing commissions, but..."  I do much prefer selling existing work to doing commissions (see my latest discussion on that topic in my October 30, 2012 post), but I was intrigued by what he wanted, and so made an exception.

As always in my work, Eminence not only depicts a specific place, but grew out of my effort to portray not so much what that place looks like, but what it felt like to me to be there at a very specific time of day and season. A very few viewers of this painting may recognize the mountains (and others will undoubtedly be convinced that they recognize them, and be wrong), but I don't want to say where this is. Though every peak and ridge is in its proper place, what I hoped for this painting is that it would be less about that specific locale, and more about what it feels like to be in the high, clear air of the mountains in Alaska--something that is important not only to me, but to the Managing Partner of the firm that commissioned it and to some of his colleagues.

Some of the most rewarding artwork I've done in the last decade has involved collaboration with writers and graphic designers. Letterpress broadsides have combined my images with poems by both Alaska State Writer Peggy Shumaker and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass. Those beautiful broadsides were made possible by the inspired work of designers Heather Kasvinsky of Fairbanks and Jennifer Viviano of Portland, Oregon, respectively. Each of them made of our words and images a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.

The same was true of the gem of a volume that designer Wanda Chin made from my images and my friend Frank Soos' essays in Bamboo Fly Rod Suite, published beautifully by University of Georgia Press in 1999 and still available in softcover and Kindle e-book editions. I am currently at work with Alaska poet John Morgan on two more books, each combining my images with his poetry, one coming soon from University of Alaska Press and the other, we hope, from Alaska Geographic. I will have more on those in a later post.

My latest collaboration to come to full fruition is this image for the poster and catalog for this year's Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. It was a delight once again to work with dear friend and recent Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker. In 2003, Red Hen Press of Los Angeles published our volume Blaze, juxtaposing three decades of my paintings of birches and the boreal forest with Peggy's extraordinary poetry. In this year's Festival poster, my recent painting Aubade--the title itself refers to a poem of praise to the dawn--tries to capture some of the magic of Peggy's words, which celebrate the first joys of creating works of art, in any medium.

I have been honored to have my artwork featured on the widely collected Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival posters twice before, in 1995 and 2002, but this year's poster is the Festival's first combining poetry and art, and it was especially fun and rewarding for me. Once again, the collaboration includes not only my image and Peggy's words, but the great design work of another friend, a gifted poet herself as well as a designer, Erin Hollowell of Homer, Alaska.

Chant II   ©KeslerWoodward 2013   acrylic on canvas   54" x 84"

My influences have long come more from writers than directly from other artists, and I think that more recently, music has begun to have an increasing influence on the way I think about my work. My nephew Charles, now a music major at UAF, began my belated, remedial education in classical music when he came to stay with us for parts of four summers to attend Summer Music Academy and lived with us during his senior year of high school. Dorli, who is principal flutist for the Fairbanks Symphony and has been a member of the music faculty at UAF for more than thirty years, has taken over that daunting task. I still know little, but am continually intrigued by what I'm slowly learning about how music works, and I think that the very incomplete nature of my understanding may even make stronger its influence on my thinking about new ways to make paintings.

For years I have thought of my birch paintings as "portraits" of individual trees, occasionally double- or more rarely triple-portraits. But as I talked about in my February post, I have lately been not only complicating and elaborating those compositions, but thinking of them in almost musical terms. I was so intrigued by the idea of melisma--the musical stretching of a single syllable over a run of many notes, as sometimes in Gregorian chant--that as soon as wonderful collector friends in Anchorage told me they wanted to purchase my first big Chant, I couldn't wait to begin another composition of a similar complexity and size.

A month later, Chant II sings sonorously to me from my studio wall. I sometimes think of my studio almost as a kind of monastery, and the woods around it as its grounds. I'd like to think that I turn to my work each day much as a monk does, engaged in devotions and hoping for a bit of enlightenment by simply working through the Hours. As we ran through the forest one day last week, I asked Dorli to explain another musical concept new to me--overtones, or partials. I think most days of how lucky I am, at this stage in my life, to have a guide and a whole new world as big as music to explore.

An Important Event in the Studio

First things first... I try not to talk much on this website about personal things beyond my artwork, but March 16 was a particularly significant day in my studio, when 62 family members and friends joined Dorli and me in its main workspace for our wedding. Almost three years after losing, just two weeks apart in the summer of 2010, the beloved partners to whom we'd been married virtually all our adult lives, family and friends of ours from ten states, the District of Columbia, and three countries honored us with their attendance as we exchanged sacred vows in my studio and asked for their blessing. 

