Most worldbuilding artists go for the traditionally left field — they draw from comics, manifest cartoony humanoid forms with bubblegum names, and ultimately forge a world that is a madcap variant of Teletubbyland. An element of kitschness comes along with this way of working, which wanes the longer an artist commits to the bit.
The Marfa-based artist Julie Speed doesn’t fit within this stereotype. (In fact, she actively bucks it, and has staunchly done so for years, which is why her work is so sincere.) And yet, she may be one of the most prolific mythmakers in Texas. Her characters, though nameless, pop up time and again from picture to picture. Sometimes they’re deferential; in other moments, they’re fighting; sometimes they’re languidly lounging; and other times they’re taunting nature, playing God, in fear, or screaming. They’re clothed, naked, beautiful, repulsive, three-eyed, two-nosed, thin, potbellied, raceless, genderless. In essence, they’re a vehicle — a projection for whatever we want to see in them, for whatever we want to get out of them, for whatever moralizing lesson we do (or don’t) want to glean from them.
In an artist talk for her current exhibition, a sort of retrospective on view through February 2 at Ballroom Marfa, Speed offhandedly acknowledged that although she sometimes has an idea in mind when making a work, she also has “the soup of 60 years of stuff” bubbling around in her head. She noted that a single piece might be a distillation of 50 different narratives, and that, contradictorily, she doesn’t care if any intentionally comes across, because when art becomes didactic, it often strikes out.
Speed sits on this knife’s edge of creating work that is fascinatingly specific but also endlessly universal. Years ago, when I first visited her Marfa studio, I immediately wondered what about the work — what larger narrative — eluded me. It was only after talking to the artist upon subsequent trips that I realized there wasn’t really anything to get; the work is about the emotion that wells up as you look at it. Her paintings are stories that are designed to communicate. And their messages are subtle, more the Brothers Grimm than Giuseppe Verdi.
The Ballroom exhibition is divided into three chapters. The largest gallery, with blood-red walls, is conflict: inner strife, interpersonal clashes, ideological battles, and tension between humans and the natural world. Caldera, a 40-inch-wide gouache painting, serves as the thesis, a terrarium of this room’s narratives. In it, characters fistfight, lava erupts from a rocky plateau, a nude family climbs a tree, a man wearing either vestments or a jubba (or a cross between the two) preaches up at the sky, and animals, including a big cat, a horse, a bear, and multiple dogs frolic, stalk, chase, and lunge. The landscape is green-gray, emblematic of Speed’s often muted, muddied palette. This kind of painting — a zoom-out of an entire scene, of her world — is rare for the artist. It is her Garden of Earthly Delights, her laying out the larger mythology and complexities out of which her more portrait-like works emerge.
An interstitial space within the exhibition, painted gray, is literally and metaphorically about being lost at sea: works with titles like Unmoored, Uncharted, and Shallow depict a cadre of traditionally clad sailors and other non-sea-fairing-types trying to navigate swirling and rocky waters. This is also where some of Speed’s more abstract pieces fit in. In these, her normally fleshy human forms are represented only by their insides — lungs, brains, skulls, and other soft and hard tissues, all excised from medical texts, are woven into the works and hidden amongst gouache and ink mandalas that ripple across the paper.
Black walls encase the final room. Movements from Bach’s Cello Suites fill the air, which in her talk Speed said she listens to as she works. She went on to describe this final gallery as being about home, based on pleasures, and inspired by the West Texas sky. Some pleasures and allusions to home, sure, but many of the works are self-flagellating in a way that would make few characterize them as such.
One piece, What Was Lost, shows a solitary figure holding a shovel in a snowy, pockmarked landscape. The holes themselves are abstract paintings that dot the pristine, white powder. There’s a futility in the digging, made apparent by the figure’s cross-eyed deliriousness, their lack of warm clothing, and through the painting’s tree-lined background, which denotes the depth of the space and marks the composition’s wide expanse outside of the picture’s frame. The most striking detail — the real driver and subject of the painting — is a small, nude, flaming-haired creature sitting on the person’s shoulder. Its four arms each wield shovels, commanding the figure to pursue what feels to be an interminable plight. The demon may be a “she-devil,” or, rather, one could easily argue it is a commentary about the connotation of that word, and more significantly, about how women are rotely inculpated.
A fluidity of meaning masquerading as explicitness is a product of the way Speed works. In her talk, she said that because her paintings are representational, people think she must begin a piece, from the jump, knowing exactly what it is about. Instead, she works, as she says, “ass backwards” — she begins with shapes and forms (with composition), and whatever the subject of the work actually is emerges from that process. So the works are a formal consideration first, and I’m convinced this is why they are all so captivating and weird.
And while the paintings’ content is wonderfully flexible and amorphous — the subject in and of itself is the vastness of the human condition — I would be thoughtless not to mention the technical precision with which Speed creates her compositions. In the same way she is a one-of-a-kind world-builder, she has a style of using materials in a way I have never seen elsewhere. She is a bona fide master of collage. Some of her best works include scraps of Japanese woodblock prints, excised elements of etchings and engravings, and other printed material.
Like a proper collagist, sometimes her touch is delicate, as in Falling Snow Jesus, which is comprised of an intaglio-printed crucified Christ whose cross tops a rock formation into which three men dig. The foreground is filled with more landscape, and the background is painted black. Small, impastoed white flecks dot the entire composition, which read as snow on the mountain and stars against the sky. This is art born from art, seen through a West Texas, big sky lens, and distilled to allude to religion, sacrifice, and the incomprehensible science of nature.
Other paintings incorporate printed elements into characters’ clothing. The images are precisely placed to echo ripples and folds of dresses, smocks, and shirts, so much so that they seem to disappear into the background of the paintings. Discordantly, it’s in these works where Speed’s technical prowess as a painter really shines: if characters are clothed in prints, all that’s left to paint are heads, hands, and feet — the scourges of most artists. For Speed, gouache behaves like oil, allowing her to build up glazes of crisscrossing, hatched brushstrokes that give her characters’ skin a luminous depth. They come out of the paintings into our world, warts and all, imploring you to see them for who they are.
Even here, as I write, I feel like there is a poeticism to Speed’s work that is hard to describe, both when you’re standing in front of it, and especially when you’re trying to put it into words. She digests the stuff of humanity — sugar and bile alike — through an everyman narrative where specific characters are a stand-in for us, not individually, but as a people, a population. She thrusts mankind into the clear light of day to show us from a base level who we really are. The good comes with the bad, and to ignore that would be disingenuous. It is an oversimplification to call her work moralistic, because Speed isn’t trying to moralize. Instead, she’s trying to capture, to emote, to convey, to understand. And we’re better off for it.
Julie Speed: The Suburbs of Eden is organized by Fairfax Dorn and Holly Harrison with Alexann Susholtz. Is is on view at Ballroom Marfa through February 2, 2025.
1 comment
Great review Brandon. I’ve always loved Julie’s work and only wish I could have gotten out to Marfa to see this amazing exhibition. I had an opportunity to visit her at her studio/ home next door to Chianti a few years ago and was amazed at her output, and her methodical approach. She is a true treasure in the Texas tradition. I just wish she wasn’t so far from Houston.