Julie Heffernan is a contemporary American painter known for her Baroque-inspired fantasy portraits and landscapes. Influenced by allegories, politics, and literature, Heffernan’s work explores a sensual fantasy realm where plants and animals coexist in harmony within a lush, plentiful atmosphere. In a recurring series, she paints women standing in full skirts made out of ripe fruit or blooming flowers. “When I look back on my work, I realize I was wrestling with my own psychic and physical growth,” the artist has said. “I realize now that when I was doing the flower skirts, they were about a burgeoning sexuality. […] Now I’ve shifted my work entirely to the tortured landscape. I’m looking around for new metaphors for my own present-day experience.” Heffernan notably employs an aesthetic based on the traditional oil painting techniques of Northern Renaissance artists—such as Hieronymous Bosch—while maintaining a wholly contemporary atmosphere that seems to come more from science fiction than art historical tropes.
She is a 2017 Fellow of the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; was awarded the Meridian Scholar Artist-In-Residence Fellowship from the University of Tampa in Florida and was the featured artist for the 2017 MacDowell Colony. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and a Fulbright-Hays grant to Berlin.
Heffernan was raised in Northern California, received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking and painting from University of California at Santa Cruz, and earned a Master of Fine Arts at Yale School of Art. She is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University and Co-founder of the journal Painters on Paintings. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
