A New Year

January 14, 2026

At the Edge of the Light

©Kesler Woodward 2025 Acrylic on canvas 60″ x 48″

I ask myself two questions when I’m about to start a new painting. The first is often how big to make it. When I began At the Edge of the Light, I knew that I wanted to work on a large canvas–something I knew would take a long time and that I could settle into working up patiently and deliberately. In this instance the question, “What do I want to paint?” came second. Different kinds of images, for me, seem to require different sizes, and the challenge here was trying to do what I’d done recently in several smaller canvases–celebrate the extraordinary light of what is shaping up to be one of our coldest winters in years, but on a several-times-larger scale.

The light of winter here is as quiet as it is beautiful. I wondered whether I could capture some of its magic on this much larger scale while retaining its subtlety and peace. At the Edge of the Light represents that effort.

There is a Time

©Kesler Woodward 2026 Acrylic on canvas 20″ x 16″

I began work on There is a Time, my first painting of the New Year, thinking about the sun here in early January, which struggles to rise less than 2º above the horizon at its zenith. Every year around Epiphany, January 6, I kind of lose my faith in spring. I know, of course, that it will come, but it’s hard for me to picture its arrival in my mind with any sense of reality. I think this painting is a paean of praise to that wan but faithful sun breaking through the trees just above the horizon, promising in the depths of winter to one day bring warmth and brightness back to our northern world.

Arizona Sycamores

And trees…always trees… I’ve painted American Sycamores in the South a number of times over the years, and European Plane trees in Italy, and I’ve long wanted to paint Arizona sycamores, which are of the same genus but a different species, adapted to their different climate and their much different ecological setting. Every time I visit the American Southwest, I love seeing them in the areas I go birding with dear friends. Finally this year, just before Christmas, I made this little painting, which is as much about the bright light of the Southwest as it is about the trunks of those beautiful trees.