Artist Julie Heffernan’s style can be described as a contemporary mix of Rococo, Surrealism, and Baroque, with a dash of the seventeenth-century Dutch still-life Masters. The title of each canvas begins with the words Self-Portrait, which conveys that these scenes are portraits of a personal and internal world, not literal depictions of the artist herself. The artist first used the term “self-portrait” when she was inventing scenarios of subconscious imagery overlaid on fruit to create “a portrait of interiority.” She found how the Still Life could be a useful trope for imaging the female. Historically, the Still Life was a tradition of and for women artists who weren’t allowed access to nude models for fear women would be corrupted.

The artist explained, “I wanted to paint the figure but did not want to objectify women. I was addressing that concern during my still life phase; taking my own body out of the painting but calling it a self-portrait anyway, was a way of saying 'I'm not this physical body alone; I'm this cornucopia of experiences, and pictures in my head'.” Heffernan uses the Still Life to reclaim the feminist body, and her body, from the male gaze.

Self-Portrait as Explosion takes the form of a lush, elaborate still life, of apples and grapes and other produce against a dark background. Some of the fruits contain small vignettes showing those pictures in Heffernan's head, snippets of experiences which the viewer is left to interpret. These round forms of the fruit become thought bubbles that allow for commentary on the messy world underneath the prettiness.

Born in 1956 in Peoria, IL, Heffernan went on to receive her BFA from the University of California Santa Cruz and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 1985, where she worked alongside fellow figurative painter Lisa Yuskavage. Today, Heffernan’s works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Knoxville Museum of Art, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond, among others. She lives and works in New York, NY.

The Dutch Still Life

Julie Heffernan is heavily influenced by traditional 17th century Dutch Still Lifes. The Dutch Golden Age led to a tremendous outpouring of still-life paintings in the 17th century. Since then, critics have generally belonged to two opposing schools of thought when it comes to interpreting them.

On one side, the generally somber scenes are read symbolically through the lens of Christian religious traditions, often underscoring life’s transience (the proliferation of rotting fruit, withered flowers, and slowly draining hourglasses offer sobering examples of memento mori, reminders of death). Alternatively, scholars assess the artist’s skill in employing an array of visual effects in these banquet scenes, floral arrangements, or vanitas paintings. But while still lifes are generally thought to be devoid of narrative, certain deeper meanings come into focus once you look beyond the metaphors and showy artistic tricks.

As the prosperity of Dutch society increased, the general public became more engrossed with the amusements of everyday life, including education, commerce, and material goods. These changes had enormous repercussions on the art market, and it’s no coincidence that the still life arose as an independent genre in Europe parallel to the birth of early market capitalism and the world’s first consumer society.

Self Portrait as Explosion is, actually, an onion. At first glance it may look like a Dutch still life but that’s just the first layer. Dutch still lifes often depicted the beautiful abundance of food and exotic goods the nation’s new global trade produced, in tension with indicators of time and symbols of mortality. Hmmmm. So, since this is a “self-portrait,“ perhaps Ms. Heffernan is beautiful and affluent, with conflicted notions of life and death? As one approaches the painting, the top layer, and then the subsequent ones, peel away and reveal strata of style and imagery; a surreal Renaissance genre scene, a Noir film still...and who’s strangling the baby?! Looking even more closely now, diagrammatic line drawings emerge, revealing sado-masochistic how-to’s. These wildly varied and disturbing vignettes suggest a disruption and fracture of time that seem to also reflect metaphorically on the painter’s sense of identity; Heffernan is perhaps best known for self-portraits that depict her inhabiting various personae from across time. The amalgam of imagery in this painting then does appear to explode off the canvas - exposing a complex psychological portrait of the artist as fragmented, but outwardly as cohesive as a Dutch still life, or an onion.

Leigh Ann Hallberg, Teaching Professor, Art Department, Hoak Family Fellow

I wanted everyone to love this painting as much as I did 25 years ago. A lot of food was being painted at the time, both in Scales and NYC. In New York we saw shows by Julia Jacquette and Thomas Woodruff who painted food as a single floating subject. More graphic in style, their pictures had the beautiful seriality of wallpaper when hung together. Julie’s food had setting; it was landscaped. Her paintings could stand alone. Our 1997 buying trip kind of missed the whole figurative painting craze of Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin, but it didn’t matter. Julie went to Yale, too, and eventually her paintings would also feature a central figure instead of stowing people away in the little cavities of a still life. But I would never like her later work more than this. With her ‘holes’ or ‘openings’ she had created a system that removed all the limitations of a painting’s subject. She could create as many worlds in her one as she wanted.

Much of our contemporary art seminar emphasized the dark underbelly of beauty or the simultaneity of attraction and repulsion. I don’t like that man spitting into the other man’s mouth either, but her craft made the rotten spots great. Because of her incredible paint handling, she could easily get away with unappealing or anti-bourgeois sentiments. The vivid fruit sitting in old-timey darkness was a movie screen for the psychological projections she painted. Pipilotti Rist and Tony Oursler would use objects as screens, projecting their videos on furniture, sculpture, fog, and trees. In a way, Julie paints this future of video art by using still life as a screen.

Choices are tough and picking this painting was part of an interlocking financial puzzle: Vija Celmins, Julie Heffernan, Bill Jacobson, Amy Jenkins, Rita McBride, Larry Pittman, Kiki Smith, and Meg Webster. Self-Portrait as Explosion was easier to pick because its fullness made you feel like you were getting much more than a painting. We collected Julie’s brilliant mind, too.

Elizabeth Gray (’98, Double Major Studio Art and Political Science), 1997 Student Union Art Acquisition Committee

Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art, purchased on the 1997 Art Buying Trip