Seasons, Time, and My Love of Birches

March 29, 2026

Immanence ©Kesler Woodward 2026 acrylic on canvas 30″ x 40″

This has been the coldest winter in Fairbanks since 1970-71. We’ve had fifty-five days with lows in the -30s Fahrenheit, thirty-two days with lows in the -40ºs, and we’ve had 94 inches of snow—more than half again our normal for the winter. As I write this post on March 28, the last time our temperature was above freezing was on Halloween day, so the lengthening and brightening of the light in the last month has been welcome. I never know what a painting I’m working on is really about until it’s finished, but I think Immanence must be my response to the light’s returning to our wintry world, and the promise that warmth will soon find its way to us through that long cold.

Kairos ©Kesler Woodward 2026 acrylic on canvas 40″ x 30″

Kairos is not a painting of a scene, but of an idea–of a particular kind of time. The ancient Greek word kairos refers to an opportune, right moment, sometimes interpreted as a divine moment, in contrast to chronos, the more standard kind of chronological time. It is sometimes used to refer to a time of rhythmic or especially opportune natural events, as opposed to the linear passing of minutes, days, or years.

That’s not a concept I could set out to paint, of course, but when I sat across the studio from this painting and asked myself what it was about, kairos is the word that dropped out of the air, and it made perfect sense to me. The snow is still more than three feet deep in the forest outside my studio window, but the trees themselves have shed their winter-white drapery. We are more than a month from what we call “budburst”–the day that the swelling leaf buds on the trees burst open and the forest is suddenly green. We are not there yet, but I think this painting must have grown from my anticipation of that “opportune moment.”

And always another birch tree. I have been painting what I call birch portraits–at once realistic (from a distance) and highly abstract (up close) images of the trunks of individual birches–for almost fifty years. I paint other things of course–mountains, wider forests, flowing water, crepuscular light, and more–but sooner or later I always find myself painting another birch portrait. This is the growing bark of a young, beautiful birch just outside my front door, glowing in the burgeoning light of a late March morning. I wasn’t planning to make another birch portrait last week, but I walked out to get the newspaper and the post-equinox light on that trunk sent me to the studio to answer that call yet again.