Kesler Woodward

Gifts From the Forest

Gifts from the Forest  ©Kesler Woodward 2022  Acrylic on Canvas  48" z 60"

I spent more time completing this canvas than any other I've painted in a very long time. When I look back at notes I've made to myself over the years about painting possibilities, there are so many suggesting I spend a season picking up, or just noting, specific objects in the landscape and painting them one by one on a large canvas--a kind of chronicle of time spent in the forest and some of the things I love there. I finally embarked on that task this summer. As I added object after object to this 4 ft. x 5 ft. canvas over the past two months, it filled slowly, and I began to wonder why I had undertaken such a thing. I never, ever work on more than one painting at a time, and so I couldn't think of painting anything else until this one was complete.

These are far from botanical illustrations. The images here are recognizable renditions of individual leaves, cones, catkins, bark, shoots, twigs, clusters of needles, and more, but they are meant to be evocations of the aspects of those things that intrigue me, not illustrations of them. I exaggerate color, emphasize things I'm interested in, and gloss over other features. I take lots of liberties that an illustrator would never allow. These are simply my personal responses to some of the gifts of the forest this summer.

Not everything depicted here is indigenous to Alaska. I have for more than a year spent time every week in a magical research plot of trees from throughout the circumpolar north, located in the midst of the 2000-acre woods of the University of Alaska campus. In this little 2-acre compound grow two kinds of birches from Finland, pines and spruce and fir and larches from Russia, Scandinavia, and northern Canada, and other species that don't occur in our Interior Alaska forests. The differences in the leaves and bark of Downy Birch,  European Silver Birch, and our Alaska Birch are subtle, just as those trees' responses to this climate and environment are different, but those differences intrigue me.

Trees in Alaska, as elsewhere, are under attack by a host of predators, many of which are aided in their predations by a warming climate. Evidence is on display in these images of the work of not only our familiar Aspen Leaf Miners, which have turned many of our aspen groves from green to gray every summer for years, but also the more recent work of Birch Leaf Miners, which have been dulling the summer green and fall yellow of the birches as they have sweept through our community more recently. Spruce Bud Blight, which I just learned about from a State Forester I took into the Exotic Tree Plantation last week, I now recognize when it appears on the tips of White Spruces, preventing the further growth of every branch it infests.

But there are pure marvels as well...the beautiful, red-violet "flowers" that are the emerging female cones of the Siberian Larches, which make these deciduous conifers look like they're in bloom for about a week each spring. The different-shaped leaves on different parts of an individual highbush cranberry plant. The quite different needles of Norway Spruce and White Spruce, and the changing appearance of a cluster of White Spruce cones between when I picked it up from the ground and when it opened and dropped its seeds, drying on the windowsill of my studio.

I don't think you need to recognize these species to appreciate this painting. But I hope that seeing it, you will be as delighted as I have been all summer by the diversity and wonder of these gifts from the boreal forest.

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!

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.

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!

     

 

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)  

 

 

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

Different Kinds of Portraits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smith Lake Sky

Smith Lake Sky

©Kesler Woodward 2009

Acrylic on canvas

36" x 48" (image)

37 1/2" x 49 1/2" (framed)

Smith Lake, in the 2000-acre arboretum that is part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, is one of my favorite places, a place I have painted nearly every year for more than a quarter century. The arboretum, which contains fields, woods, research areas, and a network of trails, is a fantastic asset to the University and the community. Smith Lake and two other, smaller ponds provide habitat for a dozen or more species of migrating waterfowl in the spring and fall. Cross-country ski trails cross all three bodies of water in the winter. The Equinox Marathon trail leads through the forest. Owls call from the trees. In 1992, when the snow and deep cold came so early in September, and stayed, that caribou which normally winter in the foothills of the Alaska Range migrated north into Fairbanks instead, these woods harbored a small band of them all winter long.

Fall is my favorite time around Smith Lake, and every year I find myself walking its shores in late August and early September, marveling at the reflections of the dark spruces in the water, the bright gold leaves of the birches on limbs and the ground, and flocks of swans on the lake itself.  This fall, though, I found myself looking up--at the sky.  I've been looking into the sun, and upward toward the sky, a lot this last couple of years, and so it's not surprising that I would find inspiration in it here. In the hard white of winter, it's a great delight to go to my studio and paint the brilliant sky and intense colors of fall. 

A New Look

A quick note to comment on the new look for the weblog.  I realized I had grown tired of the bright green background and same old look, so decided to go for a new, cleaner design with the kind of white background that I generally prefer for my paintings.  Realized, too, as I looked at the templates available on Typepad, that I could use one of my paintings for a banner. The new banner shows a portion of one of my paintings of the Alaska Range from the Denali Highway, Denali Highway, September.  The painting belongs to Morris Communications Company, which has one of the largest collections of my work, and hangs in their corporate office in Augusta, Georgia.  Here's an image of the whole painting: 

 

Denali Highway September

©Kesler Woodward 2000   Oil on canvas   36" x 90"

I'll have images of new work up soon, along with professional photos of the Canopy mosaic at the Anchorage International Airport.  I'm currently a couple of weeks' work into another painting looking up through the trees--this one from the forest near Smith Lake in the 2000 acre arboretum adjoining the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. And working on a proposal for a large project for Denali Elementary here in Fairbanks, where I've read to the same kindergarten class every Wednesday morning I've been in town for eighteen years. 

 

Home in Alaska

First Snow, Smith Lake
©Kesler Woodward 2006
Acrylic on canvas
48" x 60" (image)
49 1/2" x 61 1/2" (framed)

We are home...resettled in Fairbanks, after a few months less than two years away.  We returned in late September, in time to enjoy an unusually late, mild, and beautiful fall.  This is the first painting I completed in my new studio--a view of the season's first snow just beginning to fall on Smith Lake, one of my favorite spots in the 2000-acre University of Alaska woods.  It's also the latest, and probably last, in the series of falling snow paintings that I have been working on for nearly a year now, almost all of which are in my solo show at New Horizons Gallery in Fairbanks, opening November 3.

The Tanana River near our house is nearly completely frozen already, and there is snow on the ground now--enough for me to spend hours this week joyfully re-exploring area trails on my cross-country skis, marveling anew at the wonders of early winter in the boreal forest.  It's nice to be home.