Julie Heffernan

(American, born 1956)

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 reoccurring 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. 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, Herffernan’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.