some are gifted: "image streaming"

Sometimes you come across things, people, places that totally enthrall you.  I stumbled across the oil paintings of Julie Heffernan.  What a delight.  Sometimes when I look at art that really moves me, I'm so thankful because right then at that moment I realize that there isn't anything else that is exactly the same.


I appreciate the detail and complexity of these paintings.

Julie Heffernan: "I grew up in the East Bay of Northern California and began painting murals in college as a response to what I perceived to be an ugly world of low flat commercial buildings that seemed to have proliferated overnight in the 70s. As a student at UC Santa Cruz (BFA in Painting and Printmaking 1981), I would sneak out with friends at night and paint on billboards, changing the wording or imagery to subvert the consumerist message in favor of our more radical values. During that time I painted four large-scale murals with more communitarian subject matter, and received a President's Fellowship from UCSC for one of them.

I went to Yale School of Art and Architecture (MFA in Painting and Printmaking 1985) in order to learn what a painting can be.  I was trying to figure out how to use figuration in a fresh way, making stews of Bonnardian color with Tintoretto distortion. I received a Fulbright-Hayes Grant to West Berlin in 1986 and lived for two years in Berlin, painting day and night, still wrestling with the figuration problem. It was there that I stumbled on the practice that continues to fuel my work called, "image streaming." These are the pictures that flood into your brain almost like a slide show just before sleep. (This) represented a wealth of imagery that appealed to me for its seeming autonomy from the controls of the conscious mind. I began to jot down quickly in paint some of these individual "film stills," and then to use them in larger still life paintings as mini "projections" onto enlarged apples and pears. I came to see these thought bubbles as accumlated features of an interior self, and as a way into painting a different kind of self-portrait, one more akin to a truer self, conceived without the distortion of a mirror. Gradually, I was able to pierce the space of the still life and find landscapes that mirrored a similar interiority. They invited to enter them more and more deeply in a kind of quintessentiallly feminine space. After awhile, I came to understand that this imagery as a sort of mental montage, in combination with compositional quirks(that) I would find in the landscapes, were giving me the components, in abstract form, of a kind of narrative painting that felt very engaged with the current dialogue in painting and (the) personal at the same time. As the painting went on, I would seek to unearth a deeper story than the one I started with, one that took me to a more complex level of understanding. I continue to use painting as a way of trying to see more deeply into myself and into the stories that suggest themselves to me in the work. I let the paintings lead me and continue to be amazed and grateful for a process that allows for such access to the unconscious."

More of Interview here.