Exciting news item to share: I’ve been included in an invitational exhibit at the Schlueter Art Gallery in Milwaukee! Driving down to deliver six watercolor paintings later this week — which will be paired with poems inspired by my work in the National Parks. Here’s the gallery’s publicity blurb:

In conjunction with Wisconsin Lutheran College’s popular Fine Arts Summer Arts in the Park concerts, Schlueter Art Gallery will host an art exhibit celebrating the work of U.S. National Park Artists in Residence. Artists, along with writers and poets, have played a major historical role in establishing national parks, inspiring Congress and the public to protect the unique and diverse landscapes of America because of their art. Artists continue the tradition today. Over 29 national parks, monuments and wildlife refuges select and host artists each year to make artworks reflecting the special qualities of each place and their individual response from a contemporary, current perspective. Wisconsin Lutheran College Schlueter Art Gallery is privileged to host a sampling of past artists in residence including Diane Bywaters, Kathleen M. Heideman, Kathy Hodge, Geri Schrab and Wisconsin Lutheran College art professor Kristin Gjerdset.

Schlueter Art Gallery, Wisconsin Lutheran College
8815 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53226
Summer Gallery Hours: M-F 9 am – 4 pm plus Saturday July 6 from 9 am – 5 pm;
Opening Reception on July 12, 4-7 pm.

I’m honored to have been selected for this show, and I hope some of my friends and family in Wisconsin will be able to attend this gallery opening. Along with selections from my poetry manuscript “Department of the Interiors,” I’ll be showing a painting of the Sage Creek Wilderness area from Badlands National Park, a painting of the Tweddle Schoolhouse at Sleeping Bear Dunes, three paintings depicting the Tobin Harbor/Scoville Point area of Isle Royale National Park, and a painting of Rynearson Pond from my residency at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin.

I’ve received the good news that my work has been selected for inclusion in the National Park Service’s upcoming (juried) exhibition “Through Your Eyes.” Through Your Eyes will be a series of three online multimedia exhibitions, featured on the National Park Service website, to highlight the creative outcomes of artists-in-residence experiences.

My work (a photograph, a watercolor sketch, and an audio poem) are featured on the website of Badlands National Park, which has recently been updated to highlight the work of previous participants in their annual Artist-in Residence program.

http://www.nps.gov/badl/photosmultimedia/artist-in-residence.htm

I was in residence at the Badlands a year ago, and I’m currently editing some of the work I wrote during that (prolific) residency.  This past week, I also received word that a poem from the Badlands project will be published in South Dakota Review!

In honor of both National-Parks-Week and April-as-National-Poetry-Month, my audio poem “Why I Want To Be a Park Ranger When I Grow Up” (plus a watercolor sketch depicting the wall of Saddle Pass, from my residency at Badlands National Park) are currently featured on the National Parks Traveler website.  Please share with all the inspiring park rangers in your life!

In honor of National Parks Week, I’ve just read T. H. Watkin’s book Stone Time (Southern Utah: A Portrait and a Meditation), and Jon Luoma’s The Hidden Forest, which focuses on forest research being conducted in the Andrews Experimental Forest and other National Forest research stations. I’ve also downloaded dozens of brochures from the many National Parks, National Monuments and National Forests I’ll be visiting in May and June, and I’ve installed the “Park Maps” app on my new iPod Touch (the program contains a lot of popular park maps, but just the tip of the NPS/NFS iceberg, and no BLM maps at all).

Panorama Sunset, Badlands National Park

Check it out: one of the watercolor sketches from my recent artist residency in Badlands National Park is currently featured as the “Park Photo of the Week” at National Parks Traveler!

Hey! Hear all about it!

Badlands National Park’s website (U.S. National Park Service) is now featuring an audio poem — my own ode to NPS really —  in which I reminisce about my early encounters with Park Rangers, and their life-long, larger-than-life acorn-embossed influence on me:

http://www.nps.gov/badl/photosmultimedia/upload/Heideman%20Poem%20edit2.mp3

On Friday, this article appeared in the Post Crescent newspaper, published in NE Wisconsin (where I grew up on a dairy farm, in the unincorporated town of Sugar Bush).  As the boys on the street corners used to say, read all about it!

http://www.postcrescent.com/article/20100402/APC0904/100402035/Sugar-Bush-native-serves-artist-residency-in-the-Badlands

Badlands or Bust!

