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Heather Lee Birdsong
Untitled (Polygons No. 9), 2016 gouache on hot-pressed paper, 10 ¼ x 14 1/8 inches
I remember collecting cicada shells from tree trunks around my grandmother’s house. My brother and cousins and I would pluck them from the rough bark and hang them on our clothes, on laundry drying on the line, or throw them at each other. I thought they were disgusting and beautiful, and fascinating because of this confusing dichotomy. Now, of course, they are also imbued with the warm glow of nostalgia. But nothing from my childhood exists without a shadow, a specter of things related and not, remembered and not.
Polygons No. 13 (celestial splinter) by Heather Lee Birdsong, 2016 gouache on hot-pressed paper, 7 x 10 inches
The “Visual Chronicle of Portland” exhibition opens at the Portland Building today and remains up through April 21. My little gouache painting, Polygons No. 5 (Oregon blueberries), is on view along with other recent acquisitions to this Regional Arts & Culture Council public collection. #polygons #hlbirdsong #publicart #visualchroniclepdx #painting #pdxcsa (at Portland Building)
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
Absit Omen, 2012, 12 x 8 7/8 inches (plate); two-plate, two-color etching. Much to my regret, I only ever printed one of these with this beautiful torinoko chine-collé. I pulled 3 with an okawara chine-collé, but those prints are not as rich and crisp as this one.
This is the only artwork I've ever dreamed into being: in my dream, I had completed the dark border of cawing crow-heads and was working out a sketch for the central image (though it was far less resolved than the woman sitting primly on the ruins' stairs shown in the final print). The dream was intensely and minutely visual. In my waking life, I had been reading darkly comic Slavic folk tales and regularly hiking past the so-called Witch's Castle in Forest Park, which no doubt inspired my subconscious. (The ruin began its life in the 1930's as a public toilet, a fact that makes its colloquial name charmingly absurd.) This and other prints are included in an online exhibition presented by UPFOR through March 17, 2021. Go take a look at bit.ly/birdsong-stories.
In this video, I read "The Beast That Ate Dreams," with the video showing details from the print She Was Blinded By Her Will. The print is one of five works included in Stories From the Stone House, a print folio with letterpress-printed title page, created in 2010 and editioned in 2018.
The full text of the tale read in this video, and the complete Stories from the Stone House folio, are part of an online presentation of my work by UPFOR from January 18 through March 17, 2021. Please visit http://bit.ly/birdsong-stories to experience the online viewing room.
For more information about this work, the series it belongs to, or other works by me, please visit my website at http://www.heatherleebirdsong.com. A transcript is available on request.
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.
𝘔𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘴𝘢 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘯 by Heather Lee Birdsong, 2012, relief print on mulberry paper, 8.5 x 5.75 inches (paper size), edition of 3 plus 2 AP.
Originally an ancient monster with goggling eyes and prominent fangs that served as a protective symbol, Medusa morphed into a lethal and victimized beauty. According to later mythology, she was raped by Poseidon and beheaded by Perseus with the help of Athena, female upholder of patriarchy (and favorite daughter of Zeus). Many 20th and 21st century feminists have reclaimed Medusa as a symbol of rage and survival.
Contemporary reinventions of the myth typically overlook Athena’s complicity in the patriarchal domination of and violence against Medusa, though that strikes me as a particularly terrible part of the tale. It also feels the most relevant: it is a pattern we see repeated in every story of the powerful abusing those less powerful. It makes us feel alone even when we are not, and undermines the seeking of justice and redress. It is up to each of us to be wary of our own complicity when tested. I think of this artwork as a talisman for this kind of wariness, incorporating both aspects of Medusa’s myth.
They Wore Their Mothers’ Bones Like Scarlet Letters, 2009, intaglio etching, after The Three Fates (Die Parzen) by Theodor Baierl, 7.75 x 5.5 inches, edition of 3 (first state). By Heather Lee Birdsong.
