Julie Heffernan

from Julie Heffernan: The swamps are pink with June

We are proud to present The swamps are pink with June Julie Heffernan’s début solo exhibition with Hirschl & Adler Modern. Drawn from Emily Dickinson’s poem about renewal and rebirth in Spring, Heffernan’s chosen exhibition title says as much about the artist as it does about the paintings themselves.

**Self-Portrait as Continental Divide, 2022**

Familiar are the artfully staged, surreal, and psychological worlds inhabited by her female protagonists. Masterful confections of allegory and history painting delight and bewilder with deliberate and symbolic nods to the canons of art history: Northern Renaissance, Hieronymus Bosch, Baroque, Rococo, and Hudson River School.

But in these new works, intricate details spring forth from a ground of spilled paint and bold blotches of color, highlighting a renewed sense of urgency and passion in her work. Climate activism, feminism, identity, and lineage remain major themes of Heffernan’s career and here they emerge as fresh, thought-provoking, and more relevant than ever. These paintings remind us that, despite Winter’s best efforts, Spring will always arrive, and for those who keep “an Orchis’ heart—The swamps are pink with June.”

At Hirschl & Adler, we thank Eric Baumgartner for his photography, as well as the entire team for their support. We congratulate Julie on this exhibition, and are grateful for the time, effort, thoughtfulness, and passion she has “poured”—both literally and figuratively—into these inspired new paintings.

SHELLEY FARMER, Director, Hirschl & Adler Modern

TED HOLLAND, Exhibition Coordinator Hirschl & Adler Modern

All these my banners be.

I sow my pageantry

In May—

It rises train by train—

Then sleeps in state again—

My chancel—all the plain Today.

To lose—if one can find again—

To miss—if one shall meet—

The Burglar cannot rob—then—

The Broker cannot cheat.

So build the hillocks gaily

Thou little spade of mine

Leaving nooks for Daisy

And for Columbine—

You and I the secret

Of the Crocus know—

Let us chant it softly—

“t here is no more snow! ”

To him who keeps an Orchis ’ heart

The swamps are pink with June.

— Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Hirschl & Adler Modern: There is an obvious and deliberate use of self-portraiture in your work, and there always has been. When repeated at length, like over the course of a career, it is interesting to me how quickly I disassociate you, as an individual, from the protagonist in your paintings. For me, your likeness becomes a proxy for the viewer, a stand-in. Was this intentional from the start? Or did you start out with the aim of contextualizing your themes solely through a subjective body, namely your own?

Julie Heffernan: Everything we do is self-portraiture, don’t you think? That said, I have a kind of love / hate relationship with my female figures. I’ve never really wanted her to be so dominant, because it’s the world-building do that interests me most. On the other hand, grew up with pictures of saints on holy cards I’d carry around with me in my pockets; they were there behind the Bandaids and Merthiolate whenever I opened our medicine chest—St. Lucy holding her eyeballs; Saint Agnes, her breasts on a plate; and so weird, so different from all the girls/women I knew in the boring suburbs where I grew up. Their stories were all about quiet control, devotion internal power, qualities needed to drink in since I wasn’t getting that in the movies or TV back then (except maybe the Flying Nun!).

We make the kind of art we want / need to see and I needed to see strong women looking back at me. But they aren’t me; they’re stand-ins, yes, for all women (or maybe just the really pale ones) and also totally necessary to the overall functioning of the painting, acting as an entry point into it. Essentially she’s a host, inviting viewers into the world around her to come in, look around, commune, hang out, maybe even feel better for it. And when I don’t have her miss her centrifugal energy, the way she keeps my eye whirling around, zipping behind and in front of her, but always coming back to her. A center of gravity.

Hirschl & Adler Modern: I like this idea of being welcomed into your paintings. Usually the idea of a self-portrait feels exclusive to me—the artist painting themselves for their own sake. Knowing that the figure is a stand-in removes that exclusivity, despite “Self-Portrait” often being referenced in the paintings’ titles. If anything, the titles’ misdirection only makes the allegorical nature of the work more apparent. Do you think of your paintings as allegories?

Julie Heffernan: Can’t say I do, but maybe I’m just kidding myself. Do you think they’re allegories?

