Andrea Joyce Heimer

Interview by Wendy Vogel

The Bellingham, Washington-based artist Andrea Joyce Heimer first turned to visual art as a therapeutic tool. Born in 1981 in Montana, her work depicts memories from her tumultuous upbringing as an adopted child, as well as her fears and anxieties. Her paintings plumb the recesses of her psyche, filling each vibrant canvas with a novel’s worth of material. She also happens to be an accomplished wordsmith. A former freelance writer, she now channels her storytelling talent through her work’s verbose, confessional titles.

Heimer’s written voice is as singular as her paintings’ style, composed of flattened figures under expanses of sky or in busy wallpapered interiors. For the 2017 exhibition “A Jealous Person” at Hometown gallery in New York, she titled one composition I Am Jealous of Everyone You Have Ever Been with and There Have Been Many, and Then I Find Out Some of Them Were Squirters and I Am Undone by This Knowledge. It Weighs on Me like a Stone. An exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene, also in 2017, included works such as The Johnson Boys Used to Set Off Fireworks in Their Mother’s Home, Which Was Too Nice for Them, While We, Who Were Too Nice for the Johnson Boys, Pined Over Them Fiercely From Afar. They Didn’t Know We Existed. Since the pandemic, she has created a series of drawings about the ubiquitous experience of waiting.

Heimer, recently shortlisted for the 2020 Foundwork Artist Prize, spoke with me from her garage studio over Zoom in December.

Wendy Vogel (WV): You started making a series of drawings during the pandemic called The Quarantine Drawings: People Waiting. Why did you turn to working on paper at that time?

Andrea Joyce Heimer (AJH): Those came out of this moment where I'd just wrapped up a show for Half Gallery. I had plans to take a month off of making art, and then literally the day after the paintings left on the truck, Washington went into full lockdown. I was almost out of paint. I used all my panels, and I hadn't ordered anymore, because I was going to take time off. Then all of a sudden, I couldn't go anywhere. I got really freaked out, because painting is what I do to help my anxiety.

My husband is an art teacher for middle school, so he has a lot of art supplies laying around. We had the alcohol markers and the oil pastels. At first I was making some "landscape drawings" in the backyard. Oh boy, they were bad! That didn't help my anxiety.

I think of the figures in my paintings almost like characters, or avatars. They help me arrange my depression and my grief in a physical way that other people couldn't see. When the pandemic started, I wondered, "Okay, what are my people doing right now? What are my characters doing right now?" I thought, "They're doing the same thing that everybody else is doing. They're waiting." We're waiting to see what's going to happen. We're waiting to see if we're going to get sick.

WV: Medium aside, how has the composition process been different with these works, if at all, from your narrative paintings?

AJH: Compositionally, they follow how I arrange my paintings—just very flattened space—but the figures ended up being much larger than they usually are in the paintings, so that they look like they were uncomfortably fit into these pieces of paper. Then it forced me to think more about the objects in the interiors, because they were filling up the space too. Because I was using these drawing materials, I was able to go back to something that I had been doing very early on when I first started painting. I was using pencil quite a bit. I'm making these little marks.

WV: Hatch marks.

AJH: Yeah. Originally, that was a meditative thing that I did when I was very anxious. I was able to return to that once I had an oil pastel in my hand. It reminded me why I started making art in the first place, which was helping me deal with the world. But instead of looking back at painful memories, the drawings were very present. They were dealing with what was happening now.

WV: In a statement on your website, you wrote that you've been unable to generate language around these works. That’s such a departure from your previous work, which has these beautiful, long narrative titles.

AJH: Because I wasn't reflecting on past experiences, I couldn't come up with these flowery titles. So they’re People Waiting 1, People Waiting 2, People Waiting 3, etc. Now I've gone back to painting for my show with Nino Meier. The drawings have totally changed what I'm doing, because now I've added the oil pastel on top. I've got all these great opportunities to do the little hatch marks again. It's brought a lot of joy and danger back into it, because so many more things can go wrong. The more processes you add, the more chances there are to fuck up, and that makes it really exciting.

