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or, The Art of Getting Lost
by Julie Heffernan
From acclaimed painter Julie Heffernan, a wholly original and visually stunning four-color graphic work of autofiction about a young mother who—lost overnight on a hike with her infant son—experiences an extraordinary journey of memory, remorse, and rebirth that offers her a new way of seeing the world; for readers of Alison Bechdel, Roz Chast, and Marjane Satrapi.
One summer day, a young artist with a newborn—sleep-deprived, desperate to escape her hot, cramped apartment and her oblivious husband—sets off on a hike in the country with her baby boy, Sam, strapped to her front and her senses fully attuned to the colors, the sounds, and the flora and fauna in the woods around her. During her journey, Julie reflects on her childhood, her parents, her marriage, and her path to becoming a painter. Her memories soon merge with the imaginative pictorial worlds she invents in her work, creating a glorious and perturbing narrative.
When Julie suddenly realizes that they are lost, with few supplies, as darkness begins to set in, she must come to terms with the sudden gravity of her situation and invent tools for coping. She then discovers her own resourcefulness: snacking on wild garlic and fixing a torn shoe; tucking herself and her baby into a cave for the night; climbing a tall tree for a better vantage point. Each step in the unknown terrain of the forest leads her deeper into a reckoning with survival and unresolved past issues. She invokes the struggles of painters like Artemesia Gentileschi, women's strength in Rubens' Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, and the plights of activists like Julia Butterfly Hill, illuminating how great art can be a vehicle for perspective—how it teaches us how to see, think, and navigate obstacles and wonders and find one's way out into a capacious and self-determined life.
Beautifully told and illustrated by an established fine painter whose work has been collected around the world, Julie Heffernan's Babe in the Woods is an extraordinary journey of memory, remorse, and rebirth, and a powerful lesson in trust in one's self, offering a new way of seeing for anyone who feels lost in the world.
"The work is a love letter to the strange, intimate, and ecstatic wrung from everyday life. Heffernan's detailed, finely wrought pages are punctuated with her own bright, surreal paintings, as well as those by the likes of Artemisia Gentileschi, El Greco, and Vermeer. As Heffernan shows, the imagination requires care and attention—much like nature. This vivid narrative is a breathtaking homage to both." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Julie Heffernan's mind-bending journey into a graphic cosmos of beauty, strange nightmares, and sublime fantastical visionary brilliance is a trip anyone will love taking." ―Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for New York Magazine and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist
"Giotto and Georgia O'Keeffe are not going to give us graphic novels, but another great painter has: Julie Heffernan. Her reverie about getting lost in the woods with a baby strapped to her is many kinds of beauty: the sheer visual beauty of her paintings and drawings here, the beauty of introspection and of the brilliant exposition of a reverie during a walk that went too far into the unknown. Or just far enough to find those things that can be found no other way." ―Rebecca Solnit, award-winning author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost
This information about Babe in the Woods was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Julie Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University, represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York and Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Heffernan has had over 50 solo exhibitions nationally and internationally and is the recipient of numerous grants including an NEA, NYFA and Fullbright Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed by major publications including the New York Times, Art in America and Artforum; and it is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and VMFA among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
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