Barbara Rose Essay
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Speed has painted all her life. Her marriage to a musician initially led to a peripatetic existence that was not conducive to executing work that required ample space and uninterrupted time. Since settling in Austin, Texas in 1978, she has been able to concentrate on perfecting her unique painting technique. She does not calculate her images; they appear to her as in a vision. When she visualizes a picture, she immediately does small sketches, which she stashes in drawers to preserve for future use.
When she is ready to start a new painting, she does rough preliminary sketches of the essential shapes in order to figure out the basic geometry of the composition. Because the impact of the images is so strong, we forget how deliberate the compositional structure is. Once she determines the size and shape of the image, she decides on its relation to the field, which fixes the dimensions of the support she will prepare. This is, of course, opposed to the way figurative painters normally work, accounting for the contemporary feeling of Speed's art.
After executing a drawing, which has all the fine detail and delicate line of a Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres drawing, Speed digitally photographs it, so as not lose the image once she begins painting. At other times, like Bosch, she will paint alla prima, directly on the surface without any underlying sketch. She enjoys the smell of the paint and the physical pleasure of working. She claims that she has used and will use just about anything that lets her work directly with her hands. Experimenting with combinations of materials and new techniques in printmaking, collage and construction serves as a catalyst to push the paintings forward.
The way life becomes art is quite a straightforward process for Speed. Her obsession with the Suprematist works of Malevich started one day as she was sitting on the floor of an antique dealer's barn. He handed her the first of a number of books which, though badly damaged by fire, still contained a number of beautiful lithographs of various crows and other black birds. When Speed saw the birds' heads, for some reason she instantly imagined them as attached to heavy black bodies filled with geometric shapes, so she went home and started studying Malevich in depth. She began the series by first cutting the crows' heads out of the recently acquired books. She then mounted the images on to a support board and commenced constructing the rest of the composition. This process of cutting, gluing, and painting led to series of nine works, entitled The Murder of Kasimir Malevich. The word "murder" in the title does not refer to the corporal act, but to the crows—a "murder" of crows is like a "gaggle" of geese or a "pride" of lions.
A year later she began another homage to Malevich, the Black Square series, inspired by a walk on the railroad tracks in Marfa, Texas. "There were shapes I liked in the track junk," she says. She gathered them up and brought them back to the house where she was staying, arranged them into a series of small sculptures, drew them and then disassembled them again. When she got the pieces back to her Austin studio, she "looked again and then realized they needed black squares to anchor the shapes and limit the possibilities." She then had twelve identical sheets of paper printed with aquatint squares, once again laid everything out on the floor and started anew, this time including additional elements of found paper, painted wood, and other materials. After weeks of arranging and rearranging these generally incompatible materials, she ended up with the Black Square series, which altogether includes fourteen images.