Hirschl & Adler Modern: I think we may be talking about the same thing just with different terms. I think of them as allegories in that there are elements which mean something specific, or connote something deliberately, and that we are to put them together in order to understand the painting. Your metaphorical equivalent sounds similar to me: the paintings reflect different things that you are thinking about and those themes and ideas are expressed in your paintings in this specific way. The key nuance is how the paintings reflect your brain. As you said, while the figure may be a stand-in, we are still looking at a self-portrait. I want to focus on the stuff that is moving around inside your brain. Can you talk more about your “image streaming” process?

Julie Heffernan: Well, it started when I was in Berlin on a Fullbright Scholarship in the late 80s, just before the Wall came down (missed it—dang!). I went there because wanted to be a Neo-Expressionist like Jörg Immendorf or Markus Lüpertz, and I was really getting into it, making really big paintings full of thick black paint and all about our f’ed up society. I’d finish each painting, thinking it was great, but then the next day find that couldn’t look at it anymore. Kind of hated it. And that kept happening, over and over again.

Hirschl & Adler Modern: At what point did the stand-ins become a female figure? Can you tie that change with any change in what you were trying to say or do in your work?

Julie Heffernan: Yes—which brings up yet another story, if you don’t mind. All the image streaming / still-life stuff was happening at the same time that my first child, Oliver, was born, so the paintings became about all the new stuff happening in my life: new person, new way of painting, new way of seeing / becoming / moving through the world with multiple selves, etc. Then, a year later, things went awry: abdominal cramps (pregnant? miscarrying? Let it take its course , I think; only thing to do), which became like jackhammers. Next thing know I’m hobbling to Methodist Hospital where they diagnosed an ectopic pregnancy (pregnancy in fallopian tube: if it ruptures you can die, like from a burst appendix) and removed one of my fallopian tubes.

That said, I do sometimes use my own features, but that’s only to get a nose right or see how a neck meets a jaw. And usually have some portrait I’m obsessed with right next to me—like Velazquez’s Philip IV or Ingres’ self-portrait—that functions both as a way to solve those kinds of practical needs and gives me a surrogate self to imagine myself inside of.

But one day, after about 6 months of that painting-hating thing, I lay down on the couch for a quick snooze after a long work day, and, just as I was about to nod off, a bunch of pictures, one after another, started bodying forth into my head, each one crisp and particular and something I’d never seen before, really wanted to look at, long and hard (unlike those paintings I was doing!). Some were really weird, like a baby Infanta giving birth to another baby Infanta, some just faces (tons of faces!)—all streaming fast through my head, like individual film stills from a movie I’d never seen. And it kept happening, to the point that I realized I’d tapped into something that might solve my painting-hating problem. So I taught myself to paint differently, more realistically, and work quickly so I could jot some of them down before I forgot them. It took me a while to figure out how to use them right but finally I stumbled on the humble still life, and started using the image-streaming pictures like mini projections onto the apples and pears that, later on, I thought of as stand-ins for my brain.

I’m always calling them “metaphorical equivalents” of my own interiority, like there’s a tiny mirror inside my brain, and it’s moving around, showing me stuff I might be interested in and maybe even want to paint sometime. Ever since I started seeing stuff inside my head over 30 years ago, that “image streaming” process I’ve talked about a lot, I’ve wanted to figure out how to show what’s inside me in a coherent way. That’s the real reason started calling each painting “Self-Portrait as…”, because they were giving me ways to see myself better, be a conduit to the inside self and act like a kind of mirror—only an interior one—showing me stuff was way more interested in than what I ever got from my reflection in glass.

I was recovering in the hospital with a big bandage on my groin, wondering why I’d never heard the term “ectopic pregnancy” before, wondering why my doctors hadn’t mentioned it as a possibility, and suddenly felt, in one fell swoop, like I’d joined the ranks of all those women who, through no fault of their own, had suffered reproductive mishaps; all the women who’d died in childbirth. I was floating among them now, alive because of modern medicine, but identifying with them nevertheless, in a way never fully had before. Suddenly it was real—Lived Feminism was knocking at my door, not just theoretical feminism—and was offering me a way to understand the Life and Death nature of women’s experience: reproductive, political, situational, etc. With change thrust upon us we have to change (take note, climate deniers! ), therefore my work had to change, too. So, I made a painting with a naked woman in an Infanta wig and a bandage on her belly and called it Self-Portrait as Infanta Maria Theresa Playing Coriolanus , from the Shakespeare play about wounds of Glory vs. Shame, and that's how all my ladies were born.

