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, 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
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.
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.
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
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, 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
Another of my mini-paintings: “Which Foot Itches”, 2020, acryla-gouache on paper, 3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches. A warm gray polygonal shape in a little forest clearing.
The title is from Botkin’s A Treasury of American Folklore (1944), quoting Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes: “If your right foot itches you will soon start on a journey, if it’s your left foot you will go where you are not wanted.”
Tinted plaster cast from a single-use mold (fancy way of describing balsa wood bits hot-glued to plexi). I have no idea why I made this, but felt compelled to give it a try.
Mojave with Shadow (detail), 2016. This was the first gouache work I did consciously revisiting the desert landscape of my childhood. Ironically, as realistic shadows became more important in the work, the figurative shadow became a less powerful thing. I’m off to the desert this week, to hike among the ruddy rocks and enjoy the unfriendly desert flora.
It Has Always Been This Way, 2020, gouache on hot-pressed paper, 24 x 18 inches (slightly cropped in this image).
My first completed painting of the year/decade: a sparse Mojave-inspired landscape, populated with silhouettes of invasive plants and a string of sharp-edged polygons. I was thinking most prominently, though not exclusively, about the fragility of life in the face of obdurate systems that perpetuate inequality and ecological destruction.
The final details added to a painting just finished. The problem with scaling up, in addition to taking exponentially more time to complete, is that it is too large for my scanner.
It took a lot of experimental mixing and testing before I found the right color for this. It includes all of the colors from the rest of the painting. And while that was largely the result of multiple failures, it also feels conceptually appropriate.
Last few days to see TIME BOMBS: Art About Anxiety & Impending Disaster at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati. If you’re in that part of the world, there’s a closing reception tomorrow, Jan. 10 from 7-9pm. Thanks for including my work @manifestgallery
Plants invasive to the Mojave that appear as silhouettes in my current work in progress: California fan palm, leafy spurge, Canada thistle, oleander and tree tobacco. A couple of these were surprising to me - they‘re so ubiquitous in my memories of the desert. But then, that’s what makes an invasive a concern for the native flora and fauna.
Leafy spurge exudes a sticky, toxic sap when cut. It is also invasive in the Mojave - like most of the plants I’m silhouetting in this painting. This is the kind of detail that is meaningful to me, but not necessarily important for viewers to know. I find that tension between what the artist invests and what the audience can read/know endlessly interesting - and often challenging to navigate.
The shadows were satisfying to lay in. After a couple of weeks slowly working at this piece, large for me at 24x18 inches, perusing my folio of finished works (which top out at 11x14) feel smaller than I remember. A good reminder that most things are relative.
Working with color can be tricky: balancing hue, value, temperature - and then making sure I’ve mixed enough (a challenge as I scale up). Gouache adds another layer of difficulty to all this, looking different when wet versus dry. I love it, but feel I never quite get used to it. Maybe that’s why my heart belongs to intaglio.
Work in progress: starting with a thin, blue sky. I mixed purple (don’t remember which - it’s been sitting on my palette for months) and cobalt turquoise to get this blue.
Detail of work in progress. Thinking about inheritance, learned behavior, recent research regarding trauma and epigenetics, and the fuzzy logic of dreams.
“You must be mistaken.” 2019, gouache on paper, 11x14 inches.
I let my mistakes and brush strokes show in this one, which goes against my instincts. The gouache’s matte finish makes them less visible in reproduction, which feels both a little sad and a little funny after all my internal struggles.
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