HEART OF A DOG — Birdie Hall X

BARKING

The moon comes up. The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

- Jim Harrison

Chained To the Tree of Life (triptych) 2023

Pink Heart of the Desert (watercolor on paper, 12 x 16 in)

Portrait of a Lady (inks on handmade Rag paper, approx. 20 x 20 in)

Spring Thaw (pastel on true gesso panel, 10 x 12 in)

Montana Summer Landscape (oil on canvas, 9 x 11 in)

Bear (hardground copperplate etching, 3 x 4 in)

Europa and the Bull (watercolor on paper, 11 x 14 in)

This show at the University of Montana Western concluded a body of work made in the early spring of 2023, almost entirely works on paper or rabbit skin glue gesso panels. We are all dogs chained to the tree of life, often forgetting that transcendence is acceptance of and not dissociation from our bodies and the landscape. We are the landscape. Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece of the same title describes a dystopian, Stalinist regime where eugenically-inclined surgeons chop up and sew together animals and humans in the name of scientific progress, only to discover that no matter how far technology goes one cannot fully erase the fact that we are, in fact, animals. I finally came around to Jim Harrison after a dear friend insisted he wrote women well. It’s true, and his true connection to the landscape of the west and the violent history of its attempted erasure of Native peoples rings truer than almost anything I’ve ever read. Growing up here you can feel the darkness bubbling beneath towns built by a bunch of two-bit Indian killers. Jim understood the spirit of the west and truly loved dogs.

The spring is finally here and the prickly pear is about to blossom, and soon the rattlesnakes will be out. Truth is both beautiful and brutal.