Wait! It’s too soon! — I’ve got another day! but yes, I know….

Neighboring staff with contracts that ended on April 1 are moving out today, and others are moving in. As I begin to pack my belongings, I’m replaying brilliant and sublime moments from this past month in the Badlands. Erosion. Weather Geology. Solitude. It truly has been a spectacular and diverse time to be here, a real blessing. Doing some laundry today, I picked up a book called “Battling For The National Parks” by George B. Hartzog with an intro by the late Stewart Udall. I should explain that the laundry room has bookshelves for swapping reading materials (lots of mysteries!). In Chapter I, Hartzog is jotting down his early experiences and impressions as Director of the National Park Service. Hippies want access for large meadow-sit-ins. Conservation clubs are running utility lines through park meadows. A decision to open locked gates to back roads in the Great Smokies brings nothing but criticism. Everybody seems to want something different. Meanwhile, human rights marchers have set up great encampments on the (Park Service administered) Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Again and again, Hartzog must ask himself “Whose parks are these?” How do you manage so many different parks for the “public” when the public has so many faces and opinions? He includes this paragraph:

A mother in Detroit wrote to tell me of the joyous two-week vacation she, her husband and two children had in the national parks. They had tent-camped, she wrote, in ten parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite. She was complimentary of the rangers they had met, the clean campgrounds and the good roads. My road atlas indicated that the two-week trip must have involved at least 5,000 miles. They wind-shielded a lot of scenery.

I enjoyed that passage so much, wind-shielding, as it reminded me of the joy of those long “see it all” car trips we took when I was a kid, chalking up as many parks as possible, although our method feels so wrong in retrospect. By comparison, I’ve driven 800 miles in past month — but just within the Badlands.

It’s a wide park, stretched out like a bison, grazing downhill, and I really wanted to familiarize myself with as much terrain as possible (since the geology varies so wildly from location to location). Thought I’d share my visualization of the park map, as overlaid with a bison. North Unit of the Badlands (experienced by most visitors) is upper corner. Back-tail-hind-legs. You can see the Loop Road runs up the hind leg (and if the tail were lifted, it would point at Wall). The South Unit, which is large and wild and difficult to experience fully, is located in the bison’s great shaggy head-horns-shoulders-front-legs.

For the past couple days I’ve been crafting and revising drafts of poems, re-reading my scribbled notes, and printing copies as the words begin to gel. Part of my own creative process involves making watercolor landscape sketches.   Here are those sketches, as a Flickr slideshow.

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If you’re a plant in the Badlands, the first thing you need to do each spring is tunnel up through new sediments! (this stuff can be about as soft as poured cement when it hardens). But as it dries, the claypan cracks, and the spring perennials are forcing up through these gaps. Pretty incredible to witness. The green spears must be in the Allium family, because I pinched a bit and they taste/smell like chives. I believe the other plant, developing yellow/ruddy buds, is a “fetid marigold.” Doesn’t stink yet!

The trees are budding out, and the lawns appear 80% green today (without squinting or using a magnifying glass).  Further afield, the sod tables still appear to be a dozen hues of winter-beige, but this is only because they are covered with long dry grasses that conceal all the subtle greening happening below.

It will be hard to leave this heady dose of spring and return to Upper Michigan (although it has been warm there, too, and the ice melted early):  along the shoreline of Lake Superior, our lilacs won’t be blossoming until mid June.  Until Friday, at least, I’m loving the sight of buds…..

Another liquid-amber sunset flickering like a grassfire over the Badlands! These pics are taken from my “home-away-from-home” in the Badlands, the park housing unit tucked behind the Visitor Center. Hard to imagine getting “used” to spectacular scenes like this! What happens? — you say “another stellar sunset? Nah, I’ll pass.” — ??

In photo #4, the gold hour is over (as suddenly as it began) but the sky continued unfolding layers of frosting and cloud-fronds in an extended after-glow show.