Flowers in hell: Part Hope, Part Lament
Birdie Hall + Kathryn Schmidt
As a fourth generation Montanan raised to shoot rifles and gut animals in the mountains, the natural world and all its deep mysteries were permanently burned into my subconscious mind from an early age. My grandfather was a western art dealer; I learned to draw while sitting in his gallery, staring at highly staged, glamorous paintings of cowboys and Pocahontas. The stark contrast between Montana’s gorgeous, fertile landscape and its dark history of Conquistador Custer and two-bit Indian Killers has haunted me my whole life - but also provided endless subject matter for my art and writing. Combining autobiography with old myths and an undying love for other artists like William Blake, my work is (supposedly) narrative and exploding with vivid western visions and pink desert colors.
As a senior at Bozeman High School in 2013, my drawing teacher took me to the Missoula Art Museum where we encountered a show of Kathryn (or, as I now know her, Kathy) Schmidt’s paintings. I was immediately wrecked by their profound and haunting beauty. Painted with an almost austere elegance, they imparted a sense of deeply felt solitude in the natural world, after almost every square inch of it has been mined for human hubris. Kathy’s ghostly animals and figures wander barren and burning landscape, but by some miracle the paintings are not ugly. Working for over 40 years, she has perfected an almost impossible art of transmuting human darkness into beautiful and powerfully rendered paintings, and for this reason she has been one of my great heroines since first meeting her after seeing that Missoula show.
After countless Jim Harrison-level dinners together with Kathy and Jay (her artist husband), a decade of friendship with the Schmidts has crafted me into an artist (mostly) unafraid of shining a light into the darkness. I am honored to show with a rare artist whose work actually depicts the totality of the Western landscape, the same one which is baked into my bones. We have a mutual understanding, as TS Eliot wrote, that “the only hope, or else despair, lies in the choice of pyre or pyre - to be redeemed from fire by fire.” - Birdie Hall
birdie hall
Birdie Hall (b. 1994) is an artist based in Montana and New York. Her paintings, etchings, drawings, and soft sculpture reimagine familiar archetypes and landscapes with a sly sense of humor; while touching on themes of spirituality, psychedelics, nature, visionary poetry, modernist literature, epistemology of science, theories of the New Age, ethnobotany, reproductive history, and the afterlife. Her work, which often combines visual and textual elements, is born of an interest in a return to bodily experience (with “that dark involvement with blood and birth and death” to quote Joan Didion) amid the alienation of modernity and technology, as well as with a deep concern for the liberation of all sentient beings from suffering.
Birdie received her undergraduate degree in philosophy in 2018 and in 2021 an MFA in printmaking from NYU.
Wyoming Glove // Egg Tempera and Gouache // 24 x 24 in.
Garden Expulsion // Oil on mounted paper // 18 x 20 in.
Leda and The Swan // Gouache and egg tempera on paper // 8 x 10 in.
Swan Dream // Gouache on Panel // 16 x 16 in.
Sister of The Moon // Oil on paper // 22 x 30 in.
Night in Pompeii // Acrylic and Gouache on Paper // 24 x 24 in.
Oyster // Oil on Paper // 8 x 10 in.
Summer Girl II // Watercolor on Gampi Paper // 18 x 24 in.
Strawberry Milk Moon // Oil on Paper // 10 x 12 in.
Midwinter Spring // Watercolor on Paper // 26 x 26 in.
Kathryn Schmidt
“I am the descendant of German engineers and Irish farmers so it should not be surprising that I like to make things, first sculptures and then paintings. Though I came of age during the abstract and minimalist years, my work is figurative and narrative. Maybe my 1950’s/60’s Catholic childhood played a part with its reel of otherworldliness alongside the everyday aspects of one’s life. What a rich mix it was — the visuals, Latin messages, music, heroic saints, heaven & hell!
I am still interested in the mysteries of the world, the ultimate things and am always looking for the delivering image. My almost 40 years in Montana’s powerful landscape has had an impact, but more than rendering physical description, I use the landscape as an arena for physiological and emotional takes on the world. Even I don’t exactly know how the combinations of things come about in my paintings, but the best ones have an air of inevitability about them.
And the many deer paintings? I sometimes joke that I have a deer for every occasion but they are versatile - existing both just outside our windows and in high remote places - so they easily play a variety of roles. And the figures are nudes so that we can more easily insert ourselves in the painting, imagining essential interactions with nature.
There are many ‘travel’ pieces, travel representing any kind of exploration — new locations, new ideas — and now my concerns are climate change and our fraught relationship to the natural world. That is my focus: we humans learning to see the wildlife around us and the earth beneath our feet that so sustains us. We Americans especially have a lot to learn. And not much time.”
Born in Dubuque, Iowa, Kathryn obtained a BFA at the University of Iowa and informally finished her education during stints in London, San Francisco, and finally New York City, where for 6 years she worked for the city’s finest contemporary art framer.
Against the Ruin of the World // Acrylic on Canvas // 44 x 32 in.
Our Shining Cities // Acrylic on Canvas // 32 x 44 in.
Sorrow of an Exile // Acrylic on Canvas // 44 x 34 in.
They Were Kings and Queens // Acrylic on Canvas // 34 x 44 in.
West of Everything // Acrylic on Canvas // 34 x 44in.
Things That Cannot Be Said // Acrylic on Canvas // 44 x 34 in.
Surely the Sky is Open // Acrylic on Canvas // 32 x 44 in.
Tell Me // Acrylic on Canvas // 34 x 44 in.
This Morning Will Do // Acrylic on Canvas // 34 x 44 in.
Three Pale Figures Were Led Forth // Acrylic on Canvas // 34 x 44 in.
A Criticism of Civilization on Behalf of Nature // Acrylic on Canvas // 25 x 32 in.
I Was Asked to Come Alone // Acrylic on Canvas // 44 x 34
It Was His Last Afternoon as Himself // Acrylic on paper // 10.5 x 13.5