As a white woman and student of (predominantly European) art history, I am naturally interested in how white women have been depicted throughout that history and how these depictions continue to manifest in contemporary culture. In this work, I’ve turned the gazes of the women inward, toward each other rather than the viewer: they self-consciously and collectively carry the weight of a macabre history. What does it mean to carry this history, and how is it best borne? Is Clotho, the cutter of the thread of life, resigned to it, or preparing to cut herself loose? I give different answers on different days.
This print references two works by white male creators: the anachronistic painter Theodor Baierl (who created his Fates painting, with the central figure’s strikingly confrontational glare, in the immediate years following the end of World War I) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (originally published in 1850; like many American children, I first read it in high school).
This work was recently featured in a solo exhibition, and the edition sold out. A second state exists, all of which are in private collections too. A third state with aquatint is forthcoming, but I have no idea when completion of the plate and printing may be possible. If you would like updates about this work, please contact me via my website, here.
[image description] In this line etching, three women, mostly nude, use a single, long ribbon to tie human bones to their bodies in corresponding places. Two are standing, staring into each other’s faces. The third woman, seated on a rock behind and to the left of the other women, holds the ribbon taut between her mouth and wrist, poised to cut it with a pair a scissors.
Stillness, 2021, graphite and Flashe on translucent Yupo, 7x5 inches, by Heather Lee Birdsong. First image is the artwork; second image shows the backside of the work.
I finally finished this one. I almost sharpened away the pencil I used for the drawing, as I needed to maintain a very fine point. The backside is painted and shows subtly through the polypropylene sheet.
Hemlock, the pretty plant drawn around the folded polygonal form, is easily mistaken for Queen Anne’s Lace (AKA wild carrot) for the unwary. Queen Anne’s Lace was a favorite when I was a child, part of what made me fall in love with the Pacific Northwest. Hemlock, meanwhile, is said to have received the purplish stains on its stems from the spilling of blood (whose blood varies with the telling), and was used to kill people convicted of sedition and treachery (like Socrates, most famously) in Ancient Greece. It is also used, in careful quantities, in some folk medicines and witches’ brews. Every part of the plant is poisonous, so it must be handled with care.
Heather Lee Birdsong, A Doubtful Dream, 2021, gouache on hot-pressed paper, 18 1/8 x 24 inches.
Unlike a lot of things I make, I had no clear vision for this painting at the outset. I spent months tinkering away at it, letting details evolve as they would while I listened to audiobooks of contemporary novels based on old fairy tales, particularly those tangled up in wooded and wild landscapes. I actually “finished” this piece for the first time in winter, but something felt off. I wrapped it up and packed it away with everything else when my partner and I moved just before the end of the year. I finally brought this piece out again last week, and repainted a section of it. Now I know it’s done.
“The forest allows for enchantment and disenchantment, for it is the place where society’s conventions no longer hold true. It is the source of natural right, thus the starting place where social wrongs can be righted.”
– Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm
This shows a 3 inches square patch, or thereabouts, of a 12 x 9 inch painting in progress. It’s the view out of an imaginary room’s window: desert tree (desert willow?) in the foreground, purple mountains off in the distance, a clear blue sky. The desert is largely an amalgamation of places I remember. The tree is a very specific one — a portrait, perhaps — I photographed on a hike a couple of years ago.
I wound up painting it twice. The first time, the colors were too vivid and dark, and didn’t give that feeling of desert light. So I sponged as much of the gouache away as I could, started again, and wound up with something much better.
Imaginary Shelter by Heather Lee Birdsong, 2021, gouache on paper, 12.125 x 9 inches.
I began this by painting the architecture in blues, and realized I couldn’t settle on a color for the “figure” (the triangular polygon at the doorway) until the scene visible through the window and doorway was done. I masked off the painted areas, then worked the desert landscape as a whole (with ghost flower, lupine, desert primrose, creosote, and desert willow). I peeled the masking off to see how it was all coming together, and went to sleep with the blank polygonal space glaring.
