Elizabeth Ferrer Essay
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It is also worth noting that Julie Speed is an avid collector of art and images. Like many artists, she has acquired works by her contemporaries, especially works by many Texas-based painters and photographers. But she has probably devoted greater energy to acquiring an impressive variety of more anonymous art works and objects, including American folk art, maritime disaster paintings, glass eyeballs (which sometimes find their way into Speed's sculptural assemblages), Indian miniatures, and such flea-market finds as plumb bobs, antique wrenches, and literally trunks full of pictures — postcards, old photos, and the engravings she uses in her collages. Clearly Speed feels at home with, and is inspired by, an endless array of visual imagery. Styles and art historical lineage matter much less to her than the affinity she feels for art that is honest and eloquent.
So we come back to the basic question: Is Julie Speed a contemporary artist? To this I would say yes, unquestionably. Underlying her art is an absolute sense of freedom; she paints what she wants, the way she wants, unswayed by stylistic dictums or commercial pressures. The contemporaneity of her art is rooted in its emphatically open-ended nature. Speed's goal is not to propose answers or offer resolutions, but rather to throw out questions and frankly acknowledge the conundrums that reside deep inside all of us. She seems to accept the anxiety, ambivalence, and complexity that increasingly have become hallmarks of contemporary life. Making art becomes a way of exploring how we live with these things. In fact, in slowing down the action in her work, in showing the starkness of raw, human emotion, Speed is able to distill the essential qualities of the human psyche, especially our keenest moments of self-realization.
For many contemporary artists, history is a distant realm, something to ironically reference. In Speed's practice, it is a vital sphere to delve into and draw from. This is apparent on various levels. Her art is filled with quotations by as well as references to many artists — sometimes sly, sometimes overt — and their compositional motifs and stylistic philosophies. But in a more profound sense, Speed has also learned how to take from the past and transform ideas so that they become fully her own. As one of her heroes, Francis Bacon, once said, "You always go back into tradition, but you have to break it and reinvent it first."
In the same way that Speed is captivated by elaborately conceived Renaissance compositions that so richly evoke a world "that you can walk around it in your head," Speed herself invites, or better, challenges, the viewer to come on in. Her figures meet our gaze so insistently that perhaps we don't have a choice but to gaze back. But once engaged, it is up to us to decide how to approach a picture. The true completion of an artwork results from its intimate interactions with each viewer, who must decide whether to stay a while, flee, or maybe just duck for cover.
"I'm not that good a painter yet."
Julie Speed