We had planned a very small, intimate ceremony, inviting old friends and close family from far and wide, but not expecting many of them to make the trek to Alaska in late winter. We were overwhelmed when virtually everyone we asked made the trip--from my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter in Seattle, to Dorli's stepson and his older son from Michigan, to one of Dorli's cousins from Wyoming and her husband, to both my late wife Missy's living siblings, their spouses, and their children from Virginia, to Texas, to Wales in the U.K.

One of Dorli's undergraduate school roommates at Hampshire College, Ginnie Ferrell, who has degrees in chemistry, geology, and theology and is now an associate pastor for a vibrant, socially engaged United Church of Christ congregation in Atlanta officiated. Dear friends--from two whose post-stroke condition made it a challenge not only to get to Fairbanks, but to climb the four steps to my studio, to another who was vacationing in Hawaii with her own children and grandchildren for the month but flew back for the day--came from all over Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and far beyond.

    

As the numbers of positive RSVP's mounted over the last couple of months, we began to worry about whether the studio would hold them all. But we were able to seat all 62, with an ample central aisle for Dorli's entrance, flowers, two flutist friends from the Fairbanks and Anchorage Symphonies playing a processional and recessional, and our minister Ginnie, my son Eli, and us standing in front of the painting Dorli had selected as backdrop. 

We repaired to the house, just a few steps away, at the close of the ceremony, drank a toast in honor of our attendees, and joined a much larger group of close local friends for a reception and dinner in the ballroom of the local Princess Lodge, beautifully decorated by several of our friends. It was an extraordinary day, and three weeks later, with all the guests from out-of-town departed, with my work in the studio and Dorli's teaching and performing back in full swing, we're still celebrating the love and generosity of our wonderful family and friends. 

Radiant   ©Kesler Woodward 2013     acrylic on canvas     40" x 60"

Oh, and yes...I've been making art. In the weeks before the wedding, I had begun the painting I recently titled Radiant. I had my studio back in working order the day after the wedding, and I was soon back at work on this canvas. When I finished it ten days ago, I sat across the room, looked hard at it, and asked myself, as I usually do when I finish a new painting, "Now what was that about?"

I was kind of amazed at the effusive brilliance of the color in the two birches that had emerged on this canvas. I don't think I've ever painted two such bright, multicolored birch portraits. I could only conclude that as usual, the character of these trunks was a reflection of my state of mind. I think I must not only have been excited, ebullient, but especially in the days following the wedding, as I added dashes of brilliant color and layers of bright hues, I must have been thinking about how beautiful Dorli looked in her wedding dress, and how we both felt--radiant.

Aglow   ©Kesler Woodward 2013     oil pastel on BFK Rives paper     28" x 40" (image)

There is a similar kind of radiance, I think, in my latest painting. In the last week and a half, I've been glorying in being fully back in the swing of work, keeping my usual long hours in the studio as I worked on a big new oil pastel. I have loved working with oil pastels since I was introduced to them in undergraduate school by my painting professor Herb Jackson, and over the years I've not only regularly used them for field studies, but from time to time made big, finished paintings with them like this one, on full sheets of heavyweight BFK Rives paper.

I use oil pastels in a somewhat unusual way--much the way Herb introduced them to me more than forty years ago--more like oil paint than like crayons or pastels, pushing them hard and layering them densely to build a thick, rich surface of juicy color. In images like this one, I love all-but-burying the dark but multihued colors of the myriad branches with thick spring snow, the way the twigs' sharp forms and color burst through the whiteness that tries to encompass them, and the way the spring light sets the forest aglow.

New Year, New Work, New Shows, News

Light in the North  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   acrylic on paper   20" x 28" (image) 30" x 37" (frame)

It's a new year, but the pace of the last few months is the same. On January 6, I opened the third exhibition of my work in three months, at the Blue Heron Art Gallery, run by the Vashon Arts Alliance on Vashon Island, Washington. On February 3, the big Boreal Birch traveling exhibition of my paintings, Barry McWayne's photographs, and Margo Klass's constructions arrives from the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, where it's been since early November, and opens at Well Street Art Gallery here in Fairbanks.

