Julie Heffernan is an artist that I've recently rediscovered, whose work I find very inspiring. I like the way she makes reference to classical paintings, particularly the landscapes and the luscious fruits and flowers that remind me of Dutch paintings. http://www.ppowgallery.com/artists/JulieHeffernan/, I also found a description of how her images come to her that is the best description of what happens in my mind when I am in a creative period. See below from the following link: http://www.montclair.edu/pages/insight/Insight09-23-02/onthejob.html
On the Job with Julie Heffernan
Julie Heffernan
Born: Peoria, Ill.
Raised:Northern California
Currently resides:Brooklyn, N.Y.
Education:B.F.A., University of California at Santa Cruz; M.F.A., painting, Yale School of Art
Family: Husband, Jonathan Kalb, chair of the Theater Department at Hunter College and theater critic for The New York Times; sons, Oliver, age 10 and Sam, age 6
Favorite painters: Rubens for his rich and sensuous worlds and Velazquez for his psychologically penetrating portraits
A source of inspiration: I was hugely influenced by snorkeling in the Yucatan. The water is gorgeous. You duck your head below and suddenly you're in this deep internal space where there's coral and colorful fish. It is exquisite.
Favorite Activities: Hiking and body surfing

Her paintings have been described as "downright haunting," "enchanting but eerie" and having an "offbeat punch." And while Julie Heffernan of Art and Design agrees, she says she never strives for those results."Haunting and enchanting and eerie are wonderful words for getting a sense of how my paintings affect other people," she said, "but I don't drive or steer the work to any particular outcome. For me, it's about tracking these pictures in my head that I derive out of a process called image streaming."

This unique approach is how Julie begins work on all her paintings, and something she is trying to teach her students. "Before I'm actually sleeping, as I relax and get out of the conscious mind, pictures will flood into my head, kind of like a movie," she said. "It's not like daydreaming or remembering. They're spontaneous pictures that I just sit back and watch. And then I'll fall asleep. When I wake up, it's at that point where the images start to stream in, and out of those I'll usually 'see' something."

Julie's interest in art began at an early age, although she didn't know it would be her true calling until later in life. "I made my first painting at 10. It was just an awful little painting of lemons. It didn't show any degree of anything. Somebody like Picasso showed genius at a young age. I do not think my paintings showed any genius," she said with a chuckle. "It was after graduate school that I became an obsessed painter, and through that obsession I came to understand some things about subject matter and how to bring that subject matter to life through paint."

One of Julie's paintings (pictured left) appeared in the June 3, 2002 issue of The New Yorker, accompanying a story, "The Thing in the Forest," by A.S. Byatt. "The people at The New Yorker have printed smaller reproductions of my work before in the Galleries section. When this story came in, they thought it seemed to be just made for me," she said. "I was so ecstatic when I read it because I felt like this was the verbal equivalent of everything I'm trying to paint. The story is about two little girls who are evacuated to the outskirts of London in wartime England and when they're gallivanting in this forest, a lumbering creature oozes by. It's that idea of the gorgeous and the hideous mixed together, gamboling in a space that's both paradisiacal and also terrifying, that I'm interested in."

Balancing her painting, teaching and personal life is a challenge, but it's a task to which she is dedicated. "If I have any success at all it's because I have incredibly good work habits. I give it my all, wherever I am. When I'm with my children; I'm really with my children, when I'm in my studio, I'm really in my studio, and when I'm teaching, I'm really teaching."

Julie came to Montclair State from Penn State four years ago, and continues to lecture throughout the country. It is here, she says, she is most comfortable. "There tends to be an arrogance in students at Ivy League schools," she said. "I firmly believe in state schools. Students at state schools are hungry."

So Julie is feeding her students with the knowledge of her unique image streaming approach to painting, in the hopes that they will be open to learning how to be introspective. "Anybody can teach technique, and I do want to teach it because I think learning this magic is really fun," she said. "But it's how to help people get in touch with their subject, their story, their uniqueness. That's worth teaching."

In return, Julie believes her students are giving her a unique opportunity as well. "Before I realized I was going to be a painter I wanted to be a psychotherapist. I was interested in how people's minds work, and I love to ask questions. So having students painting in front of me and having the opportunity to suss out how this is the sum total of everything that they are at the moment is just fascinating. It's like honing in on a soul."Over the past year, Julie has found that one experience has caused her to do her own soul searching—the tragic events of Sept. 11. Living in Brooklyn, Julie and her husband witnessed the attack on the second tower from their rooftop. "It was so weird because it rammed into the building and there was no sound from Brooklyn but it was all the visuals. It was surrealism come to life.

"I'm very interested in surrealism as an art form because it engages the idea of 'unheimlich,' which is the uncanny, the idea of the familiar with the unfamiliar. And here's this familiar plane and this familiar building doing this unfamiliar thing, colliding."Then one day Julie found herself creating a building in one of her paintings. "The building kept needing to be higher and suddenly it was going off the edge of the canvas, and I realized that this was my way of working through the trauma of having seen that."