Polygons - Tumblr Posts
Body Work from Neggy Gemmy
Here’s the full view. Untitled polygons (peacock and mesquite), 9 x 12 inches, gouache on paper.
#relationshipsbelike #gouache #polygons
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.
Submission Friday:
Heather Lee Birdsong, Untitled (Forest Park), 2017, 10 x 7 inches, gouache on hot press paper.
This was the first in a series of small works depicting the private experience of emotion in public space. Forest Park, a famed wilderness area within the city of Portland, Oregon, serves as a shared backyard. Traversing its many miles of trails is to simultaneously experience the private and the public: a place where urban dwellers go to commune with nature, but where one is never really far from anyone, even if one can’t see or hear them through the dense trees, shrubs and flowers.
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
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
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.
Working on Senior Project stuff... Bam! Logo for my project Orbis.
Biomorfismi studio #4
(Praying Mantis)
I have a logo!Thank you Tibor. i'm glad for this!
Let’s talk about gender baby ii