**Self-Portrait as Infanta Maria Theresa, 1995**
Courtesy of the artist

Hirschl & Adler Modern: It is interesting to me that your work, even in the Berlin days, has always been political, but the biggest change happened when you directed that agency through your own life experience. Looking at your paintings with the benefit of hindsight, the work and its agency only strengthened as you continued to expand your visual language. Along with ideas of identity and Feminism, another major theme in your work is the environment: specifically, society’s treatment of it. When did this concern enter the paintings?

Julie Heffernan: I still clearly remember, back in 2005, reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Climate of Man, Part 1” in The New Yorker and knowing, deep inside, that everything had changed, everything was different now. There was no escaping it: the bill for all our centuries of waste, overkill, depredation had come due and we have to pay, now. So I thought and thought about what I could do and decided it was time to stop my inner-looking and start looking outside myself. made a body of work called When the Water Rises and it traveled to several red states. The first venue was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and they’d just had yet another storm-of-the-century. Whole neighborhoods were flooded and, afterwards, a ton of waterlogged mattresses had been put out to pasture on sidewalks all over town. In my show was a big diptych called Camp Bedlam that featured a new kind of habitat made of, interestingly, a ton of trashed mattresses, all piled up into shelters.

Hirschl & Adler Modern: I think that the conversation, if anything, has only gotten louder and broader in the time since When the Water Rises opened in 2018. Climate change is a surprisingly divisive issue, and women’s rights issues have, devastatingly, increased rather than decreased. Have you had to readjust how you address these issues in your work? Or perhaps better phrased, how have these recurring issues forced you to adjust your painting? Is that reflected in this exhibition?

Julie Heffernan: Yes! And you’re right: since then everything related to those issues has only gotten way more charged, but all I can do is keep painting. That said, in 2019, after more than 40 years of work work work, I lost faith. I still put in time at the studio—old habits and all—but it didn’t feel as purposeful anymore. So, I started writing a graphic novel. At first it was to keep myself busy, but soon I found it was helping me make sense of my entire life. And gradually the process of thinking, writing, drawing started working on me like a tonic, and I found myself running to the Microsoft Paint Program, dinosaur that it is, like I used to run to the studio. Following narrative tendrils leading to realizations, bringing new scrutiny to old events, knitting together otherwise random memories—all of that let me see my life in fresh and organized ways, as though all of it had somehow been choreographed and it was up to me to just find those steps and dance . And that whole process also brought together some of the basic things I’d always wanted in my paintings: intertwining narratives, art history-derived wisdom, life lessons gleaned through devotion to craft. It also involved so much drawing that my orientation to the goo of paint completely changed.

Hirschl & Adler Modern: How do you mean? Your orientation to the materiality of paint?

Julie Heffernan: Yes. When I started painting again, now with new energy, I found myself changing everything I used to do. I started pouring paint, setting it loose, layering splashes that pooled into glamorous profusions of color that intrigued me in a brandnew way. The shapes they made captured by accident some of the marvelous qualities I look to trees for—a million details, a zillion pinpoints of light, all those complex intertwining of leaves and branches—that I was always trying so painstakingly to render…

Hirschl & Adler Modern: You are speaking about some of the most recent paintings in the show, what you have called the Spill paintings…

Julie Heffernan: Yes! After I gave the spills some structure—by carving space into them—they suddenly became even more tree-like: branches appearing; sprouting characters; landscape vignettes becoming worlds within worlds; hidden seed pods, flying things throwing out sparks, gleaming like Christmas trees.

The point of the show was to engage with a whole lot of different people and start conversations that I hope are still going on.

**Camp Bedlam, 2016**
Courtesy of the artist

The brilliant thing about composing is that it brings logic to an otherwise haphazard activity, organizing through shape and pattern all the mess we make as we begin something new. And organizing is its own balm, a weird kind of rebirth. I always tell students that they’ll probably need to go through a few crises in the beginning of their careers, and purge —throw out everything they’ve done—on their way to their first mature body of work. Now I know that crisis—and purging—is just a part of living; it’s written into the equation. And so I’m back—building scenarios, designing forms in and with paint, searching out wonders—but now…the swamp is pink with June.

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Julie Heffernan: The swamps are pink with June