by Christopher Blay. Follow Christopher @artistcblay , @CuratorBlay Chief Curator, Houston Museum of African American Culture, ChristopherBlay.com

by Christopher Blay

Follow Christopher Blay @artist_c_blay on instagram

Website: ChristopherBlay.com

Chief Curator, Houston Museum of African American Culture,

from: Speed Art: 2003 -2009 pages 159-169

Artwork and Essay by Julie Speed Fiction by A. M. HoMeS Essay by elizAbetH Ferrer, published by The University of Texas Press

A. M. HoMeS

Do You Hear WHat I Hear?

He HeArS tHe CAr beFore SHe SeeS it. tHe Sound draws her to the window. It’s dusk, the headlights are on: two eyes staring down the long road. When they hit a bump, they vanish mo- mentarily as if blinking. The twilight sky is a pitch-perfect blue that hums. In front of her house, the late-model black sedan slows, then parks. No one gets out. She peeks from between the Venetian blinds. When she pushes down the blind to get a better look, the old metal

bends with a loud crack, startling her. The car’s headlights are still on, staring down the street like someone lost in thought—daydreaming.

Maybe they are not who she thinks they are, maybe they are here for some other reason, maybe it has nothing to do with her. But it’s not every day a late-model car pulls up outside and just sits there.

She gets binoculars. By the time she’s back at the window, the headlights are off, but now the interior light is on. She spies two men wearing suits and black hats. The driver is resting his arms on top of the wheel and the other one is reading a newspaper. She focuses the bin- oculars—reading over his shoulder, so to speak. Sports. She watches for a few minutes, noth- ing happens. She goes back to what she was doing—whatever that was. She can’t remember. Twenty minutes later when her doorbell rings she’s caught off guard and has depilatory cream on her upper lip, defoliant she calls it. She wipes off the Nair and goes to the door.

“Who is it?” she asks.
“You called,” one of the men says.
“I called two days ago,” she says.
“We’re not full time,” the man says.
She opens the door. “Well, I thought it might be you. I saw the car pull up, but then no one

got out.”
One man gestures toward the other. “He was listening to his radio show.”
“You had the interior light on,” she says.
“So I could read the paper. And besides, I don’t like to be left in the dark.”
“Come in,” she says. The men check left and right before entering. She spots her binoculars

on the floor and kicks them under the sofa.

One of the men takes his hat off; he’s got another hat on underneath. She wonders if he’s Jewish, or undergoing chemotherapy. “I’ve got a head cold,” the man says, feeling her stare.

“That can happen just about any time of year,” she says. “Are you from around here?”
“Not far,” he says.
“Not from here,” the other man says. “It’s easier for us to do our work if we’re not natives,

not too familiar, we’re less likely to miss a clue if it’s all new to us.” “Have a seat.”

The two men sit side by side on the edge of the sofa.
“How’s the weather been?”
“Off and on,” she says. “Not so long ago we had an odd one—there was a rushing sound,

folks said it sounded like a twister, except it was bright white, like a snow cloud in an otherwise empty place, it blew through a shield of hail, like a single plate of shattering glass, a lot of sound, hailstones like baseballs and in five minutes the sky was clear again.”

“Atmospheric bloat and purge,” the taller, thinner of the two men says.
“And last Thanksgiving we had that freak snow cone that dropped crushed ice every-

where.”
They nod. The taller of the two reaches up over his shoulder and, without turning his head,

plucks a bug out of the air and squashes it bare-handed.
“Would you like a tissue?” she asks.
He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and deposits the dead bug into it, refolds the hanky

and puts it in his breast pocket. “I’ve got it,” he says, patting his pocket. “Must have got in when you opened the door.”

“How about a cup of tea or a cookie?”
“You wouldn’t have a Dr Pepper, would you?”
“Yes, I do. I’ve got 100 percent authentic Dublin Dr Pepper—oldest Dr Pepper plant in the

country.”
“And the only one still using Imperial Pure Cane Sugar—makes a difference.”
“Make that dos Dr Pepperos,” the other man says. She notices that he’s got a foreign

accent.
She dips into the kitchen and returns with two tall bottles of Dr Pepper—she pops the tops

and hands a bottle to each man. “May I ask your names?”
“Serge,” the one with the foreign accent says.
“Katherine,” she says, tapping her hand to her chest. “But you already knew that from the

call.”
The men sip their Dr Peppers in silence.

“Mumm,” the other man finally says. “Tom Mumm.” He takes another sip and looks around the room. “Is that one of those radioshack pictures?” he nods towards a painting on the wall.

“How do you mean?” she asks.
“Radioshacks, the psychological test. You look at it and it tells you if you’re nuts or not.” “Actually, my cat made it—I had a cat who liked to paint. I’m not sure how she picked her

colors but they turned out pretty good. She passed a couple years ago, but her work lives on, I could show you a video of her working—they made one for public television.”

“It looks like flowers in a vase,” Serge says.
“I was going to say spiders leaving the web,” Tom says.
A cat comes out, flicks his tail against Mumm’s leg, Mumm cries out. “What cat is that?” “It’s the neighbors’—they’re never home so it hangs out here. Doesn’t paint though, just

eats and poops. I gave it a litter box with antennae, rabbit ears, it’s a little joke between me and the cat.” Katherine is the only one who laughs.

“And that?” Serge asks, pointing to something hanging off the wall.

“The hand of fate,” Katherine says. “I made it myself. I poured hot wax into surgical gloves and let it cool.”

“Unusual flowers.” Mumm nods to the blue carnations next to the hand of fate.

“I made those too—with food coloring. I like them because they exist nowhere in nature. That’s why I like it here—this part of Texas is like no other place in the world.”

Serge chortles. “Certainly very different from my Russia.”
“How did you come from Russia?” she asks.
“On an airplane.”
She’s not sure that was the answer she was looking for but lets it go.
Serge touches the fabric on her sofa. “Opulent,” he says, practicing his pronunciation.
She smiles. “I go to Europe every year during the month of July—it’s too hot here, and ev-

erything there is on sale, you can get bits and pieces. I’m a gatherer. I gather things.” “And that’s how you make a living?” Mumm asks.
“I give piano lessons.”
“What’s the cat’s name?” he asks.

“Dusty, short for Dostoyevsky.”

“Is that Polish for something?” Mumm asks. No one answers. “What is this place anyway?” he asks, suddenly crabby, put out, defensive as though he embarrassed himself with the Polish joke. “Where the heck are we?”

“It’s a stop on the road to nowhere,” she says. “They used to call it Tank Town—a water stop for the railroad. They say the town was named by a railroad engineer’s wife who took the name

from The Brothers Karamazov, others will tell you the town was supposed to be Martha, but the person who named it had a speech impediment and so it came out Marfa, and there is a another faction who point to a character in a book by Jules Verne. Any which way it’s the stuff of fiction,” Katherine says. She once again glances out between the blinds. “So is that your car out there?”

“Why not leave the questions to us?” Mumm says.
“Your lights are on.”
“Shit.” Mumm opens the door, steps outside and claps loudly, dogs bark—the lights turn off. “He’s always up to something,” Serge says.
Mumm comes back into the house, closes the door and locks it.
She is suddenly a little nervous. There’s a shift in his demeanor. “We came about the call. We

have reason to believe that he’s been here before, that he likes Texas.”
“How long have you lived here?” Serge asks.
“My whole life. My mother’s father was an early adaptor, he bought land a hundred years

ago. My father was stationed nearby, learned to fly here during the war. My mother too, she was a military pilot—wASp. I was a late baby. My parents were already divorced when I was born, I was created after the fact. Best sex she ever had is what my mother told me, that’s why she never got pregnant before, it just wasn’t good enough to make a baby.”

“That isn’t something a mother should tell her child,” Mumm says.

“‘Should’ isn’t the word to use, it implies an error has occurred. If she hadn’t, then I wouldn’t, if you know what I mean.”

“About the call?” Serge asks. “You got the call.”
“Yes.”
“Where were you when it happened—were you asleep or awake?” Mumm wants to know. “I was in the kitchen cooking.”
“Could we see the kitchen?” Serge asks.
She leads the men into the kitchen.
“That phone there?” Serge asks.
She nods, yes.
“Yellow, wall-mounted, Bell System mid-1970s model. Heavily kinked extra-long cord.”

Mumm talks, Serge takes notes.
“I like to talk while I cook,” she says.
“I haven’t seen one of these in a long time—still works?” Mumm asks, suspicious.
“Never fails,” she says.
“Is that blood?” Serge points to something on the receiver.
Mumm licks the phone. “Tomato sauce,” he says. And then wipes the phone with a cloth

from his pocket.

“My grandmother was Italian,” she says.
“Mine too,” Serge says.
“Was the room like this before the call or was that something that just happened?”

Mumm gestures floor to ceiling, indicating the glossy white macaroni decoupage that covers everything.

“I worked on it for years,” she says, pulling open a drawer and showing the two men her glue gun. “While things cooked, I glued and then I painted. It’s pretty durable, every now and then it gets a chip and I repair it. Long ago, when I was in kindergarten, we made macaroni pencil cups for our grandparents, I still have the one I made for my grandmother—glued macaroni onto a Campbell’s soup can and spray painted it gold—Andy Warhol may have been the first one to the bank but he was not the only one who saw gold in them there hills.”

“Going back to the call, what time would you say it came in?”
She shrugs. “Sixish.”
Serge sprays the phone with something he takes from his pocket.
“Are you dusting for fingerprints?” she asks. “It wasn’t a burglary, as far as I know no crime

has been committed.”
“We have to investigate,” Mumm says.
“Actually I’m germ-phobic and you saw what happened before—he licked it,” Serge says. “Taste buds are smart buds,” Mumm says.
“It’s Listerine,” Serge says, spraying and wiping, spraying and wiping. “I ran out of Purell.” “When you called us, where did you call from?” Mumm asks.
“I called from here, I was in a panic, well, not really a panic but in a state. I certainly called

from a state.”
“Let’s go back over it from the beginning,” Mumm says. He puts his Dr Pepper down on the

kitchen table and opens his briefcase. It’s soft-sided, more like a large ziplock bag. She didn’t realize he’d been carrying it with him. She hadn’t noticed it at all. And yet, it’s fixed to his wrist with a cable tie almost as though handcuffed there. She can’t help but stare, it’s awkward as Mumm twists his hand around trying to open the bag. She’s not sure if she should offer to help or not.

He catches her eye. “I lose everything,” he says. “Been that way since my mitten clips.” He finally gets the bag unzipped and takes out a notepad and a heavy red leather-bound book, puts the book on his lap, notepad on top, and then withdraws a ballpoint pen from his pocket.

“You don’t have to write on your book, you can use the table,” she says.
“That’s OK,” he says, “It’s the Good Book. I carry it everywhere.”
“Not only does he carry it—he sells it, in a fine leather binding. We’ve got a trunk full,” Serge

says.

“I’ve got the book as well as some nice hairbrushes if you need one, from my previous position.”

“You were a hairstylist?”

“No,” Mumm says. “Door-to-door sales—in the evenings after work. If you need anything later, when we’re done, we’ve got it all in the trunk. OK, so you don’t have caller ID, did he iden- tify himself?”

“Not overtly,” she says. “At first I did think he was trying to sell me something—I just couldn’t figure what. He never seemed to zero in on a particular product.”

“Did he speak of a certain kind of hunger, any mention of desire?” “No.”
“Did he swear at you or use dirty or abusive language?”
“No.”

“Speak about himself as the father of man?” Mum asks. She shakes her head, no.
“Any mention of a position you should assume?”
She is confused.

“Down on your knees?” Mumm asks.
“Did he seem in any way ironic, amused, mocking?” Serge asks before she answers.
“No.”
“Did you enjoy the conversation, did it leave you feeling lifted or otherwise transformed?” “I felt OK at first, a little surprised, caught off guard, and then later it started seeming

stranger and stranger.”
“About how long a conversation was it?” Serge asks.
“I really don’t know—it was like everything suspended during it.”
“Ten minutes or two hours?” Mumm asks.
“Yes.”
“Did he mention speaking again in the future?”
“He neither ruled it in nor out.”
“Do you feel you know or understand him any better and/or that he had a deeper under-

standing of you?”
“Not so much.”
“Was there a confessional aspect, did you tell him secrets, things about yourself that no one

else knows?”
She shakes her head.
“Any sense of menace or threat?” “None.”

“Did the subject of plagues come up?”
“No plagues.”
“Any mention of wrath?” Mumm asks. “Judgment . . . a sense that we were getting it wrong—

disappointing him?”
She shakes her head.
“Do you remember anything about the tone of his voice, did he sound annoyed, amused,

intrigued?”
“Mild. I would say he sounded mild.”
“How were things left, was there a sense he’d call again now that he’s got your number—did

he mention getting your number from someone, having some kind of connection to you?” Serge asks.

“Did you get the feeling he’s done this kind of thing before—or are you the first?” “Was there any kind of tone at all, beyond omniscient, beyond neutral?”
“I’d have to call it apologetic.”
“Did he ask for anything—were there any demands?”

“He wanted nothing.”

“Were you frightened by the call—did you feel it told you something, compelled you to a certain behavior? Excuse the pun, but did it feel like a calling—as in, you were called upon, that you were being asked to do something?”

“After the conversation did you have the sense that all things are one?”
“Does he have any kind of memory—did he recall or refer to past incidents, or visits?” “Did he refer to himself as a creator?”
“Did the person you spoke with give you a name or otherwise indicate how he liked—I am

assuming it was a he—to be identified?”
“He seemed to think I already knew who he was.”
“Did you star 69 him?” Serge asks.
“Pardon?” she says.
“Skip the question; you can’t star 69 from a dial,” Mumm says, rebuking Serge.
“You have to know when not to ask a question. You have to learn the meaning of n/a—not

applicable. Or irrelevant.”
In an effort to interrupt Serge’s dressing-down, Katherine injects herself into the conversa-

tion. “I have a princess phone upstairs in the bedroom. It’s a push button.”
“But you’ve used the line,” Mumm says.
“Yes.”
“Drop it, let sleeping dogs die,” Mumm says. “OK, so just to review. You were in the kitchen

when the call came.”

“Actually, I think I was in the bathtub, I heard the phone ringing, I got out and walked drip- ping across the floor.”

