Forest Park - Tumblr Posts
Writing Prompts
The full moon illuminated the sky whilst they walked peacefully through the forest park, as the sun had begun to set. The wind sent a light chill in the air, as they continued their trek. They stood by a stream where the moons reflection had shone brightly upon it. But unbeknown to them, an elf had been admiring them from afar.
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.
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.
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.
record snowfall in pdx led to a beautiful walk in forest park today