My exhibit on Vashon Island, a short ferry ride from downtown Seattle, was with noted Pacific Northwest photographer Paul Bannick, whose extraordinary photographs of birds in their habitats have won national awards, were shown recently at the Burke Museum in Seattle, and are featured in his own beautiful book The Owl and the Woodpecker. The show opened on January 6, and on January 8, Paul and I gave a talk about our work to a sold-out crowd. We had a fun conversation about how we work, moderated by Mike Feinstein, who with his wife Gerry organizes an annual lecture series with visiting artists, writers and others for the Vashon Arts Alliance. 

One of the great pleasures of the Vashon exhibition was seeing at the opening and talk many old friends who have settled in the Pacific Northwest--friends who came from all around the Seattle area and as far as Portland. It was especially meaningful that my son Eli and his family--Becca and their daughter Sage--who live in Seattle, were able to come. It was a pure delight to get to carry Sage--my now 4-month old granddaughter--around to look at each of my paintings at her first art opening.

I have resisted, with some difficulty, imposing pictures of my beautiful granddaughter on readers of my blog, but her appearance at my opening gives me an excuse to share my delight in the company of her and her wonderful parents.

It also gives me an opportunity to more formally introduce my companion Dorli McWayne, whom a few attentive readers have already noted my mentioning in posts in the past few months. Dorli and I have known each other for more than 30 years, but until the death of her husband, my close friend Barry McWayne, just two weeks after the death of my wife Missy, I knew her only as his wife, and we had literally never had a substantive conversation.  In the year and a half since the almost simultaneous, sudden and unexpected losses of our beloved partners, we have--with equal parts surprise and joy--found each other, and we are enjoying beginning work on the puzzle of melding two large households and two extraordinarily busy lives.

 Madrones  ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image) 20" x 17" (frame) 

For the Vashon Island exhibition, I included several images from the Pacific Northwest, from the colorful madrone trees which I have long admired and have painted often before to scenes from the Skagit River Valley and the North Cascades.

The new Alaska images in the show are all about light. I talked, in my presentation at the Vashon Arts Alliance, about how lucky we are in this part of the far North to have, even in the depths of winter, hours each day of the kind of twilight that people of all cultures and places find magical. In the high latitudes, the sun wheels around the sky at a shallower angle than in more southerly lands, and both nightfall and daybreak are preceded and followed, year-round, by growing or lingering, ever-changing crepuscular light.

As we once again this year pass by Epiphany in deep cold and begin to hurtle toward the equinox and on toward constant day, I am grateful for new light in the North.

December Light  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   acrylic on paper   6 1/2" x 9 1/2" (image)   17" x 20" (frame) 

 

New Work, Small Pleasures, and a Personal Collection

Sunlight Snowfall   ©Kesler Woodward 2011  acrylic on canvas   48" x 60" (image)

Yesterday I rented a big U-Haul truck to take 50 paintings and drawings to The Annex Gallery, just three or four miles from my home in Fairbanks. My solo exhibition, Kesler Woodward: New Work, Small Pleasures, and a Personal Collection will open at the gallery this Friday, December 2, and run through December 24. 

The Annex, founded and directed for the last seven years by my friend and fellow Fairbanks painter Nancy Burnham, is one of the larger commercial galleries in Alaska, and perhaps the most beautiful, with pristine, 14' high white walls, excellent lighting, and a single, simple, open space.  I didn't know, when Nancy invited me to show a year and a half ago--and she almost certainly didn't either--that it would be the last show for the gallery. After seven great years of exhibiting adventurous work in a wide range of styles and mediums, she is closing the gallery at the end of December to focus on her own painting.

As the title indicates, the exhibition will feature a lot of new work. Along with most of the paintings I've posted images of recently here, there are a number of even newer ones, among them Sunlight Snowfall, a 4' x 5' view of snow falling on a bright, sunny day in the birch forest outside my studio window. This is the kind of simple but magical thing I've loved for years to notice, watch, and paint--the sun's casting strong shadows on the forest floor even as a passing cloud in another part of the sky fills the air with flakes of snow.  

Little Birch Portraits  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   oil on canvas   10" x 8" each

Also in the exhibition will be a number of small new works, among them seven very small (10" x 8") oil paintings of individual birch trunks--Little Birch Portraits. I regularly go back and forth from quite large paintings to very small ones, from acrylics to oils, from paintings with very thin surfaces built with layers of wash and glaze to very thick paintings with gestural brushstokes filling the canvas.

I have been doing thin acrylic paintings for much of the last couple of years, using transparent washes and glazes in an effort to achieve a certain kind of luminosity in the larger images of birch trunks, or to depict wide-ranging sorts of snowfall. So it's probably not surprising that one day a month ago, I realized I was missing the feel of applying thick, juicy oil paint, and in the course of just a couple of weeks I joyously painted these seven small birch portraits.

