with Julie Heffernan
Julie Heffernan
Born:
Peoria, Ill.
Raised:
Northern California
Currently resides:
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Education:
B.F.A., University of California at Santa Cruz; M.F.A., painting,
Yale School of Art
Family:
Husband, Jonathan Kalb, chair of the Theater Department at Hunter College
and theater critic for The New York Times; sons, Oliver, age 10
and Sam, age 6
Favorite painters:
Rubens for his rich and sensuous worlds and Velazquez for his psychologically
penetrating portraits
A source of inspiration:
I was hugely influenced by snorkeling in the Yucatan. The water is
gorgeous. You duck your head below and suddenly you're in this deep internal
space where there's coral and colorful fish. It is exquisite.
Favorite Activities:
Hiking and body surfing
Her paintings have been described as "downright haunting,"
"enchanting but eerie" and having an "offbeat punch."
And while Julie Heffernan of Art and Design agrees, she says she never
strives for those results.
"Haunting and enchanting and eerie are wonderful words for getting
a sense of how my paintings affect other people," she said, "but
I don't drive or steer the work to any particular outcome. For me, it's
about tracking these pictures in my head that I derive out of a process
called image streaming."
This unique approach is how Julie begins work on all her paintings, and
something she is trying to teach her students. "Before I'm actually
sleeping, as I relax and get out of the conscious mind, pictures will
flood into my head, kind of like a movie," she said. "It's not
like daydreaming or remembering. They're spontaneous pictures that I just
sit back and watch. And then I'll fall asleep. When I wake up, it's at
that point where the images start to stream in, and out of those I'll
usually 'see' something."
Julie's interest in art began at an early age, although she didn't know
it would be her true calling until later in life. "I made my first
painting at 10. It was just an awful little painting of lemons. It didn't
show any degree of anything. Somebody like Picasso showed genius at a
young age. I do not think my paintings showed any genius," she said
with a chuckle. "It was after graduate school that I became an obsessed
painter, and through that obsession I came to understand some things about
subject matter and how to bring that subject matter to life through paint."
One
of Julie's paintings (pictured left) appeared in the June 3, 2002 issue
of The New Yorker, accompanying a story, "The Thing in the
Forest," by A.S. Byatt. "The people at The New Yorker
have printed smaller reproductions of my work before in the Galleries
section. When this story came in, they thought it seemed to be just made
for me," she said. "I was so ecstatic when I read it because
I felt like this was the verbal equivalent of everything I'm trying to
paint. The story is about two little girls who are evacuated to the outskirts
of London in wartime England and when they're gallivanting in this forest,
a lumbering creature oozes by. It's that idea of the gorgeous and the
hideous mixed together, gamboling in a space that's both paradisiacal
and also terrifying, that I'm interested in."
Balancing her painting, teaching and personal life is a challenge, but
it's a task to which she is dedicated. "If I have any success at
all it's because I have incredibly good work habits. I give it my all,
wherever I am. When I'm with my children; I'm really with my children,
when I'm in my studio, I'm really in my studio, and when I'm teaching,
I'm really teaching."
Julie came to Montclair State from Penn State four years ago, and continues
to lecture throughout the country. It is here, she says, she is most comfortable.
"There tends to be an arrogance in students at Ivy League schools,"
she said. "I firmly believe in state schools. Students at state schools
are hungry."
So Julie is feeding her students with the knowledge of her unique image
streaming approach to painting, in the hopes that they will be open to
learning how to be introspective. "Anybody can teach technique, and
I do want to teach it because I think learning this magic is really fun,"
she said. "But it's how to help people get in touch with their subject,
their story, their uniqueness. That's worth teaching."
In return, Julie believes her students are giving her a unique opportunity
as well. "Before I realized I was going to be a painter I wanted
to be a psychotherapist. I was interested in how people's minds work,
and I love to ask questions. So having students painting in front of me
and having the opportunity to suss out how this is the sum total of everything
that they are at the moment is just fascinating. It's like honing in on
a soul."
Over the past year, Julie has found that one experience has caused her
to do her own soul searching—the tragic events of Sept. 11. Living
in Brooklyn, Julie and her husband witnessed the attack on the second
tower from their rooftop. "It was so weird because it rammed into
the building and there was no sound from Brooklyn but it was all the visuals.
It was surrealism come to life.
"I'm very interested in surrealism as an art form because it engages
the idea of 'unheimlich,' which is the uncanny, the idea of the familiar
with the unfamiliar. And here's this familiar plane and this familiar
building doing this unfamiliar thing, colliding."
Then one day Julie found herself creating a building in one of her paintings.
"The building kept needing to be higher and suddenly it was going
off the edge of the canvas, and I realized that this was my way of working
through the trauma of having seen that."