Today is one of those days when I’d rather be at home, shnuggled up with the dogs watching mindless sitcom reruns and drinking a steaming mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows, Jack Daniels and Prozac. Anyway I’m stuck at my desk and the next best thing is escaping into the internet, and today I found something truly beautiful – the paintings of American artist Julie Heffernan.

The paintings are as David Cohen, New York art critic aptly put, “a hybrid of genres and styles, mixing allegory, portraiture, history painting, and still life, while in title they are all presented as self portraits.” I think they’re what would have happened if Botticelli and Hieronymus Bosch had a baby, and magical realism and fairy tales had a baby, and those two babies had a baby, and that baby had a baby with LSD, and THAT baby could paint.

I can lose myself in Julie Heffernan’s paintings – they make me feel better.

See more beauty after the jump.

Via Escape Into Life