Barbara Rose Essay
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Speed admits she would like to have painted freely like Francis Bacon or Edouard Manet, but compulsion requires her to paint close up, possessively reworking surfaces until they become smooth with invisible brushstrokes. She recalls an afternoon spent with the painter John Alexander. Watching Alexander slather paint on the canvas with big muscular gestures inspired Speed to stretch a huge canvas and paint on it with big bold strokes. However, she needed a more intimate relationship to her work and was soon standing close to the surface and covering it with her characteristic precise strokes.
Speed's painstaking technique becomes hallucinatory, even hallucinogenic, i.e. realer than real—in the sense of an apparition, a visitation for those who experience them. The elaborate patterning in her subject's clothing contrasts with the sharp dramatic silhouette of forms against the background. She makes no distinction between the sources of her imagery. The daily TV news, an Old Master painting, something she sees that catches her eye in a garden or a museum are all of equal importance as food for her mind and fodder for her art.
The presence of animals, especially monkeys and snakes, recalls the allegorical tradition seen in Renaissance painting. But once again, she drops clues and then sends us off on another track. For example, in Goya's Monkey, a woman faces out, oblivious to the two men battling with cudgels outside the window. The cudgel battle is an element borrowed from one of Goya's Black Paintings. It is typical of Speed's compositions that while horrific activities are taking place, the subjects seem totally distracted and unresponsive to the carnage. It is hard not to see this type of theme as a commentary on the way we have inured ourselves to contemporary catastrophe.
Julie Speed is an iconoclast in the truest sense of the word. Hers is the iconoclasm of a most sophisticated outsider artist. Incongruity is always present in Speed's work. She gives a nod to standard iconography but deviates from it by filling in with disparate images that more closely resemble The Yellow Submarine than Jan van Eyck. Everything reminds you of something else in this absurdist information-overloaded short circuit. The Germans have a word for the uncanny, unheimlich, which they use to describe the nightmarish imagery of the Romantic painters such as Johann Heinrich Fuseli. Fuseli, like Bosch, was considered a Surrealist ancestor.
Speed is, however, neither moralist nor Surrealist. Her imagery has more in common with the absurdist literature and theater of Eugene lonesco. Although Speed is hardly a traditionalist, her work often seems to belong to the tradition of the images of folly and of the topsy-turvy world that was dominant in the work of Kleinmeister of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the world was certainly a mess and none of the reigning orders and structures seemed to make sense any longer. This was, of course, the great period of "monkey business" when the images of monkeys, the unclean apes of man, cavorted shamelessly through a world turned upside down. This tradition of the topsy-turvy upside-down world is familiar in the works of Dutch artists like Adrian van Ostade, as well as in the many works of the turbulent times in the sixteenth century when the Iconoclasts, considered heretics, challenged official orthodoxy. These images of folly also inspired Goya's Caprichos, which Speed has pointed to as one of her sources.
Speed is able to open the Pandora's Box of the individual, as well as the Collective Unconscious. Her imagery is simply what she has taken in, as it comes out, mixed and unpurified. It is then recontextualized and mixed with other images to concoct a kind of creative bouillabaisse. Hers is a Gothic imagination informed by contemporary experience. Her excess of detail transfixes the eye. In the end, it is a challenging, mystifying and altogether enjoyable experience.
