Julie Heffernan’s output here, “Swamps Are Pink With June,” showcased a selection of figurative paintings. All were quite large, but one…Self-portrait enthroned, 2022, which stands six feet tall and five feet wide — was quite awe-inspiring, as befits its subject matter: a depiction of the artist as some kind of nature goddess. We have often seen Heffernan’s women, many of whom function as his avatars, posed like queens amid hallucinogenic arrangements of greenery and flowers. (The title of the exhibition is taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, an avid gardener who, in her own otherworldly writings, often spoke of the plants she grew.) the case with Spread (THE Autumn), 2023, in which quivering red blood cells of organic matter surround the figure’s head. In other works, plants seem to spring from the subject’s body, in the manner of Gaia, as we saw in Self-Portrait as Continental Divide, 2022. Throughout the show, Heffernan boldly declared what anthropologist Ashley Montagu called the natural superiority of women. (Psychoanalyst Karen Horney has argued that men envy the womb as well as the breast, even unconsciously, because they lack a woman’s ability to create and nurture life.)
In my opinion, Heffernan presents herself in these works as Lucretia’s Venus Genetrix, source of perpetual renewal and regeneration, rather than Botticelli’s sterile and strangely asexual Aphrodite (alias Venus). Heffernan supposedly alludes to all sorts of historically significant women (like Queen Victoria). But so many of his canvases are reminiscent of Shakespeare’s mythical Titania, due to their fairy-tale character and hypnotically designed details, often reminiscent of Richard Dadd’s famous painting. THE Fairy at Feller Master–Stroke, 1855–64. One wonders if Dickinson’s line inspired Heffernan because it distills the creative process into a metaphor: the unconscious is a swamp, while the wildflowers (the “rose”) that grow from it are the conscious. Pink is a symbol of femininity, more broadly of happiness, suggesting that Heffernan’s paintings are a celebration of joy and femininity.
Heffernan relies on the creativity of the unconscious – what Freud called his “imagination” – to idealize himself, rather than waiting for society to respect him. She is actually healing herself from the wounds that our misogynistic culture has inflicted on her. His paintings “Spill”, 2022–, as Spill (Ashdod) And Spill (Lotus emerging), both from 2022, seemed like homages to the power of ingenuity. According to the show’s press release, the artist was looking for “new energy in the studio” for the series, so she “began pouring paint onto the canvas to begin each work”, producing moments that “have accidentally captured the same energy that [Heffernan] would so laboriously try to render. The artist’s wondrously capricious manipulation of his chosen medium recalls the fecundity of Dickinson’s flourishing swamp. The painter uses a proven automatist (and modernist) method to get in touch with the unconscious. The result looked like a wholesome antithesis to Pollock’s flashy but psychically sick approach to automatism – what critic Robert Coates described as “mere unorganized bursts of random energy”, which he eventually found” insignificant”. Heffernan creates a kind of refined neo-traditionalist literary art that is insistently naturalistic, optimistic and baroquely extravagant, suggesting that modernist abstraction has become a dead end, as confirmed by the continued development of so much “zombie formalism”.