“I thought you said you had just come in the door,” Serge says.
“I had you in the kitchen cooking macaroni and glue,” Mumm says.
She points to the hot tub just outside the kitchen window in the yard. “I was soaking in it.

Are you finding my story so inadequate that you’re making one up for yourself?”
“Bad habit,” Mumm says. “We get ahead of ourselves, fill in the blanks. OK, so you came in wrapped in a towel, flushed from the bath, the phone was ringing, you answered the phone and

dropped the towel, all eyes were on you.”
“Hello?” she says, baffled.
“I think you changed your channel and started singing a different tune,” Serge says to

Mumm.
“Did I? My apologies. They used to say I had an 8-track mind. ‘Tom Mumm,’ my mama used

to say, ‘I’ll never understand what goes on in that 8-track mind of yours.’”
“It’s OK,” she says. “Maybe I don’t really know where I was. Maybe I was lost in thought. It’s not like when the phone normally rings you stop to think—where am I?—before you answer it.

The call, the oddity of it, was so overwhelming that in truth I forgot everything.”
“Are you a person of faith?” Serge wants to know.
“I never dropped the towel,” she says. “Ever.”
“Do you have a religious affiliation, spiritual practice or some kind of habit along those

lines?”
“I would describe myself as a person of thought—a thinking person but not a joiner. The

last organization I ever belonged to was the Brownies and that didn’t last more than a couple of months. I don’t like activities that involve more people than a poker game. When I was young, I did think James Dean was a god and I did hope to be an actress. I even performed a bit. I took tap dancing. I danced in a show.” She stops to catch her breath. “I once had a boyfriend who’d been injured by the same car that killed James Dean.”

“The little bastard,” Mumm says.

“Dollar in the swear box, dollar in my pocket,” Serge jumps in. “You promised to watch your language.”

“That’s what the car was called, The Little Bastard,” Mumm repeats.
“How many times are you going to say it?” Serge asks.
“It was a rare silver Porsche Spyder, the car that killed him.”
Mumm and the girl are quiet for a moment, heads bowed in grim remembrance. “So what did you do immediately after?”

“I phoned my mother. I wanted to see if my phone really was working and I wanted to tell someone.”

“And did you reach her?” Mumm asks.
“She was out playing mah-jongg and didn’t call back until the next day.”
“Did you tell her about the call?”
“Not in so much detail. I mentioned getting a strange call, she thought it was most likely

from someone I dated long ago—one of the boys I liked but she didn’t, I reminded her that I was the one who got the call, not her.”

“Why did you contact us?”

“I thought you might know something, like if it was a prank or if it wasn’t. And I thought you would believe me.”

“Oh, we believe you, our belief is not the question.”
She opens the fridge and takes out a bowl of cherries. “Would you like a cherry?”
“Cherries are out of season,” Mumm says.
“A friend FedExes them to me from where they are in season.”
“I could never tell a lie to a cherry pie. That’s how we learn English in Russia.”
“There was a kind of simplicity to the whole thing. The only thing that felt ‘off ’ was that he

said ‘one plus one equals one.’ I didn’t want to be the one to correct him. I think he meant that ‘I’ is one, which is perhaps a different concept from something we’re familiar with. He also spoke about the importance of personal cleanliness and he talked about tolerating contradiction, the idea that something is and is not all at once.”

“I guess it’s about how you see things,” Serge says. “Through whose eyes, in what world, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Do you feel you have exclusive access to something? Do you consider yourself a chosen person?” Mumm asks.

“I’m torn between thinking he is something we create to keep ourselves from being very nervous and lonely and something that actually exists.” She glances out the window.

“You’re a flower,” Serge says, out of the blue. Her skin is delicate, her pores large, like swim- ming pools, like black tar pits. “It must be hard to keep yourself so beautiful,” Serge says.

“Two egg whites and ten minutes,” she says.
“What?”
“The egg whites tighten the skin and pull the dirt out. I am not what you assume,” she says.

“And you no doubt are not who I think you are.”
“Why don’t we begin from there—admitting that we know nothing, and that our assump-

tions will get us in trouble,” Mumm says.

“Are you alone—are you ever alone?” Serge asks.

“I stand before a mirror questioning myself,” she says. “I ask, what do people here want? I answer, a connection, confirmation that who they are and what they believe has a place.”

“Are you married?”
“Is that part of the investigation?”
“No, I was just wondering.”
“Well, I was going to get married, but then I didn’t—I broke it off and I was heartbroken—

that’s when I redid the upstairs bedroom. You can go look at if you like, I wanted something warm and old-fashioned, like the inside of an Easter egg. Everything here is homemade. I like the feel, the weight of the human hand in my everyday life.” The two men nod, appreciatively. “How much does what you’re just wondering affect the questions you ask?”

“That’s a question you have to answer for yourself, about our obligations to each other, about what we expect and hope for in our contact and communication with each other,” Mumm says. “According to the phone company, you had no call that evening,” he goes on. “What kind of equipment did he use? And why would he have used the telephone when he could just speak to you out of thin air and be perfectly audible?”

“I think he was being discreet. He said he was somewhere and that he’d been thinking about things. Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourselves—how you ended up being the guys who came here, how you were sent to me—who are you and what do you do?”

“The first thing you need to know is we’re real—100 percent authentic. You can look us up on the Web, Phenomena Police, we’re active duty officers who investigate calls involving para- normal activity and other phenomena.”

“Are you a police officer?” she asks Serge.

“In Russia we have our own techniques which vary according to the situation. Here I am try- ing to pass the regular test. There I was doing a different kind of work.”

“Like what?”

He makes a gun with his fingers and pulls the trigger. “Bang, bang. Here I have no arms.” He shrugs.

Mumm is sweating. Perspiration is suddenly beading on his forehead. “Must be hot,” she says.
“Depends.”
“Where do you get a suit like that?”

“Mail order. It’s custom, a single suit you wear year-round—got places to put ice packs in and a zip-in fleece liner. And it’s water-resistant, not waterproof, but resistant.” He opens the jacket and shows her the inside, which is lined with pockets. “Comes with the ice packs. They say you can wear it anywhere from funerals to football games.” He plucks a stick of Doublemint

gum out of one of the interior pockets. “On occasion I’ve been known to use the pockets for other things. Look, I think we’ve gotten off to a poor start—may I ask for your phone number, and would it be all right if I called you sometime?”

“You can call, but if I don’t pick up leave a message, and NO hang ups.”
He nods.
“What about me?” Serge asks. “He jumped in there, but I was thinking the same thing, I was

thinking I’d like to ask you out.”
“First come, first served,” Mumm says. “Finders keepers, losers weepers. Did they teach you

that in Ruskie spy school?”
“Are we done here?” she asks.
“I think we’re wrapping things up,” Mumm says. “We’re in touch, so you be in touch.” “Where do you go from here?” she asks.
“To get a bite of dinner,” Serge says. “And during dinner we go over our notes, we begin to

draft our report. Would you like to come with us?”
She blushes. “Thank you, that would be lovely,” she says. “Just let me get my coat.”

AS tHey’re leAving tHe pHone ringS, tHey All Stop in tHeir trACkS. “What should I do?”
“Let the machine get it,” Mumm says.
“I can’t,” she says. “I was lying, I don’t have a machine.” She hurries into the kitchen and

picks up the phone in the middle of the third ring.
The two men stand in the living room, hats on, ready to go.
“Hello,” she says. “How are you? It’s good to hear your voice again.”

Julie Speed outside her studio in Marfa. (Photo: Cody Bjornson)

My introduction to Texas artist Julie Speed’s work was a pencil sketch of a female skeleton being held down, legs open, by figures outside of the frame — their identities as perhaps politicians or men in power hinted at by their strong hands and sophisticated sleeves, as a pack of sperm enter her.

The sketch would become a painting titled The Rights of Sperm. Speed shared the work in progress on Instagram around the time the state court of Alabama declared abortion illegal even in cases of rape or incest, in May 2019. The image made me feel both terrified and grateful — terrified by the state court of Alabama’s decision and grateful someone was making art about it. As one follower so precisely put it in the comments: “thanks for putting my shock and rage into words and art.”

Work in progress: The Rights of Sperm

“It [the state court decision] came on the radio and my hair went on fire and I started that painting,” Speed says. “Usually if I have a bee in my bonnet and I try and paint it it comes out like shit because it’s too intentional in a, like, ‘I’m going to tell you what I think’ kind of way, but this one I didn’t care — I just went ahead.”

The Rights of Sperm completed

I was reminded of that bracing introduction to Speed’s work when I saw The Rights of Sperm, now completed, hanging on a wall in the sitting room of her Marfa studio, near her computer and a small table with two bottles of tequila and a cluster of shot glasses. Speed’s additions — sperm swirling around the entire canvas and the skeleton made juvenile with pink socks and a hair bow — bring the point home.

Speed, 69, has built a successful career as an artist working with collage, assemblage, painting, mixed media, printmaking and more. Her Renaissance-style exactitude melds seamlessly with contemporary themes to attract a range of dedicated admirers, and has garnered her solo exhibitions at The El Paso Museum of Art, Museum of Art, Austin’s Flatbed Press, Austin Museum of Art (now The Contemporary Austin), and more. Speed’s figurative works are hard to place in both reality and time. Her menagerie of humans, often donning a third eye or limb, and animals — birds, cats and sharks to name a few — are both humorous and folkloric.

Speed in her studio. (Photo: Cody Bjornson)

Mostly self-taught, Speed dropped out of Rhode Island School of Design after studying there for a year. On the day of our interview, she wears a flannel shirt and vest paired with her trademark backwards pageboy cap and three long braids. Her silvery voice is juxtaposed by some well-timed cursing.

Current events, like the Kavanaugh hearings of  2018, often make their way into Speed’s work via the radio in her studio. Speed says she experienced something similar to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as a young woman, and the way Dr. Ford’s memory was scrutinized during the trial inspired her to create a painting titled The Arraignment, which hung alongside The Rights of Spermduring our visit.

The Arraignment

The Arraignment features one of Speed’s signatures — reclaimed, collaged paper (often Japanese Woodblock paper) — applied to top corners of the painting and the main subject’s clothes. The opposing corners represent male and female domination; one side features male warriors and women tied up and gagged, the other side a gallant female swordfighter on horseback. Kavanaugh lurks in the background, flashing from underneath a court robe, beer in hand.

Detail of Speed’s studio. (Photo: Cody Bjornson)

Speed has been dutifully collecting paper since she was a teenager, and she restricts herself to using damaged paper. The damage is caused by worms, fire, flood, or child’s play, and it forces her to be more imaginative. She used to scour flea markets and go on buying trips around the country for the reclaimed paper. These days, she mostly sources it on eBay.

(Photo: Cody Bjornson)

“My rules are, I’m not allowed to use a computer to blow anything up or down because that would make it an open-ended game and then I’d go nuts, but I’m also not allowed to wreck any good books,” Speed says. “So it has to be books that are already torn apart.”

Speed has operated a lively Instagram account (@speedstudiomarfa) since fall of 2016 via an iPad. She doesn’t have a cell phone. She regularly shares works in-progress, videos, process tips and amusing anecdotes, like how a sailor in one of her paintings, with the name “Wanda Lynette” tattooed on his arm, came from an unlikely source — Speed asking a UPS man his grandmother’s name.

Speed got some traction sharing in-process videos during her East of the Sun and West of the Moon solo show at the El Paso Museum of Art in 2018, and she wanted to continue sharing similar content. The three-channel video and sound installation, Close-Up Room, features music she listens to in her studio, and projects images of in-process works to encourage people to further examine the finished pieces in the gallery.

“There were pictures of me doing it so you get a really clear picture of ‘this is a person with their hands’ because so much stuff now is just done on the computer and then printed out on giant Inkjet printers,” Speed says. “You see the details, then you could walk back into the main body of the show and go, ‘Oh, I didn’t notice that before’.”

“So many museums now build at the scale where every room is this giant abstract painting,” Speed says. “So you get used to standing way back from the painting and it doesn’t occur to people as much to walk up and look at the details.”

For Speed, posting on Instagram is a way to continue the spirit of education through an online presence. The app also acts as a working archive, where she can revisit a piece at an earlier stage. Being self-taught, Speed experienced much trial and error to hone her techniques. She says she never appreciated the attitude that a certain level of artistic knowledge had to be earned by an academic degree.

“There were a lot of older artists and I would ask a technical question and they would be like, ‘Oh, well, that’s proprietary. You know, that’s my secret.’ They were really shitty about that,” Speed says. “So I go out of my way to say, ‘and then you take this and you put it on this and do it like this and here’s a picture’.”

One angle of Speed’s studio. (Photo: Cody Bjornson)

Speed also joins the growing wave of artists who challenge the old gallery system by selling their work directly through social media and acting as their own dealer. The art market is changing quickly, according to Speed; when she first moved to Marfa in 2006 she would rarely sell paintings through the internet. She says the majority of collectors who reach out to her typically already own her work, or are a friend of someone who owns her work. But that’s not always the case.

“I would still sell paintings by JPEG, but only to people who already owned my paintings or at least had seen a show of them someplace,” Speed says. “But now I sell paintings to people who’ve never seen my paintings [in person] ever, anywhere.”

Speed originally quit her New York gallery in order to be more in control of her own sales — she needed to retain more works in order to set up a foundation for her home, studio and artworks. Speed and her husband, drummer Fran Christina, are partnering with the Austin Community Foundation to turn Speed Studios into a foundation when the couple dies.

The ACF serves as an umbrella organization for many non-profit initiatives. It holds the funds that comprise the endowment for the museum. When the time comes, the fund advisors and the ACF will implement and govern the Speed Museum and Archive.

Eugene Sepulveda, one of Speed’s longtime friends and collectors, serves on the foundation’s board and has agreed to leave his personal collection to the foundation.

Speed’s studio. (Photo: Cody Bjornson)

“The goal is to open the studios and home as public spaces exhibiting Julie Speed’s work and to establish a big enough endowment that operation of the museum is covered in perpetuity, and to provide residencies for songwriters, poets and printmakers,” Sepulveda says. “We’re quite far along in raising the endowment.”

Speed says while the couple has certain ideals for how the place will run when they’re gone, they’re keeping stipulations open to future interpretation.

