Elizabeth Ferrer Essay
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Speed, however, remained undeterred in her desire to learn to paint, and to paint well. Beginning with her arrival in Austin in 1978, after a period living in Nova Scotia, she spent years working to develop her craft. She has experimented with dozens of painting supports and now primarily uses artboard (a hard, Masonite-like surface) or, more recently, fine-weave linen primed with layer after layer of gesso, each layer sanded to produce a perfectly smooth surface. Some works require a detailed preliminary underdrawing, and other compositions are just "roughed in" with thinned paint.
But Speed's true love is the act of painting, a process she regards as a physical pleasure, whether because of the smell of the oil medium, the play involved in applying paint to canvas, or the sheer beauty of the colors she uses, especially the cadmium red evident in so many works. (When questioned about her seeming obsession with priests and bishops, she reveals that they are present to allow her to lavishly use this shade of red, not to connote any specific spiritual perspective or to reflect any topical concerns regarding the Catholic clergy.)
Speed is not only a painter; she has also produced a sizable body of sculptures made of found objects, as well as gouache drawings, prints, and collages. Taking a close look at her collages is instructive, for it provides a fuller picture of Speed's artistic psyche. She views the process of collage in contradistinction to painting, calling it "a great brain vacation from working with oil," since it is quicker and, to a certain degree, more spontaneous. Most of the imagery for these works is taken from the quantities of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century illustrated books that Speed finds at flea markets, secondhand bookstores, and thrift stores. They include architectural guides, civic histories, engineering manuals, and reference works on such subjects as human anatomy, ornithology, or other areas of the natural sciences.
Back in her studio, Speed cuts out images of interest and then sorts them by category so that she has a ready supply of pictures of, say, birds, men's heads, or obsolete machinery. As she pieces together and glues elements, "one thing just leads to another," she explains. Deciding what will fit together "is a huge treasure hunt, jigsaw puzzle, and Rorschach test rolled in one." Speed colors areas of the completed compositions with gouache, sometimes painting in only faces or other key compositional elements.
In a recent group of works, the collage elements are placed over painted fields of dense, uniform color. Some of the collages are impressively simple: For example, the artist simply alters a man's portrait by replacing his head with a large pear or cabbage. Other works involve elaborate manipulations of and additions to an existing image. In the irreverent and slyly titled series Alters of My Ancestors (2000), Speed modified portraits of once-distinguished gentlemen by surrounding them with birds or animals, festooning them with funny hats, reworking their mouths so they are agape, and even opening their cloaks or removing their pants to expose meticulously painted genitalia (usually male but occasionally female). With such means, she pokes fun at the Western portrait genre, particularly as it had become debased in the Victorian era when a stifling dose of bourgeois homogeneity permeated upper-class mentality.