Lux Art Institute

Size and sights aren't necessarily more true to the natural world in Heffernan's paintings than in Wonderland. Her works go by the name of self-portraits, but are ultimately self-contained symbolic worlds that often feature a woman who loosely resembles the artist. This female figure doesn't look quite the same in any two canvases, either. The paired women in “Self-Portrait As Ornament II” (2007), suggest twinship. They even share a gown. But looking closely, you'll find their faces don't match.

Heffernan, who lives in Brooklyn and is a professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, was featured in two 1990s exhibitions at Escondido's California Center for the Arts Museum, while Reesey Shaw was its first director. And if you happened to see either of those shows – “Wildlife” or “Tabletops” – you probably haven't forgotten her work.

She has exhibited widely on both coasts since then, and now Heffernan is having her first local solo exhibition at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, which Shaw now directs. Shaw is a steadfast champion of certain artists and Heffernan is, deservedly, one of them.

There are 12 paintings in this show, one rendered during the artist's 16-day residency in the Lux artist's studio. Heffernan ranges across post-Renaissance art history in her work, pulling from Velasquez in one composition, Rubens in another canvas and Cranach in others – often mingling influences in the same picture. She has the technical virtuosity to make this fusion work.

For sheer visual pleasure, spend a little time with “Self-Portrait As Heat Source” (1994-2008). The gentle twists and turns of the vegetation is a sensuous backdrop to the striking female figure wearing a billowy skirt of flowers and no blouse.

We can't help but associate the figure in this picture with the Flora of ancient Roman mythology, who gained more popularity during the Renaissance. She was (and is) associated with spring and with fertility – and Heffernan muses on this dimension of her identity in a slyly metaphoric way. The flowers at the edge of her skirt are metamorphosing into small globes, and when they hit the ground they produce smoke and fire, decimating the miniature town at her feet. Literal heat alludes to fertility and erotic energy. Does it also refer to powerful, destructive forces of the psyche?

This painting is open to interpretation, which is true of her art as a whole. Heffernan's paintings hint at stories, but let you bring them to completion as you choose.

The versions of herself that appear in these paintings are theatrical, as if she were assuming different identities in each. That quality of her work is made explicit in a work like “Self-Portrait As Infanta Maria Teresa Dreaming Madame de Sade” (1999). The image of Maria Teresa, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain and queen consort of Louis XIV of France, is familiar to us from an enduring portrait by Velazquez, probably painted between 1652 and 1653. The woman in the image evokes that of Maria Teresa. The tiny vignettes of violence in the background hint at the sadism (the word coined for him) rooted in the erotic writings of the Marquis de Sade.

Her identity can be fantastical, as in “Self-Portrait As Weird Bush” (1994-2008). The term “weird bush” is self-deprecating, since the form that she refers to is more wondrous than weird. It resembles a giant circular hedge of fruit in many colors.

The bush towers above a city, more allegorical than real, done on the scale of a gingerbread or model railroad metropolis. The more you look at it, the less naturalistic it seems. Some of the structures spell out phrases or exclamations like “Oh My,” “Eeek” and “Aargh,” as if she were mocking dark feelings she was having about civilization while painting the scene.

The rest of the picture is rather Edenic. Way off in the distance a woman – only her legs are visible – is diving into a glassy lake or pond.

In a general sense, Heffernan's art embodies one idea – the contemporary notion of a shifting self in a shifting world – and it's a concept large enough to generate a procession of paintings in which her imaginative reach rarely flags. If anything, its manifestations grow more visionary and self-assured with time.

“Self-Portrait As Ornament II” (2007) is one convincing example. Its atmosphere is cosmic without looking pretentious. The pair of figures are ethereal, their joint gown covered with the outlines of figures, as if it were a rippling mural. Behind them is a tree-like column, decorated with strings of what look like pearls of many colors, and hundreds of pieces of fruit, the majority of them apples.

In other paintings, the figure is intimately wedded to nature and the life cycle. The figure is harmonious with her environment in “Self-Portrait in a Coral Pond” (2008), standing in water up to her waist, with a coral bed at her feet and fruit dangling from the trees above her head. The image carries echoes of Botticelli and his iconic Venus. In the newly completed “Self-Portrait As Another Growth,” the landscape itself, the Earth's skin, is in ribbonlike folds around the pictured woman. She projects a tranquil aura, but the small vignettes behind her, populated by men, are violent or tense with pending violence. The narrative is once again ambiguous, but Heffernan's archetypical woman is symbolic of some kind of yearning for a better world than the one pictured behind her.

As an artist, Heffernan continues to grow. She keeps expanding her notion of what a self-portrait can be. These images envision the self in broad terms, inseparable from nature in its physical and metaphysical terms.

When first used, postmodernism, that overused and abused term, pointed to a desire to reconnect with the past, after decades of avant-gardism. Heffernan's art does just that – looking backward even as it's of our moment.

What connects past and present is her strong sense of vision and style. She paints with passion and purpose. You can sense both while in the presence of her paintings.