“If there was an earthquake out here and for some reason Marfa was no longer an art tourist destination in 20 years, which is possible, then we croak and the board could decide, ‘Oh, well just sell the property and take the endowment and endow the paintings to some other place’,” Speed says. “I don’t want to make a bunch of rules ‘cause they might not be practical in like 90 years or so, when I die,” she adds, laughing.

(Photo: Cody Bjornson)

Speed’s goal is to leave 200 paintings to the foundation. When she pinpointed this number she was in her early 60s and only had 50 paintings available. She did the math — she can do seven oil paintings a year — and realized she had to get to work and commit to longevity. “I called the gallery the next morning, but quitting smoking took a little while.”

Speed regularly hosts open-studios, and invites locals and travelers alike to enter her workspace which doubles as a gallery. Her proximity to the Chinati and Judd Foundations (she’s only yards away) make the eventual Speed foundation well-positioned to attract art-minded visitors.

“It’s not like anybody’s going to drive all the way to see a Julie Speed painting, but if you can do a two-fer…” Speed says. “And you gotta have some women somewhere.”

Sepulveda says because Speed is a woman artist, there’s a risk her work won’t get the recognition it deserves. By leaving both his Speed collection and a significant pledge to the endowment fund, Sepulveda hopes the foundation will help secure Speed’s position as an significant contemporary artist.

“Donald Judd established Marfa as an epicenter of the modern art world; Julie Speed is one of the leading artists ensuring Marfa is a thriving, relevant place for contemporary artists,” Sepulveda says. “There will be a Me Too-ish moment in the art world, but until then, we’re intent on preserving the work of important contemporary artist, Julie Speed.”

Out In Marfa

Speed and her husband moved from Austin to Marfa in 2006 and acquired the studio (the building is circa 1916) and land to build their house on. Their home, built with aerated concrete block, was completed three years later, in 2009. Their land hugs the Chinati Foundation grounds, with clear views of Donald Judd’s 15 Untitled Works in Concrete. 

Outside Speed’s studio, former jail for Ft. D.A. Russell (Photo: Cody Bjornson)

Attached to the studio is a printmaking room, with an etching printing press, complete with two 300-pound rollers. The press had to live outside under a tarp while the building was being renovated, but when it was time to move it back inside, it didn’t fit through the reconstructed door. Speed’s husband took the press apart and put it back together.

“That could be like some special circle of hell, right? Like really heavy IKEA furniture,” Speed laughs.

The studio was the former jail for Fort D.A. Russell (which is now the Chinati Foundation); then it served as the Texas Land Bank offices. People who used to work in the building claimed they had some encounters with a friendly ghost named Johnathan, who Speed has yet to meet 15 years later.

“We asked, ‘So is there anything about the building we should know?’ We were thinking like plumbing or electricity, and they said ‘Well, there’s Jonathan…’ and then they went on about Jonathan the ghost who would move things around and make noise, but you didn’t have to worry about it,” Speed laughs.

Most days after she is done toiling away in the studio, she spends time stacking rocks, doing outdoor projects and gardening. She says getting her hands in the soil is therapeutic. Volcanic rocks, which are featured on a rock wall around her home, are collected from a friend’s ranch in the Van Horn Mountains. Speed says stacking rocks is good practice for her because it’s “like doing collage, only 3D.”

For Speed, an affinity for the desert landscape and accompanying quiet of West Texas began when she was living and working in Austin. On road trips out West on I10, as trees give way to shrubs and the Edwards Plateau kicks up near Junction, Speed says this shift in geographies caused her to take a sigh of relief and whatever relationship woes or self-pitying thoughts she was having would start to retreat.

“Every time I get to that chute [in Junction] I feel like everything was so big that I would get really little, so whatever it was that was bothering me would also get little and then it would just blow away,” she says.

Yonder (2019)

Before she moved to Marfa, Cabin 10 at Marathon Motel & RV Park (which used to go for $24.99 a night) helped her find some respite and perspective.

“I’d just sit in the chair and look at Santiago Peak and drink tequila until I’d fall down, then I’d wake up the next morning like ‘all better’ and that was my mental health trip to West Texas,” Speed says.

The day-to-day routine in Austin wore her down, she says. Going to get the mail from her studio required getting in the car and encountering a symphony of city noises — honking, helicopters, leaf blowers, train horns — and by the time she’d settle back down in the studio she’d be totally disconnected from the work.

Speed says, “Here I can put down my brush and walk to town, get the mail, walk back, and the whole time… ”

“…I saw one person maybe,” I add, laughing.

“And they’re nice to me!” Speed laughs. “So when I walk back in the studio, I can pick up and be exactly where I left off. Which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it makes all the difference in the world because there’s not all that stopping and starting time.”

When asked how it feels to her to be a Texas artist, Speed describes it being the first place she’s really settled down. And being able to see the horizon puts her at ease.

“When I got here I was like, ‘Oh, I can relax. No one can sneak up on me.’ So that’s what it feels like,” Speed says.

On Her art 

At this stage in her career, Speed has given many interviews and been the subject of catalogs, namely two UT Press monographs, Speed Art and Julie Speed: Paintings, Constructions, and Works on Paper. She’s often described as an iconoclast whose work is “absurdist,” “enigmatic,” or “surreal.” She’s pretty used to hearing what people think about her art, and she’s good at trying to explain it. I think she sums it up perfectly in this video interview with Texas Monthly where she talks about her incorporation of popes as an excuse to use Cadmium red paint. For Speed, it’s all about the composition.

Annunciation (2019)

“I put together all the pieces in a way that makes me happy compositionally, and make sense psychologically,” she says.

She uses the example of overhearing a museum docent describe a pomegranate as symbolic in the context of a work of art, but thinking to herself, No, they just wanted to balance out the composition. She’s not unconscious of symbols. She’s just not heavily motivated by them, which is surprising given her seemingly intentional literary scenes. Speed discusses the role of symbols as having multiple, or no, meanings. For example, a fish: it may be a Judeo-Christian reference, a magic fish that grants three wishes, or just a fish. The focus is on colors and spacial balance that create a mathematical harmony.

Speed’s studio. (Photo: Cody Bjornson)

“If we didn’t have a category called ‘art,’ you’d still be there moving your chair and arranging shit on your plate,” Speed says. “And when you sat down on the ground, you’d be arranging stones and stuff. You just do it in the same way that if you’re humming a tune, right? The distance between the notes and how heavy one is and how light another note is. It’s like there is a right in a wrong arrangement, and that to me is what makes a song or a poem or a story, or a painting or a good soup. If you put the right amount of vegetables of the right colors in the pot you get something that tastes good.”

“It’s also just accidental. I don’t know — you drive by a hay field and you look at the hay bales and the light is hitting them a certain way, and you get this strong feeling like: I’m here now, pay attention.”

(Photo: Cody Bjornson)

A wall in Speed’s studio near her easel displays taped-up images of a skull, elephant feet, and more, and also holds a box collage called Three Black Ballsfrom her 2017 series Military Evolutions. She meditates on shapes and balance, sometimes flipping things upside down or photographing her work and uploading it to the computer to change it into black and white. In their early stages, Speed refers to the people in her paintings as “blobs.”

“The people — I don’t know what they’re going to be, but I just keep painting, and then one day they’ll look back at me. And then I go, okay, they’re there,” Speed says. “Then the trick is, because the painting will last another month or something, I gotta not screw them up.”

Speed grew up identifying with the male or genderless characters in books, which comes across in her art where women are portrayed strongly. She says she has no interest in painting people who wear their gender first. The appearance of popes and sailors in Speed’s work can partially be attributed to the timeless qualities of their clothing.

(Photo: Cody Bjornson)

“I don’t usually paint women so their sexual characteristics are their leading characteristics, and the same thing with their clothes. Usually I try to take it out of time.”

As months pass and layers of paint amass, so do the characters or scenes in the work. Speed draws inspiration from day-to-day and current events, and daydreams in the bathtub.

“These paintings — because they’re representational — everybody always thinks I must get an idea, then draw a painting of it, but it’s the opposite. I make a composition,” Speed says. “So the implied narrative [gets] built by the composition, and current events, and shit that happened to me when I was three, and a fairytale I read.”

She adds: “If I try to be the boss of it and to be very specific or didactic or ‘I’m really smart and I’m going to teach you a lesson’ — right?  — then you’re just another asshole with a propaganda poster.”

Speed typically works on a couple of paintings at once, to allow the oil paints to fully dry before the next layer, and to let collage pieces be weighed down and flattened overnight. To keep herself creatively limber, she uses her entire arsenal: oil paints, collage, gouache, printmaking and 3D boxes.

“I was painting popes for a while and then people started asking for popes and I had to stop painting popes. Because it was like, ‘Oh, this is a trap,’ — and that’s why I never take commissions,” Speed says. “As long as I keep changing it up, then I’ll learn something in one form, then I can apply it to the next form and it keeps me from getting stuck.”

On Inheriting the “Pay-Attention-To-Detail” Gene

Speed’s tendency toward meticulousness and habit of working small seems to run in her blood. You see it in her visor affixed with magnifying lenses, which she wears inches from her face and keeps close to the canvas.

(Photo: Cody Bjornson)

Speed’s mother started throwing pots at age 65, after retiring from a secretarial career. A finely crafted teapot by Speed’s mother sits in a kitchen cabinet at Speed’s — it sports bunches of tinier teapots on its lid. It sits near a hand-crafted metal model of the Russian battleship Potemkin, made by Speed’s father.

“… I’m saying why I can’t do big abstract paintings even though I really like them,” Speed says. “It’s like, I don’t know — how could there be a gene for, like: pay-attention-to-detail… ?”

Speed was encouraged to make her own clothes growing up. “My family didn’t do art, but everybody worked with their hands all the time. When I was a little kid: ‘Here, honey. Here’s a torch and a chisel and a hammer.’ Nobody ever said: ‘Well, you’re too short, you’re only five,’ you know, ‘Here, don’t set the house on fire, bye’.”

That DIY-spirit and ability to find pleasure in one’s projects stuck with Speed, who has been immensely prolific in her artistic career. One of her collectors commissioned Speed’s father to make a model ship — something he never imagined getting paid for. Speed says even though he was in bad health during the project, he worked on it right up until he died.

“He was sick and in pain but he said ‘It’s the work that saves you.’ He could go in there and get into the flow and then the pain would go away, and the fear of death and all that would go away — from all the time that he could be with his hood on, going like this.”

Current + Upcoming Works

Speed’s Purgatory of Nuns series will be on view at Bale Creek Allen Gallery in Austin starting March 6, opening from 7 to 10 p.m., and it closes on April 12. In the work, salvaged engravings from an 18th-century European guide to Catholic sects are altered with gouache and collage; the works are illustrated like a birding guide. Speed says she’s looking forward to filling up the small gallery with the 42 works, which will be on view to Springdale General pedestrians even when the gallery is closed via the large front window.

Cattywampus Press produced a limited edition box set reproduction of the series, and is working on a more accessible hymnal version, designed by Lindsay Starr, which should be available by March 6.

Dark Skies (2018)

At the time of publication, Speed was on a “dark skies binge,” repetitively painting small white dots on different shades of black. The night sky started creeping into Speed’s paintings five or six years ago, which led her to coin her Dark Skies series.

Double Dark Skies (2018)

“I love going outside, looking up and seeing that Milky Way cloud of my home galaxy, stretched out there above, reminding me every night just exactly where I am in the universe, and how small I am,” Speed says. “That perspective makes me happy.”

Speed’s ‘Purgatory of Nuns’ series will be on view at Bale Creek Allen Gallery in Austin starting March 6, opening from 7 to 10 p.m. It closes on April 12.VASARI 21

Julie Speed

by Ann Landi | Aug 6, 2018

Julie Speed’s paintings offer up a magical and mysterious cosmos that defies literal interpretation. A pair of sailors and a naked woman wrestle with a hammerhead shark trapped in a net. An exuberant baby leaps from his mother’s lap as a tornado churns outside an open window. A frowning woman tenderly places drops into the eye of another figure, possibly female, as a yellow-headed bird looks on from a window ledge. Certain motifs recur: the shark and sailors, for instance, along with accordions, bears, birds, and skulls.

The savvy viewer will catch the references to art history: Japanese prints, the 19th-century French engraver Gustave Doré, Renaissance artist Antonio Pollaiuolo, and the late Medieval French painter Enguerrand Quarton. To add to the puzzlement, some characters have an extra arm or third eye; the latter, in particular, can induce a certain queasiness in the viewer, like the double vision after one too many beers.

Flying Baby (2012), oil on panel, 24 by 24 inches

If Speed’s works are not like anything else out there—neither straightforward illustration nor campy realism in the manner of Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin—it’s possibly because she has been a maverick from an early age. “From the time I can first remember, my ambition was to be a caveman. Even then I knew it was better to be a caveman, not a cavewoman,” she says. “After the caveman phase, I wanted to be a pirate” But all along, she adds, her end goal was to be an artist. “I didn’t really have any other career choice.”

Her family moved often, from her birthplace in Chicago to various towns in Connecticut, as her father, an inventor and engineer, accepted different jobs around the country. Wherever they settled, making things by hand was always an important aspect of the household. “Both my father and grandfather built model ships from scratch,” she recalls. (In another interview, she noted that “everyone in my family were sailors or descendants of sailors.”) Her mother was an expert seamstress, who also hooked rugs and knit sweaters, and together mother and daughter designed imaginary buildings on graph paper. “None of this was called art,” she says, “and we didn’t have art books in the house.”But there were nonetheless significant stimuli to spur a child’s imagination: a book of the world’s religions that had a foldout page of Indian gods and goddesses and a reproduction of Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel. And in the catalogue essay for her forthcoming show at the El Paso Museum, she recalls an elderly great aunt who told marvelous fairy tales which “often revolved around impossible tasks and quests that easily could end with a phrase like ‘and so the Shark King ate the lovely princess.’”

Kingdom Come (2014-16), oil on panel, 24 by 24 inches

“I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pen,” Speed says. “I was twelve when I sold my first drawing for twelve dollars in a bookstore.” During summers as a teenager, she worked with Anne Jones Fuller at the Stonington Art Gallery, where she encountered the works of Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Neil Welliver, and Jean Jones Jackson. “I would meet all these amazing people, like Claire Booth Luce, and avant-garde artists from New York,” she says. “All the time I was there I was doing my own work and showing in the gallery.”

