Elizabeth Ferrer Essay
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Moreover, artists whose work spans several centuries have played significant roles in Speed's artistic formation. They range from Bosch, one of her early heroes, to Vincent Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. When discussing these artists, Speed notes their ability to get the feeling just right, or to use a certain technique to get a point across. Acknowledging a sense of kinship with such a range of predecessors, Speed demonstrates how artists working in widely varying times and places have always confronted the same challenge: that of producing something meaningful and expressive out of nothing, of making something happen, whether on a piece of canvas or on a computer screen.
So with Renaissance painting, Speed may be drawn to certain colors, or with expressionism, to particular ways of applying paint to canvas. When she discusses other artists' work, she speaks very much with the voice of a painter, not that of an art historian or a critic. She talks about getting lost in Francis Bacon's painted surfaces, or about how Van Gogh "was able to just hit it." The painstaking perfection of Speed's compositions, her rendering of minute details and of precise facial expressions, all emerge from a passionate commitment to also "get it just right," so that something powerful will happen for a viewer looking at one of her pictures.
At heart, Julie Speed is a narrative artist, but one who doesn't so much tell us a story as give us enough material to come up with one ourselves. She wants us to react, say something, feel something, when we look at one of her canvases — and it is hard not to. Indeed, the responses she receives to her work, whether from people who have followed it for years or from those encountering it for the first time, are nothing short of visceral. Speed herself attributes this to the fact that viewers, especially those who have collected her works, often believe the scenes they are beholding are about them: their peculiar situations, desires, or fears. She also emphasizes her goal of crafting familiar, yet non-specific, subjects and settings so that anyone can find a way to identify with the people and situations she creates.
Speed's figures inhabit a sort of nether world, possibly connected more to the past than to the present day, but clearly set in an indefinable time and place. It is, perhaps, those conventions she borrows from art history — the figure standing behind a ledge, a compositional motif common in northern Italian Renaissance portraits; the small windows revealing a landscape; or the peculiar clothing and clerics' red vestments — that suggest the historical, but as Speed says, "I defy anyone to find these dress designs in history."
This is Speed Time, a time — and place — that we can all relate to because we've all been there, usually in moments when we are struggling with our own inner demons. Sometimes we arrive there through dreams or memories, or, like Julie Speed, while sitting in the bathtub. Time slows down in these paintings so that we can take a good look at the obsessively rendered details, mull things over, and try to figure out what might happen next. The crystalline quality of Speed's figures, their frozen gestures, and their direct, unflinching gazes, all induce our entry into a slightly out-of-kilter world, where figures (uncanny reflections of ourselves?) seem to either undergo an epiphany of reason or just completely unravel.