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Julie Heffernan’s fecund cornucopia of imagery
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
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Inner vision
The paintings of Julie Heffernan could give the impression that she is a medium, or a narcoleptic with frequent and vivid dreams. Or perhaps a Jungian psychiatrist with a deep art history background. Born in 1956 and exhibiting nationally since shortly after grad school, she is instead a lifelong artist who took the academic path. Raised in northern California, she got a B.F.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz a little later than usual, at age 25, and her M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art four years later, in 1985. A Fulbright-Hayes Grant sent her to Berlin the next year, and in Prague she has participated in the state department’s Art in Embassies Program. Living in New York, since 1998 she has been an assistant professor of fine art at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She exhibits frequently, with shows this month in New York City and Wisconsin as well as Providence. In contrast to the outdoor settings of the Rhode Island College paintings, her "Self Portraits" in the past year or so have been set inside. Frequently depicted is some spacious room dense with rococo ornamentations, her human figures are smaller than before and birds tend to swarm out of chandeliers or soar against a cherubed ceiling, bustling with ambiguous allegory. Heffernan spoke about her work recently from her Brooklyn studio. Here are some compressed excerpts. Q: Your paintings show the great respect for the preconscious. Do you have methods for tapping into your unconscious, or do you just reach out when something bobs up? A: That’s a lot of what I talk about when I do talk about my work. I was on a Fulbright to West Berlin a year out of graduate school, and I was doing these big expressionistic, ironic commentary paintings, critique/commentary paintings, like the neo-expressionists were doing. They were big and they were ambitious — and they were kind of irksome at the same time. I mean, I’d be very involved in the painting of it and then I would step back when I was done and think: "You know, this isn’t what I wanted to say at all!" (Laughs) One of the little side engagements of that time, of having a whole year just to paint, was that I’d finish a day of painting and collapse, because I’d be painting 12, 16 hours. And then before I would fall asleep, I would start to notice, as I was drifting off but still conscious, these pictures that would flood into my head. I liked the pictures more than the paintings that I’d just spent days and days painting, and thought that this just might be a place to go for imagery that felt more personal. So I spent the next maybe two or three years learning how to jot them down quickly, learning rendering techniques in order to jot them down, and also experimenting with different backgrounds for them. So with these two-inch little story paintings, I could also say so much more and not worry about it being perhaps dopey, you know? I mean, if you make a little tiny painting of somebody’s head exploding, it kind of works as a thought, as opposed to if you made a six-foot painting of somebody’s head exploding — it would be in your face and perhaps a little over the top. Now my working method is that at a point when I hit a wall, what do I do next? I tear my hair and wrinkle my brow and look through a million books and fill my head up with all these possible answers. And then I’ll just collapse and fall asleep. And almost invariably, when I wake up — in front of the painting, because if you go to sleep up in your room, you’ve disengaged — I’ll just see the answer, you know? Almost right away. I’ll listen for the answer and I’ll see the answer, and the whole trick is to really grab it as it comes quickly. Q: How much do you edit the images that suggest themselves to you? A: In all honesty, these days I use the image-streaming thing less because I think I have more immediate access to — can you call it inner vision? Now it’s like the whole painting is sort of a thought bubble, but it’s a much more complicated thought bubble, where I’m seeing the picture slowly come into focus. It’s almost like it’s a picture of an interior, of interiority that exists that I need to paint in order to see it come into focus. So it’s more complicated and it’s more full and rich — and integrated. That was a problem with surrealism, in modernism in the ’20s and ’30s, that these guys were after something that was just weird, as opposed to integrated into their own experience, their own interior selves. Q: That’s something I was discussing yesterday about your paintings — that with surrealism there was a certain arbitrariness to the imagery. But examining little activity areas of your paintings tends to reward making connections. A: That’s a process I’m most interested in. I don’t know if I have particular words for it. Again, I’ll fill my head up — let’s take the really large painting with the two girls on the mound (above). Some stance of the figure will be that which sets the painting in motion. But it’s almost like the figure is just an excuse to do the whole painting, the background, the ambiance. And that’s where I get so interested in what comes up and what makes sense. With that mound painting there are these alligators and chickens coming up the mound, and then the dogs are jumping through hoops, so there is a desire for some kind of experience. Maybe transformation. And then when a bird took off out of the second hoop, things started to feel like something was happening. So I guess the point is that I look for relatedness among unrelated items, you know? — B.R.
