Brushes with loneliness: Artist Andrea Joyce Heimer paints her way through her feelings and memories
The software I use to transcribe my interviews has started naming each audio file based on the content of the interview. It’s a new thing; the files used to be called “Note” by default. It’s unnecessary, but I don’t mind it.
The titles are usually pretty vague, things like “Theater Show Interview” and “Artist Interview and Show Promotion.” But pulling up my interview with artist Andrea Joyce Heimer, I see that the software has decided to call the file “Artist Interview: Loneliness Exploration.”
It’s a surprisingly succinct way to sum up much of Heimer’s work. Many of her paintings do in fact center on the idea of loneliness and what it means to be lonely. You might not realize it at first glance, though, as many of Heimer’s paintings feature large crowds of people, sometimes at a rodeo or water park, other times in the forest or different rooms of a house.
But upon closer inspection, you realize the people aren’t always interacting with each other, instead choosing to do their own thing while among the crowd. It’s an expression of what Heimer calls the enigma of loneliness.
“It’s this thing where on the outside, you look totally functional,” she said. “You have people around you that love you, but you can still have this inherent sense of longing and loneliness that’s not directly related to the physical bodies around you, but maybe more of an existential thing. You can be married and feel lonely in a marriage, or you can feel lonely in a friend group, or at a party. It lives inside you, no matter what’s happening outside.”
It’s a theme Heimer has worked with for much of her career, and one of the themes being explored during her solo exhibit “No Name That I Know Of,” which opened Friday and runs through May 25 at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.
Though she would sometimes work on art projects with her mom and grandmother, creating was mostly a solo endeavor for Heimer. She would start with a paper background and make up stories with the paper figures she created. It’s similar to how she works now, arranging pieces one at a time in a way that makes many of her paintings look like collages with elements layered on top of each other.
But before she can begin arranging pieces, Heimer must first have the painting’s title in place. The titles read like short stories and recall memories, and sometimes just fragments of memories, from Heimer’s past.
One piece in “No Name That I Know,” for example, is called “When I Was 12 Or So I Went To The Rodeo To Meet A Boy I Thought I Would Kiss But When He Never Arrived I Went To The North East Corner Of The Fairgrounds, Sat On A Fence, And Cried From Sun Down To Sun Up While Watching The Cowboys And Horses And Calves Run And Sweat In The Brown Montana Dirt.”
“Once I have the thought or the memory written down, then the visuals start to form,” Heimer said. “I try really hard to not look at reference photos of my childhood home or anything, but it’s a very similar process where I work flat on a table, and I paint the background first, and then I come in and I start to populate the houses or the trees or whatever, and then the people are almost always last. It’s very much like I’m assembling a collage, but it’s all paint.”
Heimer has worked with a variety of mediums throughout her career but said she always makes her way back to painting, in part because she uses the same type of craft acrylic paint she used with her grandmother, who would tell a young Heimer she should be an artist when she grows up.
The process of painting, sitting in solitude and working for hours on end, is also appealing to Heimer.
“I’ve tried lots of different things, but I always come back to painting,” she said. “I love painting. I love looking at other people’s paintings, or the process. Everything about it feels magical.”
Magical is one word Heimer uses to describe the act of painting, therapeutic is another. As the only adopted child in her family, Heimer said she didn’t have a great adolescence and felt like the black sheep. Painting memories of childhood was a suggestion from her then-therapist.
Painting these memories has given Heimer a sense of control over them and has allowed her to create a visual language with symbolism that appears in multiple paintings, though the overall scenes might not be connected. These symbols, Heimer said, operate as shorthand for certain experiences.
In many of her paintings, for example, dogs represent depression.
“Having control and I’m reassembling these memories in a way that makes sense to me, and it is highly therapeutic,” Heimer said. “It’s the only thing, honestly, that has really made a dent in that lost feeling that I struggle with.”
Because the paintings are meant to be therapeutic, Heimer said it’s important for her to start with a clear idea of what she is going to express, which takes things back to those short story-like titles. She wants to assemble her thoughts, and then the painting itself, in a way that makes it clear to the viewer exactly what is going on in each piece.
Heimer said she understands that’s a departure from other artists, who leave things up for interpretation, but that it’s all part of the work she does to organize her thoughts and memories in a way that makes sense to her.
“It really has been life-saving in many ways,” Heimer said of her creative process.