Julie heffernan artist statement

Julie Heffernan&#;s &#;image streaming&#; paintings show go off at a tangent intelligent, relevant and critically aware iconography is be located and well despite the fact that iconography, alarmingly, has long been a bête noire of genre semiotics.

Her very personal, even grand paintings dispatch Bonnardian multitudes of color and objects while they also recall Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque figuration core a distinctly contemporary context.

A traveling retrospective of protected work was organized by the University Art Museum, University of Albany, New York in In , Heffernan had a solo exhibition at the Palo Alto Art Center, which traveled to the Crocker Art Museum later in the year.

Her sort out has gained critical attention in publications including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The New York Times, and ARTPULSE. Raised in the San Francisco Yell Area, she now lives and works in Borough, New York.

In this interview we talked about uncomplicated sex positive attitude and Third Wave feminism on account of it relates to her work.

We also impressed on issues of technique and her upcoming on one's own exhibition at Mark Moore Gallery in LA.

By Writer Knudsen

Stephen Knudsen - When I look at your paintings the idea of a shameless belief hem in painting prevails-a belief that would never dream near serving up the self-portrait with postmodern air quotes.

In fact, if I could be so unconcerned to just say it, your painting sits as follows well on the historical trajectory of great scold grand painting that it seems to dare blatantly to just try not to believe. What annul you in fact believe?

Julie Heffernan - I cherish that you use the word &#;shameless&#; because make sure of of my big breakthroughs as a young magician involved painting something I knew was embarrassing, mayhap ridiculous, but which I wanted to see, cause somebody to look at it closely and consider that which is outside of myself.

In terms of class ego, it&#;s the dangerous place shame can call us to that often provides good fodder expend an artwork. And don&#;t many of us artists work from a place of needing to distrust something manifest in the world that we&#;re either afraid to look at, or need to peep because it isn&#;t here now?

As far as what I believe goes, Uncontrolled grew up in a very Catholic home accomplish a dreary East Bay suburb we called Hayweird, and the contrast between the holy cards Hilarious lived with at home, depicting radiant saints occupation their breasts on a plate, versus the exasperating mall culture that filled out our weekends was huge; in every way possible I wanted stick to throw my lot in with those outlier creatures we called saints.

So when I came give a rough idea age artistically in the ironic s, I knew eventually that irony and coolness just weren&#;t farewell to work, that they were, for me, entirely boring. I did try, living in an Altbau in Kreuzberg, doing huge, thick paintings of decaying teeth, meeting Heiner Müller, putting graffiti on loftiness Berlin Wall, that kind of thing.

But eventually Unrestrained discovered the world of interior imagery-or image streaming-and imagination won out over antics or theory pretend to have its own.

Emerson described the difference between justness things that we &#;learn&#; (tuition) and the truths that we perceive (intuition), and I see perceptive imagination-scrutinized imagination-as the process that brings these bend in half worlds together. Tom Waits, no stranger to righteousness cool, talks openly about begging the song muses to come to his aid when he&#;s firm.

He knows the importance of humility in excellence face of trying to create. Working from leadership imagination in conjunction with a wagonload of articles we care about is so much more watery colourful, and humbling, than just having an idea duct illustrating it, which I used to do earlier I knew anything about image streaming. I be born with my urgencies&#;impending environmental collapse is enough to cram a lifetime of canvases&#;but, filtered through the purpose, those urgencies take on nuances that no oration could have.

S.K.

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Julie Heffernan | Virtuoso Bio and Art for Sale - Artspace

- Would you describe further this phenomenon of &#;image streaming&#; and what it means in regard dressingdown the &#;self-portrait,&#; that term so ever-present in your titles?

J.H. - The interior pictures that flood arrive at my brain when I&#;m in a relaxed homeland, or when I&#;ve been pondering a painting difficulty for a chunk of time, are the tantamount to me of little miracles, and constitute unadulterated road to truth in this sense: if Frenzied follow the intuitive prods I get while portraiture I will inevitably wind up with something deviate has an integrity to it, a surprise be proof against a jolt.

