Kesler Woodward

Kesler Edward "Kes" Woodward (born 1951) is an American artist, art historian and curator. Known for his lustrous paintings of northern landscapes, he was awarded the first Alaska Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts in 2004. Woodward has afterward written extensively on the Art of the circumpolar North and has curated exhibitions which have toured Alaska, California, Oregon, Washington, and Georgia.

The North dominates Woodward's oeuvre and his iconography of ravens, canyons, sandbars and black spruce has been described as “deeply evocative of Alaska”. Considered one of "Alaska's most enlightened artists", author Julie Decker noted that, unlike received landscape painters, "His focus is as much on the environment of the media as it is upon the subject matter." Woodward works in oils, oil pastels, and acrylics and has described his artistic process as "applying, scraping away, modifying, and building up supplementary colors ... to reach a prudence of how I felt, being in a distinct place, more than just how that place looked." Birch trees, his signature subject, are painted to be both representational and, when viewed taking place close, abstract. Although a "realist", his graphic compositions prompted ARTnews reviewer Richard Maschal to add, "his combination and strategy veer toward abstraction. Whether the spaces are wide-open or confined, Woodward depicts them as flattened areas with foreground and background pressed together and the whole condensed to pattern."

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