It seemed a natural next step to attend the Rhode Island School of Design when it came time for college, but the curriculum soon proved alien to her temperament. In 1969, the prevailing academic discourse “was over color field versus representational versus conceptual.” Speed already had her own way of looking at the world from years of museum going: “It didn’t matter to me whether something was abstract or representational,” she recalls. “Malevich looked the same to me as Piero della Francesca. Everything they were talking about in school had nothing to do with that. Within six months I realized I didn’t want to be there.”

Concertina (2015), oil on linen and panel, 24 by 20 inches

 But she gave it a second year, switching to courses in illustration. “My professors said, ‘You can do this on your own. Don’t bother coming to class.’” At semester’s end, she dropped out and took to the road with the man who would become her husband, Fran Christina, a drummer who played mostly with blues bands. “We traveled around the country for seven or eight years, doing pick-up jobs, farm labor. I trained horses, I waitressed. Because we were always moving, we often didn’t have places to stay, but I always had my pen and I could always draw.”

In 1978, the couple moved to Austin and established a more stationary home base. Christina was on the road much of the time, but by 1980 Speed could quit the part-time work—which at one point included painting a chuckwagon for a television series to make it look dirty—and concentrate on her art. She describes her subjects decades ago “as pretty much the same as what I’m pursuing now, but not as good.”

With her husband traveling so much, the artist would take what she describes as “mental health breaks,” making trips westward toward Marathon and Marfa, TX. “I loved Motel Sixes and would stay there,” she remembers. “Going west on Route 10 there’s this place where the geography changes, and all of a sudden you can see the horizon. Whatever little thing was making me crazy would float away when I could see the big sky and stars.”

Lunch (Le Déjeuner sur L’Mer), 2017, oil on panel, 24 by 24 inches

After several trips to Marfa, Speed and Christina decided to move to the town Donald Judd, the high priest of Minimalism, made famous for its sprawling barracks-style galleries devoted to artists whose sensibilities could not be farther from Speed’s. And yet the circumstances that prompted their relocation and the buildings they ended up acquiring seem perfectly in synch with the improbable worlds the artist creates.

As Speed tells it, they “accidentally bought a little house in 2006.” They weren’t shopping for properties, but as they were stopped in front of a real-estate office, “talking about what a stupid idea” it was to move to Marfa, they noticed a man in the middle of the road, waving his cell phone to stop traffic from crushing a tarantula that was scuttling across the pavement. (Hairy male tarantulas, with a leg span of up to five inches, go on the move during mating season.) “Fran and I looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, my God, this is our town.’”

They acquired a small house behind the courthouse, and then later bought the former jail, which has become Speed’s studio. In the last three years, while renting out the first house, the couple have expanded to a complex of buildings, which will become part of a foundation supported by her “long-time core collectors.” For years, Speed showed with Gerald Peters Gallery in New York but now mostly represents herself, hanging shows in the studio and selling on Instagram to her collector base.

Eyes to See (2017), oil and collage on panel, 25.5 by 20.5 inches

For all their storybook appeal and elusive iconography, Speed admits to being affected by current events, though these never become overt political statements. Cultural clashes, East vs. West, are a subtext of Samurai warriors reacting in a scene of the Crucifixion. A small boy fingers the pin on a grenade as priests enact a fierce dance in the background. And her female figures are almost invariably sturdy characters, both white and brown, not the delicate maidens of conventional fairy tales. Call it a form of feminism or gender-bending, but they are almost mannish, neither overtly sexy nor traditional visions of womanly beauty (even a borrowed image of a tender Madonna morphs into the head of a beady-eyed crow).

Julie working on Monkey Tree in her studio in Marfa, TX (photo by Antoine San Fuentes)

As for her working methods, now as earlier, the artist taps into a subconscious well of ideas and her practice blurs the boundaries between abstraction and realism. “Because my paintings are representational, people assume that I come up with an idea and then paint that,” she says. “But it’s usually that I’m painting an abstract composition, and then I put the flesh on the bones. When I start a painting, the head is just a circle. I don’t know whether it will be young or old, male or female. One thing simply leads to another.”

Ann Landi

Top: Good Friday (2015), gouache and collage, 29.5 by 37.5 inches

You can find more about Julie Speed at juliespeed.com and https://www.instagram.com/speedstudiomarfa/

Survey exhibition of Julie Speed art opens at El Paso Museum of Art

  Julie Speed’s “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” a survey exhibition spanning the past five years of her oil painting, collage and gouache, opens at the El Paso Museum of Art, with a reception November 15th at 6pm, that includes an artist talk and book signing.

Dr. Victoria Ramirez, a resident of Texas for “decades”, and almost two years as director at the El Paso Museum of Art, has known of Speed’s work for a very long time, and feels Speed is “one of the most important contemporary artists currently working”. 

As the border town museum strives to define itself, director Ramirez looks more regionally than to either coast for validation of their programs and exhibitions, and clarifies, “Being on the border, Mexico is part of our community, we are one region”. As a visual art resource we strive to more closely celebrate the historic and current explorations of art in west Texas. As Dr. Ramirez refines her mission to educate the public about the issues and artists of this area, as well as introduce the highest caliber art, Speed’s work “checks both boxes”, and as it’s “ever more critical in communities like ours for us tell our stories in more nuanced and subtler ways”, it’s not all border walls and politics. It’s also important to introduce the work of Julie Speed to a larger audience, to those who have not yet had the experience of her “vision and imagination”.

 Speed’s work at first encounter is often associated somewhere on a spectrum between the look of the renaissance painters to the surrealists. Her honed, specific and beautiful technical skills allow her great latitude regardless of medium. Speed resists being labeled as of one school or another and feels the same about “isms”. Although viewers try hard to wrestle the images into something that makes sense to them, generally it’s to no avail. It is visual poetry and storytelling, some handed down from her great aunt Phyllis who traveled the world collecting fairy tales and myths. Upon her return, the retelling to young Speed of these not always jolly exploits, and the images they conjured sparked Speed’s imagination. Perhaps her paintings are in part these illustrations of far away peoples and foreign lands the seeds of which were long ago planted by a trusted elder. 

 I had a great aunt who recounted how she would lull her nephew to sleep by hanging over his crib, circling her lit cigarette in the dark to mesmerizing effect. He grew up to do the first light shows for the Grateful Dead. Perhaps the ancestors set the paths the artists walk.

 Speed stands at her easel, safely in her studio and releases the hounds, as it were. The truth telling birds, the roiling seas, the puzzling, conflicting, hallucinatory visitations of people and animals that seem to float through the landscapes and distance vistas with expressions of puzzlement, pain or ferociousness are part of her day. The paintings never settle down to be purely decorative, they cannot. And to impose an idea of “what a painting means”, can be quite misplaced.

In some of Speed’s earlier paintings and etchings figures in ecclesiastical garb showed up with some regularity. Viewers would often comment something to the effect that the ‘artist must have had a terrible experience with organized religion’. To that line of questioning Speed responded she had not had any religious training or experience, however there was a book of the world’s religions in her home growing up, and she particularly liked the men in hats and dresses. 

 It’s still like that, no matter the subject. Like with purely abstract art where viewers often stand in front of a painting and call out to no one in particular what they “see”. They force themselves to find some recognizable form, something ‘known’ in an attempt to understand what’s in front of them. Speed’s works often function as a similar Rorschach test. The third eye, extra limb, set of teeth or half face intrude on the experience by further refusing to comply with a viewer imposed prearranged meaning. Speed likes how the third eye forces people to engage with the work. It can make the brain hurt as it tries to reconcile this perceived discrepancy. Often when people first interact with Speed paintings and encounter the third eye their brains “correct” for them and initially they don’t see the third eye, the brain overrules the art. Speed also likes how with an extra eye she can get two expressions out of one face.

 Keeping obvious clues to a minimum, or embellishing wildly patterning away any sense of calm, the artist peels away, or layers away to produce a very recognizable, steady and potentially mysterious aesthetic, yet never quite the same, never settled, menace and wonder in equal measure. Try to pin it down at your peril. Sometimes the work, with collages of engravings from 18thand 19thcentury plates, when religious imagery abounded, begin to feel like one big visitation, and yet the juxtapositions, a puzzle of possible information or seeming red herrings, dogs, birds, weather, and composed competent faces belie the roiling sea and the absurd circumstances they all find themselves painted into.

 Which brings us to politics. Yes, Speed admits to some works in the show specifically related to current events, such as “Wall”, “The Xenophobe” and “Monkeytree”, where a group of adult men dressed in underwear pummel each other in a scrum pig pile of flailing arms and legs, while collaged engravings of monkeys in trees watch in civilized society. In 2014 Speed sent me an email with a pile of fighting men, though these were naked and shaped like pink pudgy babies each wearing a little red dunce hat, wielding knives and being generally threatening. She followed up with a phone call asking what I thought of the painting titled “Rites of Spring”. “Do you think I’ve been watching too much CNN?” followed by laughter. Political undercurrents, real or imagined, can be read into many works in the exhibition however Speed is so firmly grounded in her garden, friends and the process of art making that any random beetle, plant, or cloud that crosses her path as she walks from her house to her studio to begin work each morning, may be a more likely source of inspiration. Whatever fascinating bit her curiosity settles on may find itself portrayed in an upper corner of the current painting that needs something to balance the composition; her consummate curiosity about the immediate world her most constant contributor. 

 In this show there are the familiar images from earlier works of sailors, faces with three eyes, babies, animals, severed body parts, and faces with a very notable nose appearing on people of all genders. That nose belongs to a man Speed met at a party on the east coast when they were both teenagers. Speed turned to her friend Mary Allen and said, “See the guy with the big nose”? That guy, Fran Christina from Rhode Island, became her husband. After high school and a short stint at the Rhode Island School of Design, when what she was after they weren’t teaching, she quit and went back to being a self-taught artist and Christina, a drummer with a budding reputation, was looking to play with different bands. So the 1970’s found the two of them in a VW bus crisscrossing the United States from gig to possible gig. Their sojourn included Connecticut, Michigan, California, Kentucky, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts and everything in between. Speed picked up work in every locale from training racehorses, “waitressing badly”, house painting, gallery assistant, to maid and butler combo, and through it all she continued to draw. She sold her first painting at the age of twelve, for twelve dollars and had a gallery in Stonington, CT from a young age where she worked summers when they found themselves back on the east coast. That gallery, with a roster that included Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver, and Jane Freilicher, continued to sell her work when she had work to sell, through all their various and sundry explorations and changing addresses. 

Once they settled in Austin in 1978, Christina worked and toured steadily with the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Speed was able to begin to make art full time, and build the very disciplined practice and following she continues today. In 2006 they moved to Marfa, the land of few distractions, a welcome relief for hard working artists. 

 Some of the patterning of the collage elements of colorful Japanese woodblocks and the gray tones of engravings have moved from primarily borders and vestments to taking over large portions of several pieces, which make for possible multiple narratives as one examines the action in the original image before it was repurposed in Speed’s new work. Some resemble pieced quilts or feature the faces of Japanese men peering into the work. So there are multiple experiences viewing from a distance as well as close examination that provide another distinct and deepening understanding of an individual piece. Layers and looking and feeling and thinking can get one far off the path, which is the point of the adventure, however can also be disorienting. As an aid to understanding her sometimes complicated process, not just for collage, also for how she constructs an oil painting or gouache, Speed has created three distinct videos of eight minute loops titled “Close Up”, that will be projected onto three walls to play simultaneously synced with music in a room off the main exhibition hall so viewers can ideally go back to revisit a painting after watching.

 Speed has a strong moral compass that directs the action and injustice or implied imbalance in her work. To experience her ready laugh, compassion and facile grasp of what’s behind what appears in print, words or image make her exactly the person you want as a neighbor, she will literally give you the seeds off her Mexican sunflowers, and exactly the person you want as a contributor to the canon of art.   

Mary Etherington, Marfa Texas Nov. 2018

PASATIEMPO   Sunday,  January 8, 2017

JULIE SPEED: Solo Exhibition

Evoke Contemporary, 550 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe, New Mexico  87501   505-995-9902   

EVOKEcontemporary.com

Magic in the Mundane: Artist Julie Speed

Michael Abatemarco

In the gouache and collage paintings of multimedia artist Julie Speed, inanity and folly interrupt the mundane, heightening the drama of otherwise unremarkable moments. A tearoom becomes the setting for an act of torture, for instance, and a parlor scene becomes a surreal conflation of incongruities. The parlor scene, a painting called Hammerhead, depicts two women sitting on a sofa beneath historic Japanese art prints and an image of the Pietà. One woman is reading, while the other is grasping at a writhing hammerhead shark. You can wonder at the work’s possible meanings, but for Speed, meanings are subjective. They emerge from both the creation process and the mind of the beholder. “Because my work is mostly figurative, people assume that I start out with an idea or concept and then represent it,” she told Pasatiempo. “But I work the other way around. I start with the composition and, more than any other element, the composition drives the narrative.”

Speed’s first exhibition at Evoke Contemporary opens Friday, Jan. 6. It’s a traveling show organized by Austin’s Flatbed Press and Ruiz-Healy Art in San Antonio. Evoke is showing more than 50 works by Speed. An open-ended narrative sense makes her artwork enigmatic. Often, action is taking place, such as the small rescue boat on the sea in the painting Kunisada’s Ghosts, en route to a sinking house in the distance. But the relationship of this little drama to the central figures on the shore — a mix of costumed Japanese in the style of ukiyo-e woodblock prints made popular by Utagawa Kunisada in the 19th century, along with Speed’s own stylized renderings of people — clownish, slightly grotesque, and childlike — is unclear. We want Speed’s work to tell us stories, but here we have the prompts for crafting narratives of our own. You can look at her painting Milky Way, for instance — wherein military and political figures argue over a pile of skulls, with a pack of snarling wolves and a tantrum-throwing child getting in on the act — as an allegory of war. But the scene’s inclusion of the Milky Way, glimpsed through the windows, suggests something else — while leaders argue, the universe goes on, and will remain long after men and their petty squabbles die away. “Milky Way didn’t start out to be about war and its atrocities,” Speed said. “The geometric elements were in place early, so if it was going to be a completely abstract painting, the composition was settled. ... Then the news came of another horrific event in the Middle East. Sometimes the work changes in response to the news, sometimes to what I’m reading or thinking about, or sometimes for no reason that I can understand and point to, and while the painting may stop changing when it’s finished, my thoughts about it continue to change long after the work has left the studio. I love that other people think of things that would have never occurred to me.”