The Quarantine Drawings: People Waiting 21, 2020

Marker and oil pastel

18 x 24 in.

WV: In addition to the figures being crowded in the space, they have these big bellies, big boobs. Is that something that's getting mapped onto the new work at all? The rotundness of the forms?

AJH: I think so. I don't know about everybody else, but I've been paying a lot more attention to my physical body than I normally would, protecting it and being paranoid of it and overeating. The figure started expanding with that. I've found, especially in the interiors that I'm doing, the figures are much bigger. They're just beefier. I think it's to push that claustrophobic feeling that I am experiencing right now when I'm indoors and stuck. Playing with the scale of the figures—the chunkiness, for lack of a better word—is new.

WV: The new paintings will be shown at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles this spring, is that right?

AJH: In March, yeah.

WV: Do they have longer titles, like how you've been titling the paintings before?

AJH: Previously, I would come up with a title first and then plan the painting. That's not how these are going, because actually, it turns out most of these are loosely based on one of the quarantine drawings. I don't know what the titles are going to be. I'm not sure if they're going to be short, or long, or some of each. I would like a piece of writing to accompany them, so I'm trying to think of that.

Part of the reason for the very long titles was that the paintings are confessional, describing some particular memory that I feel like I need to explain to the viewer. All of these new paintings are about my stress responses to this entire situation. I feel like they're not that particular to me. This one that I'm working on now is about insomnia, which is universal right now.

WV: Do you think the language of your titles, and your history of previously showing them on the wall alongside the work, has anything to do with you describing yourself as a primarily self-taught artist — or how that designation translates to the art market?

AJH: Yeah. I ended up getting my MFA in 2017, but prior to that, I hadn't been to art school at all. My last art class was in high school and I got kicked out. I struggled with that in the first couple years, when I was trying to get my painting self together. I leaned on the written part quite a bit during that time. Several people have brought up that displaying the title alongside the work, and leaning on the word from, is very indebted to this outsider-y folk/illustration bubble.

In the beginning I was working strictly with people who dealt with outsider art. I lost them all when I ended up going to school. They had told me, "We can't work with you anymore if you're going to get your MFA." I had a clientele at that point and I was like, "I didn't get into this to be an outsider or a self-taught artist." The words weren't a gimmick for me.

I started painting, in the first place, as part of therapy. I was painting to convey very specific issues I was having, or painful memories. In that way, the written words communicated what I needed, which was an unbiased, faceless viewer. That's what I needed to complete the circuit, to feel like I was being heard. Now, a couple years into doing this, I feel like that has been successful. I can go to the next step, which is building that communication in the visual.

Fight On Junior Prom Night While Us Girls Played Spin The Bottle And Later Took LSD. Great Falls, Montana., 2019

Acrylic on wood panel

30 x 40 in.

WV: How do the regional aesthetics of Montana, where you grew up, influence your work?

AJH: I grew up in Great Falls, Montana. It's situated in the plains, and now I think the population is about 60,000 people. The town is there because of an Air Force base. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's very, very windy, very cold in the winter, very hot in the summer. It's very harsh.

Being adopted into a family where I felt like an outsider always felt very claustrophobic to me. I think that that claustrophobic feeling comes through a lot in all my interiors. I have a lot of crazy patterned wallpaper and a lot of paintings about hair—animal hair and human hair—because my mom was always cleaning and she was always re-wallpapering or reupholstering something. There was a lot of effort put into the way the house looks, and redoing when it didn't need to be redone.

That's a contrast to the outdoor paintings, which are often very desolate, with a lot of danger and wildness. The town was a normal small city, but if you drove to the edge of town, it's just nothing but plains. It's like three layers of loneliness. Even not having lived there in 15 years, it's so ingrained in me, that feeling of looking out into nothing.

I would spend summers with my grandmother, the only family member I was close to, in Lincoln, Montana. At the time I think about 500 people lived there—it's where the Unabomber was found. Once, when I was a kid playing, I came head to head with a mountain lion. I wouldn't have had those experiences anywhere else. There’s a push and pull between this very beautiful, scary landscape and danger lurking underneath.

