Heather Lee Birdsong
Heather Lee Birdsong
Bittersweet, 2026
flashe paint and acrylic on cradled panel
20 x 16 x 1.5 inches
Heather Lee Birdsong
Memory isn't content to hurt you once, 2026
gouache and flashe paint on hot pressed paper
31 1/8 x 25 1/8 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
Let the Woodcutter Awaken No. 4, 2026
flashe paint and acrylic on cradled panel
7 x 5 x .75 inches
Heather Lee Birdsong
Let the Woodcutter Awaken No. 3, 2026
flashe paint and acrylic on cradled panel
7 x 5 x .75 inches
Heather Lee Birdsong
Let the Woodcutter Awaken No. 2, 2026
flashe paint and acrylic on cradled panel
7 x 5 x .75 inches
Heather Lee Birdsong
Let the Woodcutter Awaken No. 1, 2026
flashe paint and acrylic on cradled panel
7 x 5 x .75 inches
Heather Lee Birdsong
Remembering Spring, 2025
acryla-gouache, charcoal, Blue Lit pigment, and acrylic on translucent Yupo
11 1/8 x 9 1/8 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
An Indelible Moment, 2026
flashe paint, charcoal powder, acrylic on translucent Yupo (recto and verso)
17 1/8 x 14 1/8 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
theres a place I love., 2025
gouache and watercolor on hot pressed paper
16 1/8 x 19 1/8 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
Enigma Cafe, Las Vegas, 2025
charcoal and carbon on paper
20 1/8 x 17 1/8 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
Echoes of Something, 2026
flashe paint, Blue Lit pigment, matte acrylic on gessoed panel
17.25 x 21.25 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
Echoes of Nothing, 2024
flashe paint, Blue Lit pigment, matte acrylic on gessoed panel
16.75 x 20.75 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
Wisteria (for Polly and Zack), 2025
acryla-gouache on hot pressed paper
25 1/8 x 31 1/8 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
Sisters (Forgetting and Remembering), 2026
flashe paint on translucent Yupo (recto and verso)
33 1/8 x 27 1/8 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
Landscape of Memory (Winter), 2026
flashe paint, Blue Lit pigment, acrylic on translucent Yupo (recto and verso)
44.25 x 31 1/8 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
Landscape of Memory (Fall), 2026
flashe paint, Blue Lit pigment, acrylic on translucent Yupo (recto and verso)
44.25 x 31 1/8 inches framed
Heather Lee Birdsong
Landscape of Memory (Summer), 2026
flashe paint, Blue Lit pigment, acrylic on translucent Yupo (recto and verso)
44.25 x 31 1/8 inches framed
Russo Lee Gallery is pleased to announce Forgetting and Remembering, a new exhibition of paintings by invited artist Heather Lee Birdsong. This body of work explores deeply personal and universal themes—grief, memory, climate anxiety, and displacement—through a striking visual language that blends observed plants and real landscapes with imagined, dreamlike spaces. Birdsong works in flat, largely opaque materials including Flashe, gouache, and charcoal powder, creating images with crisp lines and a plausible-but-unreal quality. Several works take their titles from texts by Bethany C. Morrow, Pablo Neruda, and John Cage, whose ideas resonated with Birdsong's process. Together, these paintings offer not answers, but quiet, luminous questions about what it means to be human, to remember, and to make a home in an uncertain world.
Heather Lee Birdsong (b. 1984 in Spring Valley, Nevada) is an artist based in Portland, Oregon since 2005. Birdsong received a BFA in Intermedia from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2011. Collections housing her work include the Visual Chronicle of Portland, OR; Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College; Albert Solheim Library, Pacific Northwest College of Art; and Southern Graphics Council International. Birdsong is the recipient of a Career Opportunity Program grant from the Oregon Art Commission (2026) and three individual artist grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (2023, 2022, 2014). She was a member of Carnation Contemporary, an artist-run exhibition space, from 2022 through 2024 and was an artist-in-residence in Print Arts Northwest's Emerging Printmakers Program in 2012.