Speed works out of a studio in Marfa, Texas. Although she spent a brief period in the late 1960s studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, she’s mostly self-taught. She uses her mediums of gouache and collage to complement one another, blending paint and paper seamlessly so that her own draftsmanship and that of illustrators, whose images she culls for her compositions, are cohesive. Elements like the Japanese figures in her Christian-themed painting Good Friday might seem incongruous, but their inclusion reveals a deep-enough knowledge of art history, art movements, and their stylistic conventions to establish associations between them, conflating events and artistic styles separated by great periods of time. Her not-especially-flattering depictions of people recall the images of the unsophisticated masses in Dutch genre painting, like something by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569). But they also recall the bardo figures of Tibetan Buddhist art, trapped as they are in cycles of ignorance, anger, suffering, and pain.

One can see the influence of Dutch vanitas still lifes in her work, too, which often contain memento moris, symbolic references to mortality that express a Christian view of earthly pursuits, antithetical to spiritual discipline. Undertoad, for example, shows a skull, a common memento mori in Western art traditions, attached to a leafless tree (the title comes from the toad nestled in its roots). But Speed’s take is less didactic than that of her forebears. Although she takes inspiration from Renaissance art, Dutch painting, antique medical and scientific journals, and the “Floating World” woodblock prints of Japan, among other sources, it isn’t to emulate them. Rather, she can use them materially, to cast them into re-imagined scenarios where these disparate artistic elements can continue speaking to us out of their original context. “The things that I’m drawn to, I’m not drawn to because they’re older,” she said. “I detest nostalgia. It’s their individual specific characteristics that I’m interested in. I understand that people think about art in terms of time, place, and subject matter, but I’ve never actually experienced it that way myself. For me, it’s all one.”

A dark sense of humor pervades Speed’s artwork, which straddles an edge between comedy and a discomfiting sense of irrationality. Her figures, often rendered as angry or bemused, seem as though they’re caught in situations of their own making, creators of their own Hell, with no cognizance of the fact that they’re in it. But that doesn’t mean they can’t elicit a laugh or two. Pope Descending is a case in point. In the painting, men argue over a game of cards with a cooked chicken, a vulva-like split down its center, resting between them. The Pope, meanwhile, can be seen through an open doorway as he is falling down a flight of stairs. “That painting was almost finished, and I’d painted the little figure in the background that has tripped on the dog and is falling down the stairs as a self-portrait. Then I remembered what happened last time I painted myself into a painting. About 15 years ago, in a painting called Tea, I painted myself as the figure in the window of a distant building with my hair on fire. That night we were invited to a fancy dinner party at the home of some people that I didn’t really know very well. During dinner, I leaned over the table for something and the candle caught my hair and it instantly ignited with a giant whoosh of flame. It was over in a flash, but the smell remained and pretty much ruined the party.” The memory prompted her to remove herself from Pope Descending and replace her image with the pope. “Then I started laughing because the pope falling down the stairs reminded me of Marcel Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase, and so I decided to title the painting Pope Descending. The very next morning the first thing I saw on my computer was the announcement that Pope Benedict had just become the first pontiff since, I think, 1415 or so, to voluntarily ‘descend’ from the papal throne.”

Not all of the work in the exhibit is narrative. Speed works in abstraction, too, but representational elements still come into play. Death and the Maiden, In Flagrante, and In Flagrante Again, for instance, contain molecular and amoeba-like figures derived from old texts. But even among protozoa, Death appears, shown here as a skull collaged onto the head of a spermatozoal form. “A lot of the collage elements that you notice in Death and the Maiden, In Flagrante, and In Flagrante Again are from Gray’s Anatomy,” she said. “Gray’s is particularly useful because it’s been in steady use as a textbook since the late 1800s, so there are a lot of wrecked copies out there floating around, and I find them regularly. Other collage elements are sourced from old biology textbooks, seashell engravings and silver pattern illustrations from a 19th-century art journal. I’ve been collecting wrecked books and pieces of books for almost my whole life.”

Speed stresses the importance of using books in disrepair for source material — she chooses to use found elements as they are, with little manipulation. “The rules to my game are that I’m not allowed to take apart any good books, use any internet-sourced material or my scanner and printer to blow anything up or down, so I buy what I can find at flea markets, eBay, and junk stores. Sometimes I find things while I’m out walking. The precipice in Precipice is a cement-mix bag I found blowing down the street. Fire, flood, and children are my friends, because they ruin the most books. Lately I’ve been finding and using a lot of 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints, so I’ve added worms to my thank-you list. Because the woodblock prints were done on paper made from the bark of mulberry trees, the worms can’t resist it.”

Julie Speed’s Engaging Puzzles for Inquisitive Eyes

DAVID S. RUBIN

The Rivard Report on 27 February, 2016 at 00:02

For Marfa-based artist Julie Speed, all the world’s a puzzle.

A painter, sculptor, collage artist, and printmaker who has been exhibiting for more than thirty years, Speed is currently presenting a recent body of her provocative and at times humorously enigmatic art in tandem exhibitions at Ruiz-Healy Art in San Antonio through Saturday, March 19, and at Flatbed Press and Gallery in Austin through Thursday, April 7.

A feast for inquisitive eyes, Speed’s exhibition at Ruiz-Healy Art features both representational and abstract imagery, much of which is delightfully overloaded with painstakingly crafted details. An avowed advocate of the philosophy that art is as much for the viewer as it is for the artist, Speed is of the school of artists who revel in open-ended content.

Years ago, believing that her own interpretation is only one of many possibilities for understanding what we see in her artwork, she coined the term “parareality” to refer to each alternative potential meaning, with the idea that no single explanation is any more valid than another.

Although Speed set out to be an academically trained artist, having studied briefly at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late ’60s, she is largely self-taught. Married to a musician, she spent a lot of time traveling in the ’70s, until she and her husband settled in the music-centric city of Austin in 1978. Once rooted, Speed began devoting more time to honing her skills as a painter.

During the ’80s, the period when she began exhibiting, Speed concentrated mainly on images of the human figure and, in some of her earliest paintings, her influences are fairly easy to identify. In “Ring of Fire” (1985), a well-dressed couple standing in the rain on a beach in a circle of fire and holding an umbrella is an obvious homage to a visual artist and a musician, with the imagery recalling that of the Surrealist painter Rene Magritte, and the title inspired by the popular Johnny Cash hit.

While Magritte-like stylistic elements are also evident in the subsequent painting “The Grand Dragon Crossing the River Styx on His Way to Hell” (1989), as in the irrational river composed of watermelons, this is one of the few works in Speed’s oeuvre that was actually conceived in response to a specific issue — the horrific practices of the Ku Klux Klan. As has become her custom, Speed freely blends references from diverse sources and here joins a biblical image, a crucifixion, to a mythological place, the River Styx, to create a new fictional reality in which the Klansman is on the stake, with a Black rabbi and nun as overseers and the watermelons as symbols of racial stereotyping.

“She Asked Why,” 1988, ink and watercolor.

A number of Speed’s early paintings take on the guise of simple portraits. None, however, are of people who actually exist and the imagery is more complex that it might at first appear. In “Queen of My Room III” (1998) and “Please Help Me, My Brain is Burning” (1994), invented female characters appear isolated against barren backgrounds as they stare blankly towards the viewer.

As in “Ring of Fire” and “The Grand Dragon Crossing…,” both paintings use subtle references to fire to invite narrative interpretations suggesting, for example, that the women’s expressionless faces are masking something deeper. In “Queen of My Room III,” the woman holds a lit match, and her crown is actually made up of matchsticks. So reflective viewers may begin asking themselves, “Is she a housewife trapped in a prison of domesticity, or is she a self-anointed practitioner of arson?” Both explanations, as well as others, are legitimate.

And whether it is a crown, a halo, a hat, or simply her hair on fire, the flames behind the woman’s head in “Please Help Me, My Brain is Burning” hint at inner anguish and discontent, which is reiterated in the title phrase being inscribed in Latin and moving laterally through the subject’s ears.

As potent as potential narratives that may be extracted from Speed’s paintings seem to be, it would be to misconstrue the artist’s intentions to assert that, other than in a rare example such as “The Grand Dragon…,” iconographic content is a motivator of the work. First and foremost, Speed is a formalist, who develops a composition using a trial and error process that is based on aesthetic considerations. In “Queen of My Room III,” in fact, the inclusion of the woman’s hand with the match evolved from a desire for compositional balance. Only after it is in place does it begin to stimulate potential narrative or metaphoric content.

“Please Help Me, My Brain is Burning,” 1994, oil on board

Speed’s delightful inventiveness when it comes to composition can be seen reaching a point of mastery in her ink and watercolor drawings of the late ’80s, where she subverted normal expectations by adding bits of color to isolated details within black-and-white compositions. While such compositional embellishments have become common features in today’s digitally manipulated imagery, Speed’s actions predate the digital era, and she works only with her hands, computers are verboten.

Patterns abound in these compositions as well, and the space is deliberately distorted. So nothing appears logical, as we have traveled through the rabbit hole and thus the questioning can begin. With the title phrase “She Asked Why,” in fact, Speed gives us a subtle directive to start imagining what might be going on, and she reinforces her instructions with the finely detailed book of questions on the woman’s lap, and the puzzled expression on her face as she ponders a sliced-open lizard.

In the ’90s, Speed expanded her repertoire of mediums to include three-dimensional objects. For one series, she filled shadow boxes with painted cutouts and actual thorns, which serve as architectural backdrops. “Thornboxes” (1992), for example, is a compositional hybrid of a Renaissance altar and a Joseph Cornell boxed assemblage.

Concealed behind glass and protected by a padlock, a secret narrative is taking place as two men stare silently at one another, their ears covered by the hands of others in a gesture that suggests the familiar cliché “Hear No Evil.” In the more minimal found object sculpture “The Reluctant Witness” (1999), Speed pays homage to the Surrealist objects of artists such as Man Ray, who created a number of metronomes with solitary eyeballs in the 1920s.

Although the temperament of Speed’s art is consistently offbeat and quirky, she is one of those artists who has no singular style. As a keen observer and admirer of all kinds of art, she has listed among her many influences Early Byzantine art, Northern and Southern Rennaissance painting, Russian art and icons, Mughal and Persian miniatures, Australian Aboriginal art, 19th century Japanese woodcut prints, Manet and Degas, and numerous twentieth century artists including Pablo Picasso, Kasimir Malevich, Otto Dix, Balthus, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, and the self-taught artist Bill Traylor.

So, it is not surprising that she can move back and forth with great ease between representational and abstract imagery, as she did in 2003 with the painting “Still Life with Suicide Bomber #3″ and the painted collage “The Murder of Kasimir Malevich #8.”

“The Murder of Kasimir Malevich #8,” 2003 (Cropduster) acrylic and collage on panel.

Although still working improvisationally during the first few years of the Millennium, Speed could not avoid creating these darkly sinister works in response to 9/11 and its aftermath. The abstract painter Malevich was not murdered, of course, but using his geometric style as a compositional starting point, Speed created a haunting image of a torn-open envelope with tablets emerging from it , bringing to mind the nationwide scare over the terrorist mailings of Anthrax.

Since moving to Marfa in 2006, Speed has devoted a lot of her efforts to making painted collages from her extensive collection of book illustrations. Since “Speed’s Law” dictates that she must never destroy a perfectly good book, damaged editions and loose leafs purchased separately provide resource materials for her creative endeavors.

As always, a work begins as Speed finds an interesting image to cut out and move about freely on paper, which is often another illustration that serves as the initial starting point and backdrop for an invented scenario. In “Suzanna, Annoyed” (2012), which is on view at Ruiz-Healy, the nude figure of the mythological Danae was cut from an illustration of her as depicted by Titian and his workshop and superimposed over another classical scene, striking a fine balance between the dominant foreground and the recessive background.

To fictionalize the figure further, Speed painted over her face, giving her a disgruntled expression, and brought her flesh to life by coloring it with a faint rosy tint. In this tiny scale work, she also brilliantly activated the background with droplets of red and yellow paint to create miniature explosions that echo the woman’s obvious discontent. Although Speed titled the work after the biblical Suzannah, who was accused of debauchery by lying elders, the scene could just as easily be interpreted as a contemporary woman who is fed up with the abuses faced by women in a world dominated by male power structures.

Indeed, Speed’s imaginary narratives often seem so incredibly well suited to the current issues of the day. In the recent painting “Milky Way” (2014), Speed has put a beautifully contemporary spin on the kind of satire that was practiced in the 16th century by yet another “elder,” Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Like Brueghel’s “Blind Leading the Blind” (1568), in which foolish people follow their leader one-by-one into a ditch, Speed’s “Milky Way” similarly calls attention to the futility of human folly.

Reminiscent of today’s politicians, three male dignitaries from different cultures and time periods as indicated by their garb may be plotting the world’s future, as an angry woman (a Trump supporter perhaps?) cheers them on. While hungry dogs in the right foreground suggest that the power figures will ultimately swallow one another alive, skulls on the table and windows opening on to star-filled nighttime galaxies are reality-check reminders that all human activity is transient, that political tides come and go, and that life as we know it is just a momentary spec on the boundless universe of space and time.

CATALOG ESSAY FROM:

JULIE SPEED - PAPER CUT: SELECTED WORKS ON PAPER 

THE GRACE MUSEUM -SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 TO FEBRUARY 14, 2015, ABILENE,  TEXAS

My studio used to be the jail for Fort D.A. Russell, a former calvary base on the edge of the town of Marfa, Texas about 60 miles north of the Mexican border in the Chihauhuan desert. It’s a big building so I’m lucky to have a separate space just for collage.  

I’ve been collecting wrecked books, moldy magazines and worm-eaten and water damaged engravings from flea markets and yard sales for most of my life.  When I walk to town to pick up the mail I almost always come home with a few bits of metal or wood that I’ve found along the road or railroad tracks. Sometimes people send me things. My cupboards are full. 

