Psychological Perspectives, 54: 5–6, 2011Copyright c© C. G. Jung Institute of Los AngelesISSN: 0033-2925 print / 1556-3030 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00332925.2011.547109

About the Artist: Julie Heffernan

Nancy Mozur

J ulie Heffernan has a fertile imagination. Her paintings visually explode asagents for nature’s bounty. Many are titled “Self-Portraits,” implying both

the interior world of the archetypal as well as outer life. This duality playsthrough many of her pieces. She often depicts solitary female nudes, adornedwith a profusion of oozing fruit, flowers, and animals, against the backdropof a forest or palatial room. Young men are entangled in tree branches andblossoms, unaware of the paradox between imprisonment and the freedom tobehold loftier views of earth. While a set of twins, encircled by a hoola-hoopof fire, stares at the viewer with an eerie calm, a distant volcano is aboutto blow its top. In 2008, Heffernan explored architectural forms in a seriesof paintings, also entitled “Self-Portraits.” These images revealed, in cross-section, the underlying rooms and activities within their walls, suggestingfantastical portrayals of psychic structure.

The artist shows us that nature has two simultaneous faces: cre-ation and destruction. In Heffernan’s work the viewer doesn’t always knowwhether a rhapsody of riches is being presented or a frozen world of chaoticproliferation. Her visions recall elements that coexisted in Roman mythology,symbolized by the Goddess Flora and Dis Pater, Lord of the Underground,who is frequently shown with a cornucopia. Both deities exemplify aspectsof wealth yielded from the lightness and darkness of existence.

Heffernan’s work serves as vessels for historical referencing and tech-nique, intermixing the new with the old and the personal with the collective.The art of Velasquez, Bonnard, Arcimboldo, Brueghel, and baroque paintingappear influential, yet her imagery seems to come from her own inner source.

During the 1980s, in Berlin, the artist began practicing “image stream-ing.” In her words:

These are the pictures that flood into your brain almost likea slide show just before sleep. [They] represented a wealth of

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imagery that appealed to me for its seeming autonomy from thecontrols of the conscious mind. I began to jot down quickly inpaint some of these individual “film stills” and then to use themin larger still-life paintings as mini “projections” onto enlargedapples and pears. I came to see these thought bubbles as accu-mulated features of an interior self and as a way into painting adifferent kind of self-portrait, one more akin to a truer self, con-ceived without the distortion of a mirror. Gradually, I was able topierce the space of the still life and find landscapes that mirroreda similar interiority. They invited [me] to enter them more andmore deeply in a kind of quintessentially feminine space. . . . Asthe painting went on, I would seek to unearth a deeper story thanthe one I started with, one that took me to a more complex levelof understanding. I continue to use painting as a way of tryingto see more deeply into myself and into the stories that suggestthemselves to me in the work. I let the paintings lead me and con-tinue to be amazed and grateful for a process that allows for suchaccess to the unconscious. (Art Slant interview with Sura Wood,2008)

Julie Heffernan received a BFA from the University of California, SantaCruz, and an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art andArchitecture. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art and Design atMontclair State University in New Jersey. She has continued to exhibit forthe past two decades, both nationally and internationally, and her art appearsin collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, Virginia; NortonMuseum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Uni-versity of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina; and the ZabludowiczArt Trust, London. She has received the Fulbright–Hayes Fellowship (1986)and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1995) and the NewYork Foundation for the Arts (1996). P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City rep-resents the artist.

Special thanks to Julie Heffernan, Jamie Sterns and P.P.O.W. Gallery,New York for their assistance. Photographic credit courtesy of the artist andP.P.O.W. Gallery, New York.

Inquiries regarding the artist’s work can be made through P.P.O.W.Gallery in New York City, info@ppowgallery.com.

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