When painter Kes Woodward ventured North into Alaska in 1977, he didn’t think of it as fleeing the “lower 48” states, but as the beginning of a grand new adventure. “I really think that Alaska is to the West what the West was to the East in the late-19th and early-20th centuries—it’s almost a fantasy land of wilderness, of frontier, of self-reliance,” Woodward says. “It really is magical.”
Snow Country, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60”
Woodward found himself in Alaska—it’s nickname: the Last Frontier—after graduate school, when he took a job as a curator at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, the state’s capital. “I fell in love because it was the kind of place where everyone wakes up in the morning and thinks they can remake the world because anything and everything is possible,” he adds. “My late wife would tell me my body may frequently wander out of Alaska, but my spirit never budged.”
Crown, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16”
Woodward will be showing his newest Alaskan landscapes at a new show now open at the Stremmel Gallery in Reno, Nevada. The works offer colorful skies as seen through magnificently silhouetted trees, as well as snow-filled landscapes of mountains and glacier-filled valleys. Though he is a realist, Woodward was guided into art by many of the modern painters of the 20th century, including many of the second-generation color field painters such as Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Jules Olitski and others.
Replenishment, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60”
“The light and landscape, and being in a particular place at a particular time, it can be overwhelming for an artist. And when you’re standing as close to the painting as I am when I’m painting it, it’s all about surface, color, shape and form—I want it to be completely abstract,” Woodward says. “I put a lot of miles on during the course of the day. I paint on the canvas until I get lost, then I realize I don’t know where I am so I walk back across the room and get it clear again. I have a groove in the linoleum of my studio as I walk back and forth and back and forth all day long.”
Rising, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36”
Woodward is heading into the time of the year in which Alaska gets almost continuous light; from early May until August the sun will never set, but instead skip across the horizon. Then, it transitions to a period of 24-hour nights, including mesmerizing periods of twilight that last for days. Woodward likes to think that everyone on the planet gets the same amount of sunlight, “but Alaskans, we just get it in different packets.” —
Upcoming Show
Up to 15 works
Through April 10, 2021
Stremmel Gallery
1400 S. Virginia Street, Reno, NV 89502
(775) 786-0558
www.stremmelgallery.com
Powered by Froala Editor
