A PSA Created By Ron Wimberly ( @d-pi ) And The National Lawyers Guild. Meant For NYC In Specific But

a PSA created by Ron Wimberly ( @d-pi ) and the National Lawyers Guild. Meant for NYC in specific but good advice to anyone out there. “I am exercising my constitutional rights to remain silent and have an attorney” and “I do not consent to a search” are the only things you should ever say to a cop asking you questions.

wc williams - the archivist

Mojave Dream, two-color reduction relief print. This is one of the APs I kept for myself. The edition is for @rainboeliza’s 10th (!) annual print exchange. I look forward to getting back prints from the other participants after the new year.

#heatherleebirdsong #smidgeonpress #rainboelizastudios #vividexchange #printmaking https://www.instagram.com/p/B6bwfSShp9Z/?igshid=n4nrmoce3zd5

trying to flesh out some #dune character designs for the #drune / #dunetober / #moltobenegesserit thing on twitter last month

then my brain died and i forgot about it

Heather Lee Birdsong, currently untitled, 2020, acryla-gouache on Yupo, 7x5 inches.

I recently finished this little painting — an experiment, wherein I painted recto and verso on a sheet of Yupo. About a decade ago, I was enamored with reverse glass painting, and I dusted off those old skills to render a landscape made hazy and indistinct by the translucent substrate; the rest is rendered sharply on the front side.

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The Eater of Stones (She Ate the Stones Until She Starved)

In this video, I read “The Eater of Stones” with footage of the print She Ate the Stones Until She Starved, one of five prints from my Stories from the Stone House series. (The captions are auto-generated, but surprisingly accurate.)

I’m not sure I felt the sadness of this story until I watched this video through. During the creative process, with writing and drawing both, I experience a state of remove. I’m not sure if it’s a kind of intellectualizing or dissociating, or something else entirely. I, like many artists, often feel I don’t understand what I’ve made until I can sit back from it for a bit.

Anyway, Rapunzel and other “maiden in the tower” fairy tale types, hungry ghosts, maladaptive coping, Nabokov’s Lolita, the nesting habits of swallows, and personal experiences (mine and others’) are all influences here. The story and print are about how easy it is to feel lonely and unloved when one is isolated, physically or in spirit. The theme feels timely as we approach one year from the beginning (for many) of lockdowns and quarantine, but it is the story that changed the least from when I first began them in 2010. Are you metaphorically eating stones? I think there are times during this last year when I have caught myself doing so. Please spit them out and reach beyond your tower, if so; it helps. And to my dear friends, especially my partner, who have been there for me when I have: thank you.

Through March 17, 2021, you can see all five prints from the folio (which comprise a single work), and read all five related narratives in UPFOR’s online viewing room of my work at http://bit.ly/birdsong-stories.