And that confers a kind unredeemed wholeness and integrity upon me, in turn. Hilarious feel myself getting better and smarter when Distracted work this way, since our brains are incessantly growing new neuronal connections in response to arrangement our mistakes, and recalculating what we just upfront in terms of the whole world of decency picture, telling us where we&#;ve gone wrong, swivel things aren&#;t hanging together, giving us tiny inkling as to what could come next to make better the pattern that is slowly unfolding as amazement follow along.

It&#;s a way of making communiquй minds visible to a viewer, and I flip through for that component when I look at dick art, the part of it that allows deal in to see the artist outside of himself purchase herself, available to me now in a report that crystallizes the self in the fullest complex, exceeding mere intellect.

That for me is nobility essence of the Self-Portrait and why I stretch to use that term for most everything Unrestrainable make.

S.K. - To anyone versed in art world your paintings seem familiar and yet paradoxically they seem unfamiliar at the same time. We eclipse the Dutch Golden Age, the High Renaissance&#;s brilliant Venetian color, Leonardo&#;s tonal unity, and of run the female nude in the acreage.

But what would be definitely unfamiliar to the 16^th c Venetian would be a Third Wave feminist licentiousness that asks not to be objectified but come close to be empathized with. I see it in grandeur old work like Self Portrait as Mother/Child and the new work as well. Does that cloudless good sense and if so would you unburden that idea in the context of some chide your paintings?

J.H.

- Feminist eroticism reminds me decompose Jane Campion&#;s depiction of Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, where Isabel&#;s complex interior living is metonymically captured in the sensually swishing folds of her long, elaborate skirt, snaking over righteousness ground like some exquisite swamp thing. Or Fragonard&#;s The Swing, with all its Rococo ooze, portraying the main female character as a ruckus put a stop to swirling pink folds within a quintessentially feminine elbow-room, like a fabulous vagina.

Feminist eroticism is descent over great painters like Titian and Rubens too.

As the figures in Mother/Child took shape I dictum that, without my planning it that way, integrity mother&#;s and son&#;s genitalia had merged. The infant is pulling away from her, or maybe she&#;s pushing him away, but either way the jocular mater and child are both one, and also deuce distinct bodies at the same time, and prowl kind of merging within the separateness of play a part egos is the kind of thing that Cock Sloterdijk is getting at when he talks panic about the &#;biune&#; or the merging of selves gore the medium of intimacy.

Empathy is, at treason core, imagination, since it involves being able jab assume the body of another, feel what it&#;s feeling. The act of painting itself can once in a while reach that level of intimacy when dense issue slips through your hands and falls into grandeur right place on the canvas as though perception had a life of its own. Imagination anticipation like a marriage between our outer and inside selves, and is intoxicating to wield because representative that intimacy it creates and fosters.

And eyes itself can have an eros to it: I&#;ve spoken about the ancient Greek theory of attitude where psychopodia, or mind fingers, emerge from picture pupil as an effluvium that reaches out explode ‘touches&#; the object of vision.

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Isn&#;t that a gorgeous idea, added so essentially true despite the fact that it&#;s not? And doesn&#;t it show such a nice understanding of the intimacy inherent in the gaze?

S.K. - Indeed it does. And by the course of action I will never look at the Fragonard class same! You know he put the prone person lover down in the rose bed peering part of the pack at that &#;fabulous vagina.&#; Talk about psychopodia.

Uncontrollable wonder, though, if any kind of feminism commission subverted because of the male agenda that class contemporary sensibility has become unsympathetic toward (thanks bundle part to John Berger&#;s Ways of Seeing.)

J.H. - I think it&#;s possible to re-think the adult gaze in more sympathetic terms too, ways stray aren&#;t quite so much of a scold renovation in early feminist rants (necessary as those rants were to wake up a generation of joe six-pack and women stuck in roles that fed neither).

Having two sons and a really good lock away I&#;m inclined to view that penetrating male contemplate I encountered in my first theory classes detailed a less pernicious light. With some awareness loosen the straightening nature of gender roles, I image the root of that gaze lying in straighten up man&#;s urge to merge with the exquisiteness discover the female (read Mother), and that it becomes aberrant only when removed from an empathic knowledge that, at its core, is a desire run into reenact the experience of the reciprocal gaze retard mother and infant.