WV: It sounds very cinematic. Many people have described your work as collage-like or quilt-like, but I also imagine the interiors as cross-sections of a dollhouse. There's something very theatrical about their staging.

AJH: Yes. When I spent time at my grandmother’s house, there wasn’t a TV or any kids to play with, so I made paper dolls a lot. I'd make them and cut them out and then arrange them and play with them.

When I started painting, I think that made sense to me compositionally. I have these characters, I have these things, but how can I lay them all together? It came from that impulse of telling stories in my head and physically rearranging pieces of paper to tell different stories. The paintings are assembled more than painted.

The Quarantine Drawings: People Waiting 48, 2020

Marker and oil pastel on paper

30 x 40 in.

WV: I’ve read that you and your mother and your grandmother would paint on ceramics, using a trompe-l'œil technique.

AJH: That was one thing that we did together. My grandma had a kiln and we would go to the ceramic store and get the pre-made little figures and then we'd paint them. When my therapist suggested that I try painting, I had some of that exact paint laying around. I've turned so many people on to this kind of acrylic paint, because it's wonderful. It has this amazing matte quality. You could draw on top of it. It's from Jo-Ann's and it's $1.39 a tube and I still use it! Now it reminds me of my grandmother. I learned a lot of my painting techniques from doing crafts. I do a lot of sponge painting and that kind of thing.

WV: Yeah, which also gives that very flat, almost frescoed appearance to the work. When you were painting ceramics as a kid, were you also looking at ancient pottery, or was that something that you discovered later in life?

AJH: That was something I learned about later, maybe in high school. At the time, growing up where I did, I wasn't exposed to a lot of art. What I was super influenced by were the reservations that surround Great Falls. Pretty early on, as part of the school curriculum, I learned about indigenous art and Native American art. As a little kid, I loved horses, and there's a lot of depictions of horses in ledger drawings by Plains Indians. Those works are very pictographic, they're very flat. They have all this action. If you look at ledger drawings and then you look at ancient Egyptian work and you look at Greek and Roman pottery, it's a continuum. It's all narrative-based. The figures are cookie-cutter and they're there to serve a purpose. I was tapped into that idea early on.

I was also looking at Charlie Russell, who lived in Great Falls for a long time. He was an old cowboy painter who painted scenes of the Old West. He wrote a lot of stories about his life. The first museum that I went to in elementary school was the C.M. Russell Museum Complex in Great Falls. It's this rickety old building with a bunch of his paintings in it, these detailed, intricate oil paintings. A lot of his works have a triangular composition. That has stuck with me to this day. A bunch of my paintings are organized in a triangle because I'm like, "That's how you do art."

Around the time when I started trying to really paint, Henry Darger was a huge revelation for me — the way that he would find an image of a person that he wanted to use and would repeat in all these really ingenious ways, creating a world that he could live in so that he wasn't quite as lonely.

The thing that those influences share is a utilitarian nature. The ledger drawings preserved historical moments that the Native Americans were afraid they were going to lose, because these settlers came in. Charlie Russell was documenting his life. Henry Darger was trying to build a world that he could live in where he was happy. My paintings are in line with all of that work. It seems very separate, but they help me deal with the anxiety and so for me, they're utilitarian objects.

WV: I’d like to hear more about the animals you incorporate into your paintings. You said that you grew up in this place where you were, in some cases, face to face with wild animals. You’ve also worked as a horse trainer. Do you think of animals as mythological figures, or are they more companions?

AJH: I have always loved animals. I've taken horseback riding lessons since I was seven. Horses have always been my escape from everything else. Sometimes I have animals in my paintings. No one would know this, but they're stand-ins for people that I know or who I'm painting about. As symbols, they're so amazing, because they have these universal characteristics that everyone is familiar with. It's become this shorthand in a way.

Animals have always been companions that I think are very trustworthy. To me, they symbolize trust and empathy in a way — like I was saying before, having a viewer hear my confessions or my sadness or whatever I was painting about. Before I had the outlet of painting, animals were the closest thing to that.

Group Gasp, July 4 In Great Falls, Montana., 2019

Acrylic on panel

30 x 40 in.

