Elizabeth Ferrer Essay
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But what about an artist like Julie Speed, who, in an age when digital manipulation can achieve just about any painterly effect, lavishes attention on the craft of painting, and on such things as how an individual strand of hair is depicted with a brush and paint? Should we think about her in the context of the handful of truly eccentric artists who seem to pay no heed to trends or to the styles predominant in the times in which they live? (The fifteenth-century painter Hieronymous Bosch is one who comes to mind.) Or does her work represent another stance, that of a contemporary artist with a rare, perhaps subversive, gift for adapting old tools, even old forms, to produce something very much of the here and now?
Julie Speed freely acknowledges the inspiration she has gained from many earlier artists, but not always the ones we might assume. Unsurprisingly, she speaks with ardor of many Italian Renaissance painters, figures like Botticelli, Bronzino, and Mantegna. She is especially drawn to the Italians because of their ability to richly conjure a world within their canvases. Speed has spoken of being able to "enter" the picture of an artist like Botticelli, to get lost in his details and spatial illusions. Her work also owes some debt to painters like Rogier van der Weyden and Pieter Bruegel, who were among the earliest artists to work with oil paint. By using pigments suspended in an oil medium, these and other Flemish artists were able to depict their subjects with a much greater degree of realism than was possible with the tempera-based paint still in use in Italy at the beginning of the Renaissance. They were also able to achieve dense colors, subtle transitions of tone, and greater translucency — all qualities that are essential to Speed's own manner of picturing people and things.
Regardless of her attraction to any particular artist or movement, Speed typically will borrow a centuries-old painting convention less out of a desire to pay homage to the past than out of the need to solve a formal problem. For example, her positioning of a figure next to a window, as in Tea (1999) or The Burning Boat (2000), is not intended to recall the style of Vermeer or to hark back to some past era; rather, she is simply borrowing a narrative device that is as useful today as it was in the seventeenth century, a means of revealing simultaneously what is inside and outside a room. (The third eye seen on so many of her human subjects is rooted in a similar motivation: It allows her to show multiple expressions on one face.)