Because of the infinite  possibilities involved with working in collage and because too many choices make you crazy,  I limit my materials by a couple of rules. First one is: no tearing up good books…. so fire, flood and children are  my friends.  Second rule is no using the computer. If I need to alter something I alter it with a tiny brush and paint or a knife. Some sections  I paint entirely with gouache so the finished work often ends up much closer to a painting than a collage. Sometimes vice versa.   Sometimes the collage pieces I add are dimensional  so the work turns into a box. 

To begin, I use an exacto knife to cut out the pieces, sort them into rough categories, then pick up a piece that I particularly like and paint the edges  of the paper with a warm gray gouache to camouflage the cut. Then I’ll pick up a dozen or so other pieces that look like they belong with the first piece and paint their edges also.

Next, using a reversible pressure sensitive putty, I start positioning the first pieces onto an Arches paper ground. The size of the pieces that I start with dictates the size of the ground.  Sometimes it takes a couple of days to get the first  3, 5, or 7 pieces right. Each time you add an element or shift one of the pieces even slightly then  the distance/weight relationships  between all the other pieces also change, so balance is a constantly moving target. 

When the anchor pieces are right,  I glue them down with acrylic matte gel, using an etching brayer and/or rolling pin with repeated pressure to squeeze out the excess gel. Then I  weigh them  down overnight with heavy pieces of glass.  If there’s a lot of mold on the paper I’ll  later add a  top layer of gel medium to stabilize it. 

The next day I start to paint. I’ll paint for a while,  then add another collage piece and on and on back and forth. If I need to cut a larger or very complicated  piece of paper, or if I need to glue several pieces to each other before gluing them to the ground, I’ll use a pencil and  tracing paper to demarcate where the knife goes and where the glue goes. Most of the collage pieces that I originally altered with a knife I’ll alter many times again with a brush and paint.  

With each  added element, whether paint or collage, the possibilities multiply.  As the days go on,  the visual equation becomes exponentially more complicated.  The more complicated it is, the more fun it is. 

This piece, Death and the Maiden, is one of a reoccurring series that I’ve been working on, on and off since 2007. I call them “floaters”.

They began with a winter trip down the South Texas coast where on a deserted beach we found what seemed to be some kind of grim jellyfish Jonestown involving thousands of Portuguese man o’ war. The sand was littered with their bodies…amazing blue and purple and green and pink glistening jellies…some of them still living. So I started to think about what their tentacles would look like moving in the underwater currents, then that expanded to thinking about everything that floats and how it moves and the spaces in-between. 

From tentacles it was a short hop to dendrites and neurons and from there to other body parts, both visible and microscopic. What’s swirling inside us looks remarkably like what’s swirling in the deepest oceans and the night sky also.  Body parts, shells, plant parts, nebulae, splashes and explosions are all similar in structure and seem to lend themselves to being combined, painted and alteredin as many combinationsas I can possibly invent with a knife and paint. It’s an endless puzzle ……which is the whole point really because the satisfaction for me is in the work.

Julie Speed, July 2014

Turns out Men O’ War aren’tjellyfish at all, or even a single animal.  They’re a colony of zooids,  individualorganisms which cannot exist on their own.

The Moral Painter

 by Elizabeth Ferrer        

 (Courtesy of the University of Texas Press) 

The Art of Julie Speed

The contemporary art world has long maintained an awkward relationship with realism, especially with work that does not intend to offer a postmodern critique of, say, the power structures implicit in older Western art styles or the objectification of the human figure. What was for a very long time highly esteemed in a painting or drawing—the sense of verisimilitude that could conjure for a viewer what something was like, through the masterful evocation of three-dimensional form, textures, or the play of light and shadows—is now largely viewed as obsolescent, even unnecessary. This approach to valuing a work of art waned in the mid-nineteenth century in large part as a result of the emergence of photography, which acted to supplant painting as the visual medium best able to provide an index of reality. Later in the nineteenth century, a succession of painterly styles, beginning with impressionism and continuing through such movements as pointillism, postimpressionism, and fauvism, continually diminished the appreciation for technical mastery that was central to painting for several centuries.

But alongside the rise of modernism, there were always artists who found new motivations for returning to the realist mode. Some were driven by the desire to directly convey social or political messages, such as the artists associated with the Ash Can School in the United States early in the twentieth century, or the social realists in the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s. By mid-century, even as the avant-garde in the United States and Europe increasingly embraced abstraction and then conceptual modes, in Latin America much attention continued to be focused on artists who demonstrated exceptional technical virtuosity. This is seen, for example, in the work of such figures as the Chilean realist Claudio Bravo and the Cuban landscape painter Tomás Sánchez. By the 1960s, realism also enjoyed a revival in the United States, thanks to the prominence of figurative artists like Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, and Chuck Close, as well as to the vogue for photorealism exemplified by the paintings of Robert Bechtle, Audrey Flack, and Richard Estes. Nevertheless, these artists represented a minority, especially amid the growing pluralism of visual styles in this and subsequent decades. Painting may have never died, but fewer and fewer younger painters (and their teachers) in recent decades have placed a priority on acquiring the fundamental skills that artists once persevered to attain.

Many commentators have characterized Speed’s paintings as a kind of latter-day surrealism, a conjuring of dreams and of the disjunctive realms brought together in the subconscious. The founder of surrealism, André Breton, noted that a central aim of the movement was “to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super- reality.”1 Based on this ideal, figures like René Magritte and Salvador Dalí were drawn to realistic modes of depiction, even if they were using them to imagine clouds inside rooms (Magritte) or melting clocks (Dalí). Speed, however, has never claimed inspiration from dreams. In the past, she emphatically noted that the images in her paintings came to her fully formed, whether while sitting at home in the bathtub or driving through the vast emptiness of West Texas, the place she now calls home. In recent years, she has spoken of a more elaborate process of artistic creation, one tied to formal and technical concerns but also to happenstance and whimsy.

Formany years Julie Speed has depicted enigmatic characters, eccentric men and women of uncertain age and time period. The men are often figures of authority, especially religious clerics and military generals. In contrast, the women are less clearly defined; they enact private dramas and maintain a mute presence in the face of impending calamity and inner demons. Speed’s women typically inhabit claustrophobic interiors, compact spaces that display only the scantest evidence of a domestic life (most often, a table displaying food or a card game). When her figures are alone they tend to gaze outward, their faces brimming with emotion. Seen in pairs, as in the paintings Evil Twin and Frogpond, they engage with each other warily, typically lost in their own individual worlds. Increasingly, she depicts large groups (often of men, sometimes completely or near naked), whose actions inevitably descend into crude, if farcical, violence.

Julie Speed portrays her characters using an old master technique that she has practiced for many years, one that endows them with a stark sense of realism. But even as they so plaintively manifest the anxiety that is a hallmark of contemporary existence, they clearly are not of our world; rather, they seem to inhabit some out-of-kilter, parallel world. These invented figures— they are never based on real people—function like doppelgängers that have been conjured to bear the weight of our collective trauma. Speed depicts them as if they are in a permanent state of emotional overload, unable either to escape their plight or to make sense of it.

During the slow process of painting Speed begins to understand where these figures come from. For example, The Cup, a scene of three men arrayed around another male figure whose chest has been cut open and is dripping blood into a cup, came as a result of Speed playing around with abstract forms on the linen canvas. The artist saw the arrangement of circles she was making as a grouping of men’s heads. While continuing to paint, she also discovered that the overall triangular arrangement of the figures created a relationship among the men; she then elaborated the details in the composition until she arrived at its final form. Only later did she recognize the presence of Christian symbols and the painting’s resemblance to traditional compositions of Christ’s descent from the cross. But at the time of painting, Speed had indeed been thinking about religion, about the role it plays in international power struggles and why some people adhere so unquestioningly to archaic or absolutist beliefs. Ultimately, The Cup acts as a satirical reworking of the Deposition, a theme that signifies Jesus Christ’s mystical nature and his act of martyrdom to save humankind. The work provides an alternative reading of an old theme, connecting humankind’s voracious appetite for violence with blind reliance on belief sys- tems. But, for Speed, such an interpretation can only be an end product; attempting to initiate a painting with such an interpretation in mind, she states, is a clear formula for failure. Just as significant is the process of painting, the way color and form animate the canvas, and the varied responses that such a work elicits in viewers.

Speed has long produced an impressive range of works in other formats—collages, prints, sculptures, assemblages, and works that mix varied media. These works are lesser known but, for the artist, they share equal importance with her paintings and works on paper. She has developed a mode of working with printmaking, collage, and other formats that offers her a completely different creative approach. For all the exacting care that Speed puts into the creation of collages, these works do not take nearly as long to complete as a painting. As a result, she can more freely experiment with new materials and techniques, as well as produce suites of works that play out variations of a single visual theme.

Much of this work is made possible by the fact that Speed is an inveterate collector of obscure, out-of-print books; old prints found in thrift stores; and pieces of metal and junk that she picks up during long walks along the train tracks near her studio. She is drawn to such arcane objects because they provoke in her an immediate, even if unexplainable, emotional or aesthetic response. The result of this collecting is often collages or, occasionally, small three-dimensional works created to give visual clarity to thoughts and to visual stimuli. One example is Black Squares, a series of fifteen works united by the inclusion, in each, of an identical dark aquatint square printed on a sheet of paper. The collage elements added to each of the surfaces in this series were bits of Speed’s “railroad junk” and found images that she has saved over the course of years, even decades. Working in this way, employing a fixed visual format combined with an array of materials, she is able to play out an idea and work with things, producing distilled poetic statements through incongruous pairings.

Speed also occasionally pursues the creation of a discrete series that embodies a small obsession, or that responds to a desire to experiment with a specific theme or artistic technique. One such series is The Murder of Kasimir Malevich, consisting of mixed-media works on paper that reflect her recent preoccupation with the disparate realms of birds, the modern Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, and world politics.

In 2004 Speed purchased a smoke-damaged, mid-nineteenth-century volume, Reports of Explorations and Surveys, one of several monumental exploration surveys commissioned by the United States government during an era of fervent expansion. The scientific illustrations of birds she discovered inside the book stopped the artist in her tracks; these are precisely the kinds of images that speak to her so viscerally that they can move her to pursue an entirely new body of work. During this period, in 2003 and 2004, she was also studying the suprematist canvases of Kasimir Malevich and thinking about the way this pioneering modernist infused meaning and emotion into a nonrepresentational art of pure color and geometry. Speed had experimented with abstraction only tangentially up until then, primarily through the sculptural objects she some- times produced from found materials. Even if her artistic mode would seem to bear little relation to Malevich’s highly reductive proto-minimalism, a close study of his paintings provided her with an appreciation for geometric form that had a considerable impact on how she would commence working on a blank canvas and develop a composition. And in his writings, Malevich equated his abstract forms with pure feeling, suggesting for Speed the possibilities of merging a more delib- erate approach to art making with her idiosyncratic, emotionally charged subject matter.

The artist’s discovery of the nineteenth-century bird illustrations provided her with the inspi- ration to produce a body of work, The Murder of Kasimir Malevich, unlike anything in her oeuvre. The series functions as an homage to an iconic modern master, one that wrestles with the art- ist’s faith in the abstract and, concomitantly, his rejection of physical representation. Speed’s images in the series act as experimental hybrids, combining representational forms (fragments of the bird illustrations) with abstraction, collage, and painting. Yet they are pared-down images, simple and direct. The compositions treat the birds as geometry, and geometric forms inspired by Malevich’s paintings as dynamic, organic matter.

As for the series title, Kasimir Malevich was not murdered, of course—he died in 1935 after a long illness. But John Jenkins, the legendary Texas antiquarian from whose library Speed ac- quired the volume with the bird pictures, might himself have been murdered. Plagued by allega- tions of fraud and forgery connected to his high-profile book dealings, his body was found on a public boat ramp in 1989, and it is unknown whether he was killed or committed suicide. And mysterious forms of death were also on Speed’s mind at the time she was making the collages because of the 2001 anthrax attacks, followed by growing anxiety over the possibility of mass biological warfare. One work in the series directly addresses this state of dread: a bird’s body contains a jumbled arrangement of letters that spell out “variola,” the Latin name for the small- pox virus. Tracing the accumulation of influences that contribute to such a series, it is possible to understand Speed’s collages as a diaristic art form that can weave together a remarkable set of disparate yet connectable influences: in the case of these works, Malevich and the early his- tory of abstraction, Texas and U.S. history, and an alarming incident of terrorism.

A lucky find was also responsible for the images comprising the 2005 Bible Studies series, a large group of etchings and mixed-media works combining drawing, collage, and printmaking techniques. In the mid-1990s Speed visited a used bookstore in Galveston where she purchased a box of water-damaged illustrated books; it would provide her with source material for years of collage making. Among the items was a Swedish Bible dating to the 1870s, with illustrations by the French engraver Gustav Doré. Speed began to cut out and combine various Bible scenes for a series of images, among them the repeated portrait of a cleric who gazes pensively outward. His clothing is covered with numerous fragments of engraved Old Testament scenes, through which Speed wittily transformed the figure into a living embodiment of fire-and-brimstone religi- osity. By wearing a robe filled with scenes of burnings of heretical texts, the cleric also acts as a symbol of censure, a mute castigator of free expression. In Ad Referendum, the dense collages of Bible scenes provide narrative and context, while the portrait of the cleric acts as a constant, the visual element that Speed says she needs when creating works in series “in order to make the game interesting.” The background becomes the variable, an expressive zone that offers shifting readings of the same central image. In successive images, the cleric is surrounded by jellyfish, fireworks, and bubbles; he also has a bird perched on his head or shoulder. A few images have additional collage elements, strips of handwritten or typed text, and, in one, cigar bands. Ulti- mately, the cleric is treated as a less-than-solemn figure, a passive witness to Speed’s insertions of overblown drama, bits of random information, and a sardonic phallic reference. 

History is obviously rich source material for Julie Speed, but even more important is the present day. She has always used her work to tackle the big, universal is- sues that never go away—the struggle between good and evil, the quest for wisdom, the need to make sense of our lives. Rarely, however, does she render details that could tie her protagonists to the present day or to any specific moment in history. Speed casts her figures as oddball every- men or women who could ostensibly inhabit any time or place. But, to my eye, they make sly allusions to the conditions and social conventions of an exhausted European culture. In much of her work from the 1990s Speed seemed to relish evoking the style of the courtly portrait painting that began in the Renaissance, the northern European still-life tradition, and the interior worlds (physical and mental) of Vermeer’s women. Her paintings of cardinals and bishops are rooted in the portrayals of powerful religious men by artists like Raphael and Titian. But as Speed’s images around this theme have became more irreverent—she has depicted cardinals partially nude, gambling, and posing with monkeys—it has become difficult to look at them without thinking about the sexual scandals that mired the Roman Catholic Church in the 1990s and early 2000s. Certainly, Speed was thinking about this controversy as she depicted clerics dressed in elaborate vestments, but, to her mind, these canvases were as much about her desire to work with brilliant cadmium red paint as they were about the increasingly compromised state of Ca- tholicism in the United States.

