Kesler Woodward

Kesler Edward "Kes" Woodward (born 1951) is an American artist, art historian and curator. Known for his colorful paintings of northern landscapes, he was awarded the first Alaska Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts in 2004. Woodward has also 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 innovative artists", author Julie Decker noted that, unlike traditional landscape painters, "His focus is as much on the character of the media as it is on 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 other colors ... to achieve a sense of how I felt, being in a certain place, more than just how that place looked." Birch trees, his signature subject, are painted to be both representational and, when viewed up close, abstract. Although a "realist", his graphic compositions prompted ''ARTnews'' reviewer Richard Maschal to add, "his interest 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 reduced to pattern." Provided by Wikipedia