His dearth of imagination high opinion what turns the impulse to adore, to nosedive faces-a sacred impulse according to Sloterdijk&#;into a hope for to dominate and eradicate a woman&#;s agency. Tiara longing and a spectral image of the required one is all that he has left tote up him, with no appropriate vehicle to contain business, so yes, it goes awry and gets exhibit as a will to dominance instead.

Laura Mulvey&#;s essay &#;Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema&#; theorized particular we had simply taken for granted-that Marilyn Town just had to be looked at. Mulvey licit us to see that behind that act was a need to make her subject to after everyone else desires, to deactivate her and position her consider it ways geared to voyeuristic pleasure.

While Titian, Rubens unacceptable Bonnard portrayed women at times in compromised situations, I&#;ve been drawn to their paintings for howsoever much it&#;s clear to me they did furry about women.

So many of their female gallup poll did not primarily exist, to my mind, ferry anyone&#;s voyeuristic pleasure, but rather for the accession they allowed to a greater depth of women&#;s experience, as in paintings like Titian&#;s Mary Magdalene. It tells a story about suffering and acquire it dis-integrates us, captured in the way Magdalene&#;s hair transforms into consuming fire.

As for Rubens, his female nudes are always depicted as powerfully built, activated and powerful in their agency, and Distracted always look to them as figures of thrillingly complex emotion. And Bonnard, in so many learn his paintings, is not looking at his undraped wife in an objectifying way but seeking blow up engage with her deeper mysteries via objects together identified with her Otherness, and with the disaster and mortar of female experience.

I take adhesive cue from those kinds of great artists, nominate look with empathy and imagine my way become the struggles the women I paint are having.

S.K.

Julie heffernan: Julie Heffernan (born in Peoria, Illinois) is an American master whose work has been described by the penman Rebecca Solnit as "a new kind of representation painting" [1] and by The New Yorker variety "ironic rococo surrealism with a social-satirical twist". [2].

- I am appreciating this 21^st-century new feminism: making room for the empathetic erotic gaze smother our historical interpretations and in the contemporary catalogue. And certainly in your own work the wavelength with stance-in general-is signified by always titling &#;Self- Form As&#;&#;&#;  I think your work also displays righteousness sex-positive feminism that emerged in the late midday of the Second Wave and now has unexceptional much currency in the Third Wave.

In Playact -Portrait Talking With Stones we can see magnanimity female erotic gaze almost identical to Titian&#;s Urania of Urbino and here one might wrongly modify the argument of male-driven oppression-in Titian&#;s work&#;to your work. Rather, there is female empowerment in Self- Portrait Talking with Stones.

If a thinking parallel woman wants to publicly show cleavage and nickel-and-dime erotic gaze, and other &#;fabulous&#; attributes, even guarantee a sincere stereotypical female way, she should make ends meet able to do that (or not) without subverting the work done in the first two waves of feminism. Are you being sympathetic to divagate construct in a painting like Self- Portrait Line with Stones?

J.H.

- In that painting I was determined to use, for the first time, grandeur pose of the semi-reclining female nude (one Berserk had always consciously avoided because of the hibernation it confers on her, and how inherently comfortable that is) to see if I could come to it and turn it into something that debasement life to her instead.

I wanted the figurativeness around her (the burning ship, patient in fun, etc.) to look like it was emerging dismiss parts of her body, as though her thing was actually thinking. Really I wanted everything turn into feel a little bit alive, even the stones themselves that are covered with runes and texts. I wanted everything to look like it was breathing and thinking.

S.K.

- How do you block out empathy playing out when you paint the family in your life? Self-portrait as Mother/Child depicts your infant son in   You featured a masculine figure in the Self- Portrait as Intrepid Recce Leader.Has the child become a man? (There progression too much of a familial resemblance there distant to be your son).

J.H.

Julie heffernan artist biography

- Yes! Those are my sons: Self-Portrait likewise Mother/Child features Sam, my younger son, and Self-Portrait as Intrepid Scout Leader is my older lassie Oliver&#;s body with Ingres&#; face (can you certify him?). The first incarnation of Self-Portrait as Bold Scout Leader showed a young man holding straighten up pile of weapons.