WV: I want to turn to another emotion: jealousy. Your 2017 exhibition “A Jealous Person,” shown at Hometown in New York, received a lot of attention. I think jealousy is amazing as a painterly tool. It's an emotion that is automatically creative, because you're imagining scenarios that are fictional. Do you think of jealousy as a gendered emotion?

AJH: At the time of that show, I was having a lot of jealousy issues that were affecting my relationships. I decided to go whole hog and be very confessional about it. I wanted to try to air things out by just totally embarrassing myself. That opening was very difficult, because people were walking around reading the titles. It was therapeutic, but it was very cringey.

I personally have been more jealous than male people who I have been involved with or been around. If you look at jealousy, yes, it's often attached to women. There's some really shitty language associated with it. "She's the crazy girlfriend, blah, blah, blah."

Recently I was reading something that said the function of jealousy is mostly to protect. Often, it has to do with relationships, right? So if you take a step back, you can see what aspect is hurt in there, or is twisted somewhere, that's causing that that protective reaction. For me, that’s a more positive way of looking at jealousy. People often say, “If you were more confident then you wouldn't feel jealous." That's not true.

To answer your question, jealousy is an emotion we all share. I just think that women are socialized to respond to it more. And you know what? That's great. We're not bottling it up. If we can recognize it, then we can utilize it.

WV: Yeah, I think that jealousy is also tied to this idea cultural idea that is imposed on women that there's scarcity—scarcity of love, scarcity of resources. Women are socialized to be jealous of other women.

Staying with the topic of gender, your paintings have also been described as suburban fairy tales. Fairy tales are known as vehicles for conveying social mores in childhood, but there's a rich alternate feminist history of fairy tales as a women's genre—stories told around sewing circles, or known as old wives' tales. Fairy tales often revolve around fears of sex and violence, which seems connected to your exploration of female sexuality as well. And you wrote the short story "Red," based on Little Red Riding Hood, that was adapted for the short film Mildred and the Dying Parlor (2016).

AJH: As far as the paintings go, I haven't used the term "suburban fairy tales," but people have called them different versions of that. My neighborhood growing up was a nice neighborhood—very ordinary, very suburban — but I was so desperately unhappy and aware that my family had all these weird secrets. Early on, it really cemented this idea in me that something can look one way, but it can have layers underneath that you can't see. Then under that, there may be layers that I don't even know about. I think that's what fairy tales do. They present a story on the surface, but then there’s the mythological layer underneath, and underneath that are the morals and the history of when it was written, and rewritten. It's this layered process of storytelling and of preserving history, and also presenting some moral argument usually.

I didn't really read those kinds of stories when I was a kid. I was a pretty serious child. I didn't watch cartoons. No one read to me, so I didn't have any favorite fairy tales. Somewhere along the way, in my early 20s, I became obsessed with Little Red Riding Hood — the entire history of it, all the interpretations of it. I use the story in my teaching a lot, as a prompt for projects. It hits all my interest points: the girl alone in the woods, all the weird sex stuff, the feminist angles, and animals. All that is to say that I'm interested in fairy tales, again, as utilities. They're assembled with all of these layers, which work on their own, and then they're put together into a story that we can enjoy on all levels, by all ages.

It's important to me that kids respond to the paintings too. I don't know why—I don’t have children, and I'm not that interested in them in general. They'll often notice things in paintings that adults don't notice. I get really excited about that, because I've put a lot of thought into the details, and then a little kid looks at it for two seconds and will ask, "What's that? Are those mushrooms on the person's plate?" Yes. Yes, they are.

Wendy Vogel

Wendy Vogel is a writer, critic and independent curator. A former editor at Flash Art International, Modern Painters, and Art in America, she has written about art and culture for Artforum, art-agenda, BOMB, Frieze, The Guardian and MOUSSE, among other publications. Vogel has curated or co-curated exhibitions at the Hessel Museum at Bard College, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center, VOLTA NY, bitforms, and EFA Project Space. She currently teaches in the photography department at Parsons School of Design. She is a 2018 recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.