Julie Heffernan's 'second self'

Julie Heffernan is a contemporary New York artist known for an old-master style of figurative painting. In large canvases that vividly display a consummate technical ability, she depicts fulsome and improvised worlds of incongruous and bizarre imagery. With a decidedly postmodern sensibility, she liberally quotes seventeenth-century Dutch, Spanish and French masters. Consistent with a deep engagement of art historical subjects, she has framed her work primarily within the genres of still life and self-portraiture.; This paper focuses on Heffernan's use of self-portraiture, the most significant and central theme in her work. Despite the close physical resemblance to her subjects, as well as the use of "Self-Portrait" in her titles, Heffernan has consistently maintained that her work is not self-representation. The aim of this paper is to support Heffernan's claim and to disprove its perceived contradiction. My interpretative analysis relies on an examination of the genre of self-portraiture within its historical tradition, as well as insights into the theoretical framework of deconstruction, which finds its roots in the methodology of the twentieth-century French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. The direct application of Derrida's approach is more specifically dedicated to the concept of a "dualist paradigm," as well as to the notion of deferred textual meaning. This paper will examine Heffernan's self-portraiture within this framework to show that her painting is not an expression of a unified self, but is rather "representation" as metaphor, as symbol.