Kesler Woodward :: About Kesler Woodward

Photo credit: Robert Peck, Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, 2001

I grew up in South Carolina, never considering a career in art. If anyone had told me when I was a senior in high school that I would be an artist, I would have been both surprised and offended. I liked science and math, had never been interested in art, and entered Davidson College in North Carolina as a chemistry major. I took an art class in my sophomore year to be with Missy, the woman whom I later married, since she was an art major at the time. (She is now a pediatrician, and we have been married 37 years.) She also took me to my first art museum, as a 19 year-old.

When I began taking art at Davidson, I had an incredible painting teacher, Herb Jackson, who convinced me by example--in his work and in his teaching--that art was something a bright, ambitious person might spend his life trying to do. I found that drawing and painting were not so much magic talents that people did or didn't have, but that they were skills that could be learned. I discovered that creativity, desire, and hard work were much more important than so-called "talent."

I've since devoted myself to making art, writing about art, and teaching art for more than thirty years. When I retired in 2000 after teaching at the University of Alaska for twenty years, it was to paint full time. I am normally in my studio by 8 every weekday morning, and I work until about 5 every day. I believe that inspiration comes in doing the work, rather than needing to be found before starting.

Birch Trees and The Northern Landscape

I have now painted the northern landscape for more than a quarter century, from Hudson Bay in Arctic Canada to East Cape on the Bering Strait in Siberia. I paint mountains, rivers, snow, ice, tundra, and forest, but more than any other image, I paint birch trees. People often ask why I always seem to return to birch trees as subject matter. First, I think they are among the most beautiful things I've ever seen. They're not at all white and black, as most people think of them, but display an amazing range of beautiful colors, textures, and individual forms. I call a lot of my birch tree paintings "birch portraits," because the trees seem to me so individual. As with people, a lot of the history of their lives can be seen in the way they look.

The other reason I paint birch trees, though, is that they are so abstract. When I began painting, I made completely abstract paintings for a long time before I started painting representationally. Birch trees, since they are so varied in form and color, allow me the freedom to experiment and invent with my paint's color, texture, and handling, and still make an image that ordinary people can understand and relate to. When people who don't know my work ask me what I paint, I tell them I make big, abstract paintings that happen to look like birch trees. Most of my paintings look very realistic from a distance, and very abstract close-up. I like being able to have it both ways.