For Speed, this less direct engagement with the here and now changed on September 11, 2001. In the painting Damage, completed in early 2002, she portrayed a figure with a bandaged head who turns to meet the spectator’s gaze. The scene visible through the window behind him is of dozens of minute bodies falling in the sky, all aflame. Perhaps the most topical work of art Speed has ever created, Damage is an unambiguous evocation of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. (It is illustrated in the 2004 volume Julie Speed: Paintings, Constructions, and Works on Paper.) Speed has often painted scenes of calamity and disaster (multitudes of drowning swimmers in The Bather and Bandwagon, careening tanks visible outside the window in Witness), but this painting acknowledges that no disaster imagined by the artist could surpass the real horror of multiple humans leaping to their sure death.

Since that time, the artist has only once come so near to mirroring the world close at hand, with four paintings from 2003 that share the title Still Life with Suicide Bomber. Each depicts a table displaying fruits along with severed body parts. The canvases horrify us in much the same way that extremely violent movies do, conjuring evil with an almost comic implausibility. These are unnerving images, less for their goriness than for the fact that they clearly reference the real- ity of our times. Speed notes that these compositions have more to do with “the moment just before—or after—something really bad happens” than with the actual phenomenon of suicide bombers in Iraq or elsewhere. Nevertheless, the climate of anxiety inaugurated on September 11 has had a lasting resonance in her work.

Ultimately, Julie Speed’s work argues for a kind of morality, one that has everything—and nothing—to do with politics, religion, nationality, and ethnicity. She deals frequently with the related themes of organized religion and power structures, examined from the uncommon van- tage point of one whose father was a scientist and who was, as she says, “raised with fairy tales before Jesus.” She has long viewed faith systems (especially the most dogmatic ones, like evan- gelical Christianity) as being akin to a belief in magic, and she expresses fear regarding those in power who believe in and base decisions on magic instead of science and knowledge. “I like to garden, bird watch, cook, and move rocks around in my garden,” she says. “There’s the possi- bility we could all live like that. But instead, we’re arguing about whose invisible friend is cooler than whose invisible friend.”2

Speed’s morality, then, comes down to the individual. With her paintings, whether of figures bearing the scars of some unknowable trauma or of groups engaged in absurd acts of violence, Speed emphatically suggests that the stakes for the future of humanity have become too high. She tackles the big issues by revealing the human condition in its most raw states, whether at ex- tremes of lucidity, bafflement, or arrogance. It is in these most intense moments of intellectual and psychological engagement that life has the greatest potential for good or evil. And Speed, who thinks with incredible breadth and circularity, would take us back to Kasimir Malevich and to his mission of articulating a form of art based on pure feeling. Malevich concluded that an abstract language best suited such a quest. Speed, even if known for her figurative painting, doesn’t necessarily come down on one side or the other; some of her mixed-media works and sculptures are highly abstract. But in her painting, pure emotion is just that, displayed starkly on the faces of imperfect characters. This is why the act of painting, and the ability to paint well, remains such a high priority in her artistic practice—it allows her to invent figures that can most vividly reflect life stripped to its bare essentials. Neither real nor unreal, they just exist timelessly, before history and after history, defiantly beating the odds.

ELIZABETH FERRER, NEW YORK    October 2007

JULIE SPEED, INOCOCLAST

BY BARBARA ROSE

She has a determined look on her face, this dark, muscular nude woman with the overly prominent nose wearing what looks like a red bathing cap decorated with tiny starfish on her head. Slung over her shoulder is a huge gold colored fish that might once have float- ed in the pond of a Mandarin prince. Or could it sim- ply be a monstrous version of the little goldfish in glass bowls that were sold in five and dime stores, when Woolworth’s was still in business. You have never seen this woman before, yet she is strangely familiar. You conjecture she must be the artist's doppelganger because she appears in various situations and positions in so many of her works. But a photograph of the artist reveals she is small, silver haired with delicate fea- tures, so this hypothesis cannot be correct.

We will, of course, never know who Julie Speed's Swimmer  is since she never existed except as a figment of her wildly creative imagination. Fish appear within many of Speed's mysterious tableaux, including the recent Fishmonger (p. 48), whose bloody apron tes- tifies to sacrifice, and whose open mouth expresses horror at what he has done. Speed is aware that fish are loaded with Christian symbolism, but her intention is not to evoke scripture; instead she seeks to expose a multiplicity of often opposing meanings as in The Sinner.

Speed fearlessly mixes memories of the Old Master paintings she loves with images from fairy tales, poetry, trash novels, thrift shops, Baroque prints, newspaper photographs, and Persian and Indian miniatures, blend- ing them together with everyday experiences and fantasies. The results of such wide and deep excavations inevitably address the Collective Unconscious so dear to Carl Jung and James Joyce.

Chinese cooks often keep a "master soup" on the stove to which they add daily leftovers until the stew becomes so rich that the original ingredients dissolve into an unfamiliar but delicious stew. Speed arrives at her complex and ambiguous images by adding layers of associations and memories, the residue of her experience which is gradually enriched by time merging into a synthetic image whose sources are no longer distinguishable. She has described this continuous process of image enrichment as follows: "The hambone that got thrown in circa 1958 is indistinguishable from the shallots I added in 1994. The pot’s been boiling for fifty years so it’s really hard to recognize the individual ingredients anymore. "

Born in Chicago, the restless artist spent most of her early years in New England. Her high school art teacher, Spanish painter Narciso Maisterra taught her to love both Francisco de Goya and Francis Bacon, who remain among her heroes. By now, her personal pantheon includes Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Sandro Botticelli, Rogier van der Weyden, Hieronymous Bosch and the popular illustra- tors Edward Gorey and Maurice Sendak, as well as anonymous Australian Aboriginal painters, and most recently, Kasimir Malevich.

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 compo- sition. We forget how deliberately composed the images are because the finished work is so strong and complete. 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 contempo- rary 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 con- struction 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.

The placement of her figures within the picture plane reveals a connection to modern painting, that predates her recent involvement with Malevich—the inventor of non-objective art. This is also obvious in the way she works. The critic, Meyer Shapiro, noted the priority of the image-frame relationship as a characteristic theme shared by both modern art and medieval painting. In addition, her debt to flatness, whether it be from the Italian primitives of the early Renaissance or folk artists, coincides with the flatness of modern art. Despite her rejection of abstraction, the work has a unique Janus-faced relationship to the past and the present. Indeed, her debt seems to belong to neither source, but rather to a special kind of mental space that her quirkiness creates.

The combination of innocence and sophistication in Speed’s work has a compelling allure; her imagery is intense and vivid. The amount of detail she laboriously applies keeps the eye and the mind at work long after other art would become tedious. Speed has an extraor- dinary capacity to absorb and store experience as a per- manent eidetic archive she may access at any time.

Speed has often been identified as a Surrealist.
She rejects such a stylistic categorization, instead identi- fying her work as "pararealism", meaning it is an alter- native to what we normally see. This seems to make sense in terms of its relationship to parapsychology, which is the field of mental telepathy and the percep- tion of the paranormal. It was André Gide who defined artists as "the antenna of the race," referring to their ability to receive and transmit realities that are invisible to others. Certainly, Julie Speed is one such active antenna, constantly picking up signals.

There is a hallucinatory concreteness to her visions that brings to mind intense descriptions of saints in states of rapture and communication with a world beyond our own. It is therefore not surprising that Speed reads and writes poetry. The way she compress- es and laminates images relates not to Stéphane Mallarmé's Symbolist correspondences but to the poet- ry of Amy Lowell and the New England Imagists. The poets’ images do not depend on free association or cryptic references, but rather on the construction of a concrete and specific image that resembles an epiphany or vision.

The deliberate ambiguity of Speed's images resem- bles that of poetry, neither of which can be flattened into a single interpretation. Indeed, the critic William Empson identified seven types of poetic ambiguity. The painter must have at least ten. Her technique appears close to that of the early Netherlandish painters and she has referred to her admiration for Jan van Eyck, yet the meticulous detail in her work is not actually the same, nor is it used for the same purposes.

Her images, although not contrived to elicit emo- tion, do resonate. In response to her 1999 traveling exhibition, Queen of My Room, she received boxes of letters interpreting her paintings. Almost all the expla- nations were completely at odds with anything that had ever crossed her mind. She received a twelve page paper from a mathematician who explained why her paintings were related to his three dimensional mathe- matical theory. Other letters from physicists found that her work also corresponded with their theories. She found these responses mystifying, since she knows vir- tually nothing about math or physics. Several psycho- analysts were convinced that the paintings were a per- sonal cry for help. Evangelical Christians were sure her soul was on fire. There was even a letter that led to a visit from the bomb squad. She delights in the fact that while no two interpretations were the same, each view- er was certain that they had received the correct message.

She also rejects obvious symbolism, although she is aware that some images appear particularly loaded. Still Life with Suicide Bomber # 4  depicts an ear and sunflowers, but the connection to Vincent Van Gogh did not occur to her until someone pointed it out.

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 l ́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, III (p. 43) 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, Persian 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 (p. 22), The Yellow Boat (p. 18), and Small Pond (p. 41).

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 com- monly 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 (p. 73) is com- prised 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.

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 brush- strokes. 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 relation- ship to her work and was soon standing close to the surface and covering it with her characteristic precise strokes.

Speed’s painstaking technique becomes hallucina- tory, even hallucinogenic, i.e. realer than real—in the sense of an apparition, a visitation for those who expe- rience them. The elaborate patterning in her subject’s clothing contrasts with the sharp dramatic silhouette of forms against the background. She makes no distinc- tion 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 (p. 61), 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 composi- tions 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 sophisticat- ed outsider artist. Incongruity is always present in Speed's work. She gives a nod to standard iconogra- phy 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-over- loaded 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 lit- erature and theater of Eugène Ionesco. 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 cen- tury when the Iconoclasts, considered heretics, chal- lenged 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 cre- ative 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. 

BARBARA ROSE,  NY  2005

Tracking

by Julie Speed  (Courtesy of the University of Texas Press)

Sometimes pictures come singly, sometimes from a germ, sometimes from scratch, but always one thing leads to the next in a way that feels inevitable.

Most people assume that an artist begins with a coherent thought or idea and then, if it’s a figurative work, basically just illustrates that idea, and if she’s really, really deep, then the illustration might not actually be a picture of what it’s a picture of but instead symbolize some specific other thing and, if the viewer has the secret decoder ring or museum wall text, they will be able to figure out the “correct” interpretation.

A stranger wandered in off the street a couple of days ago, spent some time looking at a large drawing that I was working on of a bunch of old naked guys fighting each other with pink sticks, and asked, “What do they represent?” How do I answer that? Do I say, oh, they represent the fighting in Iraq or Thermopylae or the cock-up last night down at Joe’s? What’s the point? They’re not real, so my thoughts, even my really, really deep thoughts, about them carry no more weight than anyone else’s.

In addition, the elements which people usually interpret as narrative are more often the product of the composition than vice versa. If there is a spot of red in a certain place it is more likely there because I wanted red than because I wanted blood. Composition comes first. The second most interesting part happens as the abstract skeleton gradually takes on its figurative flesh.

In 2002 I bought the ruins of a set of beautiful smoke-damaged nineteenth-century leather- bound books: Reports of Explorations and Surveys, which had been salvaged from the last library fire of the legendary Texas antiquarian book dealer, John Jenkins, shortly before his violent murder/suicide (still debated) in 1989. Inside the books were hundreds of odd and beautiful, off- kilter and moldy lithographs of birds and fish, snakes and plants, rats, moles, and, best of all . . . black bird heads. No bodies, just heads, which leapt off the pages and attached themselves, instantly and quite sharply in my mind’s eye, to curvilinear black bodies stuffed with geometric shapes on a white background. The images were so overwhelming that I became deaf for a min- ute or two. The man who was selling the books spoke as, one after another, he handed over the sooty volumes. His lips moved, but I literally couldn’t hear.

The geometric shapes led me to study Russian constructivism and, from there, to make the paintings which collectively became The Murder of Kasimir Malevich. The title came from the black birds, a “murder of crows” being the same as a “pride of lions” or a “wake of buzzards.”

Starting with a pile of cut boards, a parallel ruler, and a handful of ancient plastic triangles found in the back of a drawer, I drew shapes endlessly until I dreamed geometry at night. During the day the background noise was continuous news of the anthrax attacks which had followed hard on the heels of 9/ll. Fear and speculation were rampant as to all the possible ways in which various nightmarish biological agents could be weaponized and distributed. In Texas death seemed most likely to be delivered by crop duster.

Strangely these fears dovetailed with my reading at the time about Malevich’s theory of the “additional element” (or “supplemental element”), which he came up with while he was director of the State Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad and teaching in what he called the “Department of Bacteriology of Art.” According to his theory, there are specific shapes in art (which he and his students isolated and diagrammed) which he believed could, like a tuberculosis bacillus, literally “infect” an artist who uses them. At different times both he and his second wife contracted the “white death.” She died of it.

The ways in which events collide with composition to make a painting is a funny thing. During most of the time I was working on The Murder of Kasimir Malevich #8  (later nicknamed “Cropduster”), the two yellow triangles and the black bird head were its reasons for being. All the big shapes had been worked out and the painting was almost finished when it became apparent that it needed narrow black shapes and small open white shapes to complete the balance. Because I’d been looking at charts of Malevich’s “additional elements,” I stole one of the sickle shapes from his diagrams of infectious art to supply the narrow black shape and then repeated it, making wings. For the open shapes letters seemed right, so, since I had just finished reading a long terrifying article about the stunningly adaptive properties of the smallpox virus, the letters V A R I O L A suggested themselves to me. The very last thing was to almost accidentally paint a chute on the bird, and only then came the realization that it was a lethal crop duster. It sounds ridiculous even to me that it should be such an ass-backwards process, but it almost always is.