In the end, I pulled the color of the polygon figure from the farthest mountains. I grew up in an asphalt-covered bowl of desert edged by mountains. When I felt most desperate to escape, someone told me that they could never leave, that they would miss the mountains. The sentiment struck me as absurd — the mountains were far away, an ever-present backdrop and nothing more, their ruddy faces empurpled by the vast amount of atmosphere between us and them. Even though leaving (many years ago now) was the best thing I ever did for myself, I do miss the purple mountains.
Preparation for Being by Heather Lee Birdsong, 2021, gouache and Luminance colored pencil, 24 x 18.5 inches.
I was feeling a bit ambivalent about this one until a friend and fellow artist messaged me with their impressions of this piece, unbidden, and it turned out to communicate exactly what I hoped it would (you know who you are). That is such a validating experience after all one’s isolated agony in the studio.
Work in progress. I’m pretty happy with it this far, but the last bit is (as ever in my painting process) the biggest gesture and thus has the greatest potential to ruin the whole thing.
Onward.
It Has Always Been This Way
𝘐𝘵 𝘏𝘢𝘴 𝘈𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘉𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘞𝘢𝘺 by Heather Lee Birdsong, 2020, gouache on paper, 24 x 18 1/8 inches. Photos by Mario Gallucci. This painting is about the human tendency to see existing systems as unchangeable, even though history tells us that’s rarely true. That faulty belief is often used as a crutch and a bludgeon to defer responsibility and silence those who seek to address wrongs. The sentiment feels even more significant in the midst of a pandemic (which is still not actually over, despite most people and institutions meant to protect us deciding to feign ignorance) and powerful demonstrations confronting the effects of racism in policing. The plants that appear in the foreground—California fan palm, leafy spurge, Canada thistle, oleander, pampas grass and tree tobacco—are all invasive to the Mojave desert, the landscape of my childhood. I did not know these familiar species were invasive until after I moved to the Pacific Northwest. The depicted plants also are all in bloom in September, because of course I pursued that kind of temporal logic, when it was totally unnecessary and not meaningful to anyone but me. That’s the artist’s privilege, I suppose. Original version below. I had to unframe and repaint a significant portion of it. I unknowingly used a fugitive pink pigment the first time (read those lightfastness ratings!). I did not document what it looked like faded because it made me feel physically ill. You can see that I did not attempt to repaint the sky—the blue is cooler and brighter-looking in the final version—but I actually wound up with a stronger painting as a result, I think. I also had to pay the framer again to put it all back together properly, so I’m glad I was able to sell the finished piece and see it off to a good home.
Grandmother’s Woods Smell Like Fire
2022, Flashe on translucent Yupo, 12 x 9 inches. © Heather Lee Birdsong.
Completed painting first, followed by images of the work in progress.
Because the polypropylene substrate is translucent and the paint is flat and opaque, I paint on both sides to play with perception. Stuff on the front feels very sharp and closer, stuff on the back remains kind of quiet and slightly fuzzy. I think about this in relation to the psychological phenomenon of dissociation and feelings of “otherness”. I like to simultaneously use flatness and simulated depth, pushing and pulling at traditional American landscape painting (its cloying Romanticism and problematic history as Manifest Destiny propaganda) and the very literal nature of the work as a flat 2D image.
I learned reverse painting techniques on glass from Paul Missal. It’s a funny thing to do, essentially painting in reverse order, but I take a particular pleasure in the challenge.
This painting will make its public debut at Wavelength Space in Chattanooga, TN in April 2023.
I incorporated glow-in-the-dark pigment into this piece. It’s “fun” to try to document, so here’s a gif that vacillates between normal light and low light + long exposure. Just because.
Hopeful Things in Dark Places, 2023, Heather Lee Birdsong; matte vinyl paint (Flashe), charcoal powder, Blue Lit pigment, gum arabic, acrylic on translucent polypropylene (YUPO); 38 x 25 inches.
Copyright 2023 Heather Lee Birdsong, All rights reserved.