Chatanika Freezeup  ©Kesler Woodward 1987   acrylic on canvas   60" x 84"

The third aspect of this exhibition is work from my personal collection. I decided to take advantage of having the large, beautiful space of The Annex to include some works that I have held onto for myself, over the years--things that have been shown once or twice or not at all and have lived on the walls of my home for anywhere from years to decades.

Almost all the paintings I have done in the past thirty-five years have gone away. My dear, late wife Missy had the option of choosing for herself any painting I did, before it went on the market, and she exercised that option with great restraint. Those few paintings, perhaps a dozen in number, will remain in my family's collection for my son Eli and his family and are not in the exhibition. But she regularly urged me, in the last twenty-five of our forty years together, especially, to retain further examples for myself, not letting all of any series of works go away. That was--and still is--strange for me, as I'm always much more interested in the next painting than the last one.  I'm completely wrapped up in each painting until it's done, and then focused entirely on the new painting I'm starting.  I never have had a hard time letting paintings go, and have been eager to have the ones that are done go out into the world.

So...along with the many new works in this exhibition, I have included a few of those I have retained for myself from various bodies of work. These include two large (5' x 7') paintings from a series I did in 1986-87, of rivers and lakes in the Fairbanks area with the surrounding landscape reflected in the water.  Chatanika Freezeup (above) and Chatanika Breakup, another 5' x 7' canvas, have lived on the walls of my home for almost a quarter century.

Tracy Arm  ©Kesler Woodward 2001  oil pastel on paper  28" x 42" (image) 

It also includes other, mostly smaller works that I have retained from my initial summer as Denali National Park's first Artist-in-Residence, in 2002, and my stint as Expedition Artist for the Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced, a 2001 Smith College-sponsored expedition retracing the route of the last great exploring expedition to Alaska, in 1899. That 30-day expedition along the Alaska coast from south of Ketchikan, through the Aleutians and the Bering Sea, to the Bering Strait and three stops on the coast of Siberia, was for me the trip of a lifetime. 

This part of the current exhibition is by no means a retrospective. It is neither comprehensive nor systematic, but a personal collection of things that I have retained, often serendipitously, for myself over the years. I am hoping that the inclusion of these few works will provide context for the many new paintings in the exhibition, and that visitors to the exhibition will enjoy catching a few glimpses of some of the work that led to the images I am doing today.

Old Growth Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2001  oil on panel   5" x 7" (image)

Denali from Eielson  ©Kesler Woodward 2002  pen and ink  3" x 7" (image)

Thinking About Snow

Near Teklanika  ©Kesler Woodward 2011   Acrylic on canvas   16" x 20" (image)

It's still fall here in Fairbanks, one of the most beautiful I can remember, but looking around the studio at my most recent paintings, I see that I'm dreaming of snow. It's something of a mystery to me that I never seem to know, until I stop working and look around at what I've done, exactly what I'm thinking about. I just go up to the studio and work, and I'm as surpised as anyone else to see what comes of it.

Near Teklanika is an image of one of my favorite places in Denali National Park--a quiet little pool just off the road near Teklanika campground. Every time I've drive by it, I fantasize about building a cabin next to it and living there, year-round, watching the seasons come and go. I've often stopped the car, gotten out, and clambered through the woods and tundra to walk all around it, lost in reverie. Once, just a few years ago there, I listened to a magical chorus of a whole family of kestrels calling back and forth to each other from the tops of separate trees.

 Smith Lake September   ©Kesler Woodward 2011  Acrylic on paper   9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (image)

Smith Lake, in the middle of the 2000-acre arboretum on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, is a much larger body of water, less than two miles from my home. It's a place I've gone to watch the gathering of swans, the change of the seasons, and some of the first snow flurries of the year, for thirty years. I've painted it in every season, but especially in fall. One year, I had an entire exhibition of paintings I did of objects I picked up in a single walk down to the lake's edge from the Geophysical Institute on the university's West Ridge.

I'll remember this tiny little painting for a long time, as I painted it with my right arm in a high-tech sling, recovering from surgery on my shoulder after a bad fall tripping on a tree root while running on the trails in Fairbanks in July. It was as big as I could work at the time, with my painting arm lashed closely to my chest, on the back side of an ergonomic pillow. It was sheer stubborness that made me go to the studio and work anyway, and even such a tiny painting left me aching at the end of every day. I'm out of the sling now, rapidly regaining range of motion and strength, able to work on any size painting I want, and grateful for the remarkable skills of Anchorage surgeon Robert Gieringer, who put my thoroughly torn up shoulder back together.