In the large 2007 graphite and gouache drawings of the pink-bottomed guys hitting each other (Fight Club, Fight Club II, and The Revisionist), the angles of the arm and leg bones of all the fighting men, and thus their positions in relation to each other and to the rectangle of the paper, are all governed by the tangle of triangles underneath. The flesh came later.

In all the pink cake paintings so far (One Pink Cake, Flounder, Three Pink Cakes, Happy Fuck- ing Birthday, and Watch for Falling Rocks), the cakes are there primarily because they are about the same size as human heads. Those paintings began with abstract geometric drawings of triangles formed by an overall design composed of circles and ovals (cakes and heads) intersected by straight lines.

On the flip representational side, the trees and sticks of Revelations, Bivouac, and Crusades are pink because one morning at dawn last winter, I opened my eyes to find that the sun’s rays coming up over the church roof next door had turned the bark of the leafless pecan trees in the backyard bright pink. That pink then strayed from the trees, to the sticks, to the cakes, to the butt-cheeks of the fighting guys.

While all the “art” concerns—new media/old media/, conceptual/aesthetic, abstract/repre- sentational, etc.—are great fun to talk about, they seem sort of beside the point when you actually get down to work.

In the last few years I’ve begun to notice a little “click” that I can “hear” as each shape (or color, volume, line, etc.) falls into place. Because of its precise nature (it’s either right or not right—there’s no “close”) my guess is that there’s a mathematical basis to it. I think someone, though not me, could write an equation defining it.

There are also shapes inside of shapes, patterns inside of patterns, and when the main composition of a painting is more or less settled, I happily pull up a chair, put on magnifying spectacles, pick up smaller brushes, and re-enter the painting, this time treating each square inch or so as if it were a tiny abstract canvas.

Just as the daily practice of drawing gradually builds up the communication between hand and eye, in the same physical way, pitting a small piece of paper text against a hunk of wood or iron in collage is something you can practice and get better at. Arranging different-sized spheres on various-sized open planes, then various-sized closed planes and so on, over and over, is almost endlessly absorbing. The mathematical relationship between the spheres, whatever it is, is like something I already know but can’t quite remember, or something not actually lost so much as serially misplaced. Whatever it is, it’s also there in everyday things like cooking, gardening, or idly arranging sticks and rocks in the grass. No matter what you’re constructing—a painting, a song, a story, a stone wall, minestrone, whatever—there is a pure satisfaction to be felt in “hearing” those little click echoes when you get it right.

It took several weeks and thousands of combinations to arrange the balls of snakes in Axis, Falling Snakes, and Trick Snakes. I would twine them one way and they would be wrong, then the next and the next and the next . . . wrong, wrong, wrong. Then, suddenly “click,” they would be right, and I had to get them glued down quickly before they slipped out of whack again. By “learning” the snakes I was also, for the future, learning the tangle of human limbs in the various fighting men, the curves of the tree limbs in Revelations, the eddies of the water in Adrift, and so on. 

The abstract aspects of my work I think of like the bassline or rhythm section, and laid on top of that is the daily input of current events, books I’ve read, whatever thoughts are occupying me at the time. That’s the melody, or figuration. If the two weave in and out of each other in just the right way then the work is good. If either aspect is out of balance then the work is unsuccessful.

Take, for instance, the painting Frogpond, which began with two irregular charcoal blobs on a large canvas. The blobs might have been inspired by an illustration of cells dividing, or maybe the shapes of rocks in a river or a pattern of steam drippings on the bathroom wall. I don’t remember. When I drew a horizon line at the top of the canvas the blobs turned into figures standing chest-deep in an ocean, so I added battleships on the horizon (my father was building a model of the battleship Potemkin at the time). But the straight line bothered me so I curved it, erased the battleships, and the curved line changed the ocean first into a planet and then into a pond. By then, I’d been working for a couple of years on learning a new (for me) way of depicting water, having been inspired by a book called The Adventures of Hamza, a series of beautifully intricate adventure paintings commissioned by the teenage Mughal emperor Abkar when he came to power in the middle of the sixteenth century.

Because it was a pond and the men were by that time pink, I added frogs with their pink and white bellies to make smaller spots of the same intensity and color and then water lilies for the same reason, all in triangles. Maybe the frogs were just there because I wanted pink and white blobs in a certain arrangement, but also I was thinking of frogs, because I had just been reading about the alarming worldwide drop in the frog population caused by our spilled chemical waste seeping into their vulnerable permeable skin. For whatever reason, the crucified frog at the top of the painting was one of the last elements when, too late, I realized that the top center pink and white spot needed to be higher, but by then the painting was a month and a half old so there was no going back. The only visual solution I could think of was to raise him up. He looked stupid just jumping so I put him on a cross, which of course added a whole new basket of questions on top of the first layer. Are the men polluting the pond? What is their relationship to each other? Are they farting? Is that why the frogs are all dead? Are they dead or have they just fainted from the fumes? Or are they faking? Has the crucified frog died for the sins of the chubby pink men (they look uncomfortable and perhaps a little guilty), or has he died for the sins of the other frogs? Can frogs sin? Of course none of my ruminations on pollution or frog sin have any more validity than whatever the viewer brings to the painting. That’s why it’s art, and not homework. 

The New York Times

Art in Review;

Julie Speed By GRACE GLUECK

Gerald Peters Gallery

24 East 78th Street, Manhattan

Through Feb. 25

Julie Speed is a quirky neo-Surrealist whose inspirations range from old master and Mughal painting to that 20th-century master of arcana, John Graham. In her show here, ''Bible Studies,'' she paints robust, red-faced peasant-type people with odd ways.

One, wearing nothing but a red bathing cap and an angry expression, stands up to her thighs in a stylized body of water as she reels in a red fish. In ''Evil Twin,'' a double portrait of two bun-coiffed women, one sticks out her tongue as she gazes toward the viewer. Religious symbolism abounds in this work, as in ''Little Fishes,'' which depicts a grim-faced bishop standing over an open book on a table, as a three-armed infant, naked in a nearby high chair, tries to catch tiny fishes flying through an open window.

But Ms. Speed's chef d'oeuvre is ''Ad Referendum,'' a suite of complex etchings, each with a different ground, that appear to be of a homey prelate resembling Pope John Paul II. His garment and biretta are adorned with collaged fragments of images of atrocities and book-burning from several sources, including illustrations by Gustave Dore and old Bibles.

Lovable this imagery isn't, but it grows on you, largely because Ms. Speed's grasp of it is firm and her technical mastery impressive.

JULIE SPEED bio & cv

After dropping out of Rhode Island School of Design at age 19, Speed spent her twenties moving around the U.S. and Canada working pick-up jobs (house painter, horse trainer, ad writer, farm worker etc.) until moving to Texas in 1978 where she settled down and taught herself to paint. She switches back and forth regularly between oil painting, printmaking, collage, gouache and drawing, often combining disciplines. Two large volumes of her work, Julie Speed, Paintings, Constructions and Works on Paper, 2004 and Speed, Art 2003-2009 have been published by the University of Texas.  She lives and works in Marfa, Texas.  In her words, “I keep hours just like a real job, only longer, and in my spare time I read books, drink tequila, and garden.”

Solo Exhibitions:

2021 Julie Speed : East of the Sun & West of the Moon Dishman Museum of Art, Beaumont, Texas  Jan 22- March 13 2021

2019-2020  Julie Speed : East of the Sun & West of the Moon  Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA. Aug 31, 2019 – March 15, 2020

2018-2019 Julie Speed : East of the Sun & West of the Moon  El Paso Museum of Art  Nov 16, 2018- April 7, 2019 

2017  Julie Speed: Excerpts from the Undertoad  LHUCA Lubbock, Texas  Aug 4 – Sept 30 

2016-17 Julie Speed,   Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe, N.M. 

2016 Undertoad  The International Museum of Art & Science, McAllen,  Texas 

2016  Undertoad  FLATBED PRESS  Austin, Texas Feb 18- April 9

2016 Undertoad  Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, Texas and Flatbed Press, Austin, Texas Feb 18 – March 19 

2014 Julie Speed- Paper Cut: Selected Works on Paper The Grace Museum, Abilene, Texas

2013   Julie Speed: Cut-up  Southwest School of Art,  San Antonio

2013      Julie Speed: Snug Harbor   Nicolaysen Art Museum, Casper, Wyoming Feb 1 – May 12 

2012-2013  Julie Speed: Snug Harbor     The Longview Museum of Fine Arts , Longview, Texas,  Nov 10, 2012 – Jan 1 2013 

2011     The Pirate Queen Flatbed Press,  Austin, Texas

2011     Julie Speed, Boxes and Collages 2011 and The Pirate Queen & Other New Etchings Gerald  Peters Gallery, New York, N.Y.

2010     Julie Speed: Not From Here, Gerald Peters Gallery,  New York, N.Y.

2009     Julie Speed,  New Work/New Book  Galleri Urbane, Dallas, Texas

2009     Julie Speed, Recent Collages, Boxes, Gouaches and Floaters,   Galleri Urbane, Marfa,  Texas

2008     Julie Speed,  George Billis Gallery, NY, N.Y.

2008      Julie Speed  George Billis Gallery  L.A.  Ca.

2007     Talking Room,  Galleri Urbane,  Marfa,  Texas

2007    Bible Studies, Westby Gallery, Rowan University, New Jersey

2006    Heads, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, Texas

Bible Studies, Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, New York

2005    Bible Studies, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, Texas

            Bible Studies, Flatbed Press, Austin, Texas

            Bible Studies, Galleri Urbane,  Marfa, Texas

            Julie Speed, Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, New York

2004    Julie Speed, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio, Texas

            Julie Speed: Squares, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, Texas

2003    The Alters of My Ancestors, Jones Center for Contemporary Art, Austin, Texas

            The Alters of My Ancestors, Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, Texas

            The Murder of Kasimir Malevich, etc., Etherington Fine Art, Vineyard Haven,

                 Massachusetts

2002    

The Alters of My Ancestors, Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art, Dallas, Texas­­­­

The Alters of My Ancestors, The Nave Museum, Victoria, Texas 

The Alters of My Ancestors,   Lawndale Art Center, Houston, Texas,

2000    Julie Speed, New Work, McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, Texas

1999    Queen of My Room: A Survey of Work by Julie Speed 1989 – 1999, Austin

                 Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Queen of My Room: A Survey of Work by Julie Speed 1989 – 1999 DVAC, Dallas, Texas

Queen of My Room: A Survey of Work by Julie Speed 1989 – 1999 Galveston Art Center, Galveston, Texas

Queen of My Room: A Survey of Work by Julie Speed 1989 – 1999 Art Institute of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas

1997    Allene La Pides Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, Texas

1996    Allene La Pides Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

1995    Tarrytown Gallery, Austin, Texas

Davidson Galleries, Seattle, Washington

1994    Carrington-Gallagher Gallery, San Antonio, Texas

Ron Hall Gallery, Dallas, Texas

1993    Jansen-Perez Gallery, San Antonio, Texas

1992    Tarrytown Gallery, Austin, Texas

1991    Guerilla Gallery, Austin, Texas

1990    Scott Alan Gallery, New York, New York

1989    J. B. Tollett Gallery, Austin, Texas

1989 Joy Horwich Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

1985  Foxworth Gallery, NY, NY

Books and Catalogs

2020  Julie Speed: Dark Skies  Special project for  the Taubman Museum of Art’s “Curated Cribs” program. 

2018  Julie Speed : East of the Sun & West of the Moon published by the   El Paso Museum of Art  

2015  Julie Speed – Undertoad, jointly published by Flatbed Press, Austin and Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio. Essay by Lyle W. Williams, curator of prints and drawings, the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio.

2014 Julie Speed – Paper Cut: Selected Works on Paper, published by the Grace Museum, Abilene, Texas  “Reality Redefined”, essay by Judy Tedford Deaton, Chief Curator, The Grace Museum

2013  Julie Speed: Snug Harbor, jointly published by The Longview Museum of Art and The Nicolaysen Museum of Art , essay “A Conversation between Julie Speed and Lisa Hatchadoorian”

2013  Julie Speed; Cut-Up, published by the Southwest School of Art, essay “Force of Confusion”, by Leigh Baldwin

2012  Speed & Rizzie: In One Room, essay by Mary Etherington, published by The Gerald Peters Gallery

2009  SPEED, ART 2003-2009   Artwork and essay, Tracking by Julie Speed,  response fiction, Do You Hear What I Hear? by A.M. Homes, essay, The Moral Painter: The Art of Julie Speed by Elizabeth Ferrer, published by the University  of Texas Press

2006  HEADS - Julie Speed  Cloverleaf Press

2005 Julie Speed,  essay Julie Speed, Iconoclast by Barbara Rose, published by Gerald Peters Gallery, N.Y.

2004  Julie Speed: Paintings, Constructions and Works on Paper,  essay, Julie Speed, The Art of Metaphor by Dr. Edmund Pillsbury and essay Speed Time by Elizabeth Ferrer, published by the University of Texas Press

2002  Alters of My Ancestors,  jointly published by the Nave Museum, Lawndale Art Center,  The Art Museum of South Texas , essay, Julie Speed’s Altered Ancestors by Dana Friis-Hansen and Julie Speed and the Art of Transformation by Edmund P. Pillsbury, Ph.D

1999 Julie Speed – Queen of My Room.   Julie Speed and Elizabeth Ferrer, published by the Austin Museum of Art

 Other:

Flatbed Press at 25

by Mark Lesly Smith (Author), Katherine Brimberry (Author), Susan Tallman (Introduction) published by the University of Texas Press   2016 

The Art of Found Objects: Interviews with Texas Artists by Robert Craig Bunch, published by Texas A&M University Press 2016 

Queen of Her Room, 30 min. doc. For Gallery HD TV NY produced by Karen Bernstein.

Texas Monthly Talks, 30 min. interview with Evan Smith KLRU TV PBS.

Austin Now, Julie Speed produced by Domenique Bellavia KLRU television

"I [art] Marfa", exilés artistiques au Texas 3/5, Episode 2: Julie Speed, artiste by Katie Callan et Sebastien Carayol, Produit par: Petit Dragon, en association avec ARTE France  3/7/2014

A (Third) Eye for Detail by Antoine Sanfuentes  MSNBC.msn.com