Welcome to our new website!
Hi Folks,
We’re happy to be back! Welcome to our new website platform. Please excuse the layout of our older posts as we take time to format them in the coming weeks.
We took a pause from publishing to focus on other projects but are always happy to return to Painters on Paintings. It is a way for us to take the temperature of the art world: to learn what artist are looking at and how they are folding what they see into their practice.
We have exciting texts in the PoP pipeline to share with you this season! Our latest piece by Alina Tenser is an insightful take on the expressive qualities of glass sculpture, with its plethora of transparencies acting like painterly glazes in three dimensions.
Next week we have an essay from Marik Lechner who we met at L-space in Chelsea this October. His exhibition of large-scale textile works had all the plastic complexity and sensual immediacy of Expressionist paintings. Only — they were done with yarn, miles and miles of it!
Sandra Lee shares a meditation on East Asian garden ponds, using them as a reflection point to pull together artworks that slow time and center contemplation.
And here’s a little about what we, your Editors, have been up to this year.
Update from Virginia:
This fall I had a solo show at Radiator Gallery. The exhibition, BACKDROP was anchored by large, freestanding paintings constructed from reclaimed wood. The works functioned like stage sets, forming a broken panorama. The paintings pictured theater architecture and waterways that border New York, invoking the Hudson River Valley School while playing with the genre of scenic painting.
Questions of local ecology and sustainability were at the helm. The exhibition was site-specific – both in terms of the installation and its focus on the local landscape around the gallery site, situated in Long Island City on Newtown Creek. If you’re interested in the ecological thinking underpinning the exhibition, please see the Climate Report I created for Artists Commit.
Update from Julie:
I’m happy to report that the graphic novel I’ve been working on for five years, Babe in the Woods, or the Art of Getting Lost, will be coming out in September through Algonquin Books, a division of Hachette. Here’s what the publisher, Betsy Gleick, had to say about it:
From acclaimed painter Julie Heffernan, comes a visually stunning and original four-color work of autofiction about a young mother lost overnight on a hike with her infant son. (It’s) a meditation on learning to see, survive, and create, for readers of graphic books by authors like Alison Bechdel or Marjane Satrapi, and for anyone interested in art and the creative journey.
One summer day, a young artist with a newborn—sleep-deprived, desperate to escape her hot, cramped apartment and oblivious husband—sets off on a hike in the country. With her baby boy strapped to her front, her senses fully attuned to the colors, the sounds, the flora and fauna in the woods around her, Julie walks along a trail; and as she walks she reflects on her childhood, her parents, her marriage and her path to becoming a painter. Soon, her memories merge with the imaginative pictorial worlds she invents in her paintings to create a glorious and perturbing narrative.
Before she knows it, Julie and baby Sam are lost, with few supplies, as darkness sets in… She invokes the struggles of painters like Artemesia Gentileschi, women’s strength in Rubens’ Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus and the plights of activists like Julia Butterfly Hill, illuminating for the reader how great art can be a vehicle for perspective—how it teaches us how to see, how to think, how to navigate obstacles and wonders and find one’s way out into a capacious and self-determined life.”
Sending warmth, safety, and gratitude. For those of us fortunate to be healthy and secure this winter, it’s a great time to be in the studio and support our communities, those local and abroad.
Virginia & Julie