Childs Glacier   ©Kesler Woodward 2011   Acrylic on board   8" x 10" (image)

Another of the small paintings I did while recuperating from the surgery. I was thinking about snow, about how soft it is as it falls, and how miraculous it is that if it keeps falling for thousands of years, consolidates, and flows slowly down from the mountains, it can create such a magnificent mass of ice as the Childs Glacier, which flows into and breaks up in the mighty Copper River near Cordova, Alaska.  I made a weeklong raft trip on the Copper several years ago, 100 miles from Chitina to Cordova, in the company of several other artists and writers, and we floated past this extraordinary terminus, calving giant icebergs into the cold, silty waters of the Copper River.

I love the fall. It's never long enough here in Interior Alaska, and I'm not by any means eager for it to be over. I know winter will be here soon enough, and that it will be six months long. But I'm dreaming of snow, and excited at the prospect of seeing it start falling. 

Boreal Birch

On July 1, an exhibition that two other Fairbanks artists, a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist and I have been working on together for more than three years opened at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska. Boreal Birch: Art and Science in the Northern Forest includes 20 of my paintings, 26 of Barry McWayne's black-and-white photographs, and 15 of Margo Klass's constructions, as well as a number of her small, handmade books--all about birch trees and the boreal forest. Accompanying our images are wall texts developed by Kimberley Maher, a PhD student at UAF whose research is all about birch trees. Kimberley not only challenged us with questions about our work and new information about birches over the three years we worked on this project, but developed curricular materials for use in grades K-12 in the schools in conjunction with the exhibit.

This very large show will be on view at the Pratt Museum in Homer through October 2. It travels to the Alaska State Museum in Juneau for November, December, and early January, and will come to Fairbanks, filling all the gallery spaces at Well Street Art Gallery, in February of 2012.  

It was a delight to work on this collaborative effort. The four of us met regularly, comparing work in progress, talking about birches and the northern forest, and influencing one another. We visited one another's studios. We went with Kimberley into the woods to tap birches for sap and take cores from trunks, and we peppered her with questions about the physiology of the birches themselves.

Barry McWayne, whose untimely death ended his direct participation last August, was the only artist I know who has devoted as much time, thought, and imagery to birch trees as I have. Working in two entirely different mediums, we shared similar visions of the individuality of the birches' trunks, the moods and atmosphere of the forest, and what we both called the "pelts" of the birches themselves. He and I had talked for more than two decades about doing a show of birch images together. Fortunately, Barry had already taken and printed many photographs in preparation for this exhibit, and we were able to use a large number of them, along with some of his earlier birch images, to represent him and his vision fully in the show.

Margo Klass has delighted in birch trees for years as well, incorporating images of them in her work long before she came to Alaska in the last decade.  Her exquisitely crafted, three-dimensional, magical and mysterious altarpiece-like boxes and handmade books combine natural elements from parts of the trees themselves with found objects related only visually or metaphorically to the trees and the forest--all of them transformed by juxtaposition and artistic alchemy.

In the last several years, I have been involved in several collaborative projects with other artists and writers, and the experience each time has been energizing, broadening, and surprising. From a very large scale public art project for the Anchorage International Airport on which I worked with Anchorage sculptor Sheila Wyne and Franz Mayer of Munich Studio in Germany, to two collaborative projects with Alaska's current State Writer Peggy Shumaker and several with Alaska writer Frank Soos, each project has led me to think differently about my own work, posed new challenges for me, and opened up new directions.  I like working alone in my studio, and would never want to change that basic way of life, but these collaborations have been rich leavening for both my life and my work, and I'm looking forward to more of them in the future.

Kimberley, Margo and her husband Frank Soos, who wrote the essay for the brochure we produced about the exhibition, Barry's widow Dorli McWayne, who allowed us to use his images and helped me mat and frame them, and I worked together on the installation in the beautiful exhibition space at the Pratt Museum, with great support from the museum's staff.  We were even more pleased with the results of our collaboration than we had hoped or imagined. If you can make it to Homer, Alaska, this summer, we think the exhibit is one you will enjoy. The following are the dates for the show at its various venues:

Pratt Museum - Homer, Alaska - July 1-October 2, 2011

Alaska State Museum - Juneau, Alaska - November 4, 2011 - January 14, 2012

Well Street Art Company - Fairbanks, Alaska - February 3-26, 2012