Barbara Rose Essay
page 4 of 5
Many viewers have questioned Speed about why she sometimes furnishes her figures with a distracting third eye. She rejects the idea that the motif refers to spiritual insight, like the third eye of the Greek prophet Tiresias or Buddhism's inner eye. For her, it is another element to jolt the viewer, a practical way to show the subject's ambivalence. She constructs the lines that indicate the subject's dual field of vision, which forms an invisible triangle. Whatever the inspiration, this third eye, which is not in the middle of the forehead or the chest, but just above one of the normal eyes, adds a note of mystery that causes a sense of disorientation. It is as if the pictured figure is actually turning his or her head before us, making it virtually impossible for the viewer to focus.
Part of the pleasure in looking at Speed's paintings is that they evoke both tactile and optical responses that are totally unfamiliar. The costumes decorated with obsessive horror vacui patterns appear prickly when investigated as in Woman with Dogs. These are not precisely trompe I'oeil but it is a related effect.
The artist is quick to point out that she rejects images that seem too close to her personal experience; instead, she seeks to evoke responses in others, rather than to express anything about herself. Her expression is her incredible talent. Speed does not want to either express herself
or to mirror popular culture. She states, "it seems to me that popular culture mirrors itself too much already - one long depressing hall of mirrors."
The paintings are not always conceived in series, but sometimes specific images keep recurring, as if demanding to be painted again. For example, The Dogmatists, II has a predecessor in an earlier version, titled The Dogmatists. She intentionally painted the bodies of the two men locked in mortal combat in a shade of pink that is reminiscent of hairless piglets, which makes their pointless mayhem look all the more ridiculous.
The image of the two grimacing knife-wielding men is also related to the gouaches, Dawn of Man/Crack of Dawn and The Rites of Spring, and she intends to make other versions as well.
Speed has no logical explanation for why one thing or another engages her attention. Recently, she has become interested in the representation of water, as a result of looking at The Adventures of Hamza, miniatures commissioned by a teenage Mughal emperor around 1550,
that were the subject of a show at the Smithsonian. She is fascinated by the stylized rendering of water, which she includes in such gouaches as The Bather, The Yellow Boat, and Small Pond.
She claims to know nothing about color theory except what she has independently deduced. She gets "crushes" on certain colors. For a while she favored umber, a favorite Renaissance pigment, which was commonly used to paint shadow. Then she turned to Ultramarine Blue, another Renaissance favorite, but the color she returns to most often is Cadmium Red Deep, the color used in many of her figures' costumes. The skin tone of the face in
Untitled, Red is comprised of red, green and blue mixed together, which produces an effect that lends the subject a choleric look. The smoke pictured in the scene is also red and the figure's skin reflects the red of the sky. In the gouaches, she crosshatches an entire palette, each color added on in a different layer. In less dramatic moments, Speed is also inspired by the colors of bugs, birds and plants — which she collects.
