Garlands of fruits, rendered with softly psychedelic colors; twisted networks of wiry limbs and roots, framed by lush tropical plants, luminous in distant mist; topographical cornucopias of formal gardens, resplendent on the surface of a globe, itself set in a magical walled garden; fruit laced bowers sheltering asexual twins; glowing indoor showers of jeweled raindrops; flaming chandeliers hanging from trompe l’oeil ceilings in baroque drawing rooms, an adolescent boy lifting a folded carpet of landscape amid a netting of captured momentos; and a rope mesh dress with flowing skirts made of small game animals and fruits; these are some of the lushly painted items, signs and symbols that make up Julie Heffernan’s “Self Portraits”.

The Illinois born, Brooklyn based artist names many of her works as such, “Self Portrait as Big World”, “Self Portrait as Broken Home”, “Self Portrait as Animal Bed” and “Self Portrait as Fabulous Droppings”; others are part of a sequence with more direct names, “Tender Trapper”, “Boy in Flight” and “Budding Boy”; but the sense of enigma, hidden meaning waiting to be sought out, and the elaborate Baroque meets Magic Realism detail of her compositions is common to all.

Heffernan’s paintings carry echoes of the Early Renaissance, Botecelli, Bruegel and Bosch, along with the more overt stylings of 17th Century Baroque painting and the profusion of shapes, colors and patterns with which the Baroque style gave meaning to our contemporary use of the word.

These are mixed with the dream state juxtapositions of the Surrealists, by which I don’t so much mean Dali and Magriette, as Ernst, Tanning and Tanguy; and the intensely chromatic rendering of contemporary Magic Realism. All of these affections and influences are assembled and woven into a dense and intricate tapestry of styles that becomes uniquely her expression, and by extension, her self portrait within her self portraits.

Heffernan studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz and received her MFA in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. She delivered this year’s commencement address at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Though the artist doesn’t appear to have a dedicated web presence, you can find her work well represented by several galleries, particularly the P-P-O-W Gallery in New York (also here). There is a post on Escape Into Life that features several works large enough to get a quick overview (more here). There is a brief interview with Heffernan on ArtSlant.

Quoted in an article on Montclair State University Insight Online, Heffernan says she seeks out her imagery in the semi-waking state on the edge of sleep in a process she calls “image streaming”. In this she shares some of the true intentions of the Surrealists, who were most interested in inspiration from dreams and the unconscious mind.

(Painting titles above: “Budding Boy”, “Self Portrait as Big World”, “Boy in Flight”, “Self Portrait as Booty”)

Painter Robert J. Barber lists his inspirations as including Joaquín Sorolla, John Singer Sargent and Diego Velázquez (a superb short list); and you can see the influence of the first two in particular in both his figurative and landscape paintings, which emphasize fresh, clear color choices and expressive brushwork.

Personally, I also see echoes of American Impressionists like William Merritt Chase and Theodore Robinson in his direct, colorful and painterly approach.

Landscapes, and notably, townscapes, are the focus of much of Barber’s work. In the examples on his website, which are unfortunately a bit small, his landscapes seem looser and more casual, more likely done en plein air; and the townscapes seem brought to a higher degree of finish as studio paintings (it can also be a matter of scale, Barber doesn’t give dimensions in his online galleries, and I think the townscapes are larger in size).

Barber often chooses views that look down a sidewalk in his town paintings, adding challenges of dramatic perspective to his compositions. His color choices, though rich, are naturalistic; and I particularly like the way he handles the muted tones of overcast days and objects in shadow.

In his website galleries you will also find figurative work and a few still life and interior subjects.

Born in Illinois, Barber grew up in California and now lives in Pennsylvania. He studied Studio Art at the University of California at SantaBarbara and Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Design. He also pursued independent study with painters Ken Auster, Craig Nelson and Dan McCaw.

After 20 years as a freelance illustrator, working for book publishers, movie studios and natural history museums, Barber transitioned into gallery art, garnering awards in several juried shows. He also conducts painting workshops in Maryland other locations.

In addition to the work on his own website, you can find some of his paintings reproduced a bit larger on the Peter McPhee Fine Arts site. There are also works at the McBride Gallery and Susan Calloway Fine Arts.

Barber’s work will be part of a group exhibition at Peter McPhee Fine Arts in Stone Harbor, NJ from August 7 – September 1, 2010, with an opening on August 7 at 7pm.

German symbolist and Art Nouveau painter Franz von Stuck (sometimes simply “Franz Stuck”) began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist for popular magazines; but after winning a gold medal at his first painting exhibition, and experiencing subsequent critical success, he began to devote himself to painting, engraving and sculpture, as well as architecture.

Von Stuck studied at the Munich Academy, and later returned to take up his role as a professor, counting among his students noted modernist stars like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers.

Stuck was one of the founders of the Munich Secession, a group of like minded artists who withdrew from the official auspices of academic art and established styes outside the mainstream (the most widely recognized of these groups was the Vienna Secession, which included Gustav Klimt).

Von Stuck was highly successful and critically well regarded in his time, though his fame and influence faded toward the end of his life. He is sometimes compared to Arnold Böcklin, by whom he was greatly influenced. The comparisons are often unfavorable, but Von Stuck went his own way and was responsible for wonderfully intense interpretations of mythological subjects and literary subjects, like his portrayal of Lucifer (above, third down).

He designed and constructed his own frames, which he considered an integral part of the work. He was a talented sculptor as well as a painter, at times applying both skill sets to works like his striking painted relief of Beethoven (above, bottom), based on a mask of the composer once thought to be a death mask, but later established as a mask made from Beethoven’s face during his lifetime. Von Stuck’s portrait evokes the kind of fiery intensity we associate with “Ludwig van’s” stirring work.