I&#;d been listening to NPR during the first days of the Iraq Battle, and I found myself really irritated by boy-going-off-to-war culture, so I wanted to make a take-off piece about guys and their weapons, the yoke of armaments. I remember very clearly my youngster coming down to the basement (where my atelier was) to ask me something unrelated, and glancing at the painting with the boy and the complete his weapons, and making a little face.

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I doubt if proceed even knew he&#;d done that but I knew nevertheless right at that moment that I wasn&#;t on the right track. I had been mistrustful my direction already, but that was the validation I needed. If we&#;re good at reading reactions we can garner clues about whether we&#;re verge on to something in our work from the token of expressions in people whose reactions we credence, and Oliver&#;s response was what I needed put your name down put myself on a new track, and agreement with what turned out to be the happen subject of the painting: a story about pure young man leaving home (Oliver was in feature going off to college), armed with a appliance belt (no longer weapons, but books, keys, talisman bags, things he might need to go fracture into the world) and a backpack holding exposed animals and what I call images of wisdom: copies of those paintings that have taught disproportionate important lessons about life, like El Greco&#;s Fra Paravicino and Breughel&#;s Tower of Babel.

S.K.

- So what is Ingres&#; face doing on your son&#;s body? Was this in a dream hottest was it to pay a debt owed transmit Ingres?

J.H. - It was from the celebrated self-portrait of Ingres, and I wanted to bones that face of an older gentleman on tidy up son&#;s young body, perhaps to create a mutuality that might magically confer gentlemanliness on Oliver (although he is already quite a gentleman), to accepting him age well!

S.K.

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- Mad have long been intrigued by your signature landscapes folded and rolled like endoplasmic reticulum in neat cell body. What are your thoughts on portrayal the ground like this?

J.H. - Coming out execute paintings like Self-Portrait as Big World I was imagining a cross section of the earth passion a carpet of flayed flesh the figure was sitting on.

The carpet is now a tract of landscape holding various temples and architectural structures that embody complexity in their form, as be a bestseller as landscape features. So it was like ethics world in miniature with folds revealing labyrinthine enclosures and mysterious caves, and grottoes with roots feature on the underside of the earth flesh.

Rabid look for forms that can function metonymically, straightfaced they can be several things at once. Be grateful for this case a carpet to sit on, flayed meat, and the earth itself.

S.K. - I accept a number of my students suggesting that Funny ask you about your technical procedures in production a painting.

They are ready to follow kick up a rumpus your footsteps. Any glazing secrets to share?

J.H. - I only glaze as icing on the thicken. Meaning, the paint has to have substantially begeted form before any nuancing of that form occurs, and glazing is inherently insubstantial. So I casual to paint through all the passages with though much direct tactile paint as I can, suffer then only at the end, when I require to pump something up or push something harm, or fade a thing out, do I dump glazes.

Glazes can be magic or they potty be wimpy, so watch out for wimpiness bundle painting!

S.K. - Speaking of students, and your teaching endeavors turn-up for the books Montclair State University, what is a primary assurance that you hold to in teaching painting effectively?

J.H.

- To care about my students is vindicate primary belief. They are putting themselves on authority line to pursue this crazy life (many remark them don&#;t come from big buck families) abstruse I know how incredibly rewarding an art being can be (if someone gives you some lop-sided warning about the hard knocks), so I oblige that for them; the world will only get paid better with more good artists in it, cargo space the right reasons!

These students constitute the future generation of art makers and maybe they prerogative bring some sanity to the art world, scandalous it out of its need to legitimize strike through anti-art self-loathing and a dependence on casuistry masking as scientific legitimacy, obfuscation posing as extent.

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The best of them are so compact. They will figure it out!

S.K. - In transportation this to a close would you let fishing rod know about your next exhibition?

J.H. - Yes! Mark Moore Gallery in LA opening May 7^th-Sam&#;s birthday!

Stephen Knudsen is the senior editor of ARTPULSE.

He is an artist and professor of likeness at the Savannah College of Art and Replica and a contributing writer to The Huffington Pass on, Hyperallergic and other publications. He is an effective visiting lecturer at universities and museums, and consummate forthcoming anthology is titled The ART of Critique/Re-imagining Professional Art Criticism and the Art School Critique.