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Take a cursory glance at one of Julie Heffernan’s paintings and you could be forgiven for suspecting a pastiche. Look only a little closer at the eventful canvas and some portion or juxtaposition will lift you by the collar, rattle you a little, then set you down wondering. Seeing "Julie Heffernan: Paintings" at Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery is like sneaking into someone’s dreams. Her talent is such, though, that the sometimes surreal and always evocative images readily become our own dreams, inviting our own connections and significances. What a fecund cornucopia of imagery. Dogs leap through flaming hoops held by pre-pubescent girls — "Infantas in Training" (2000), as the title informs us with a wink. In paintings taken three years apart, two young queens share the same high gown, her highness evidently of two minds about something. Swarming rats abound, and to a lesser extent other animals and birds, never alone but in herds and flocks, always outnumbering the humans. When there are fruit, they are always bountiful, though here and there is bruised or rotting flesh and sometimes the fat apples or peaches are juxtaposed with equally vulnerable tangles of tiny, fighting figures. We’re not talking symbology too personal to communicate more than anxiety or anguish. No, Heffernan draws from recognizable motifs rich with shared associations, if not archetypal commonalities. She accomplishes some of this communicating by anchoring her paintings in art history. We see medieval Madonnas and Renaissance allegories, Watteau-esque pastorals, and Boschean hells. The rest she makes work through that ultimate post-modern declaration of honesty — placing herself in her paintings. Since figures predominate in these paintings, we are always plunged into a psychological space, invited into some timeless conundrum. "Self Portrait as Mother/Child" (1997) is a good example of the sorts of images Heffernan successfully pulls together. Cherubs and arrow-threatening Cupids adorn the background, setting the mood for the clothing-free tableau. But this is not some Baroque ceiling in a 17th-century chateau, for it has a mother and child in the foreground of the sybaritic activity (is it the naked father of the child who is being threatened by two of the archers, we might ask?). The standing mother does not have the babe cradled in her arms, but rather in that oddly common contemporary position: dangling the about-to-squall baby boy from both wrists. In middle distance, a tiny Greek temple is aflame, its marble composition notwithstanding, and its smoke seems to be the source of the clouds in the idyllic background sky. At left, under a spilled vase, fat rats sniff; they are outsized threats to a model/toy medieval village on the floor. Whew. Such a world in which the pleased mother’s little shoulder-dislocated offspring will have to cope. Most of the 10 oil paintings here, dated between 1996 and 2000, are at least as rich with detail. The exhibition was curated by Lisa Russell, who teaches painting at RIC. All but one work in the show is set outdoors, and that painting could be outside. "Self Portrait as Wreck" (1997) presents a pile of apples, some of whose bruises are festering into images such as an automobile junk yard in the woods, gentlemen in 19th-century garb shooting down airliners and, it must be noted, the unaccountable face of the Disney dwarf Dopey. Only three of the paintings are landscapes, I’m surprised to note after counting them up. The bucolic-but-gone-bad sense of the exhibition left me with the impression that they had dominated. "Climbers" (1996-9) has a rock sticking up like a thumb in the middle distance of a landscape. Twenty or so frantic naked people are approaching and clambering up, while coming toward the opposite side is a half-naked woman in a feather-plume skirt. That same figure, complete with red hair jutting sideways above her ears, appears again among these paintings. In "Self Portrait as Infanta Maria Theresa Dreaming Madame de Sade" (1999), she dominates, images erotic and otherwise floating above her head like thought balloons. Volcanoes are a direct way to deliver with impact the message that a serene landscape, too, has a skull beneath its skin, and they appear several times in this show. Heffernan devises other contrasts to the Constable-like serenity and Rousseauean innocence of these natural worlds. As in "Climbers," with its William Blake denizens of Hell, people are the trouble in "May Day" (1997). Men in suits go at one another with swords and maces and bare teeth, all in a green, tree-dotted meadow, a lake and sky enduring behind them. The year before, Heffernan painted a similar battle in "Self Portrait as Astyanax," in which a jumble of tiny, ferocious soldiers are at work beneath the boy of mythology, who was killed so that he would not grow to seek revenge after the Trojan War. With Julie Heffernan, we’re not as much entering the dream life of an art historian as the imagination of an artist whose intuitions are astutely well-trained.
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