Matchstick Crowns and Monkey Tails

by Margaret Moser

Julie Speed

If cachet were all it took to make a painter feel successful, then Julie Speed should be satisfied. After all, for her current show at the Austin Museum of Art, Johnny Depp and Jimmie Vaughan loaned pieces. Shawn Colvin's Grammy award-winning album A Few Small Repairs is named for one of the pieces in the show (though another Speed piece illustrated it), and Kathleen Peirce also used a piece for the cover of her book of poetry.

Queen of My Room III

Traditional art collectors prize Julie Speed's work, too. The original piece for which the show is named, Queen of My Room, is not in the exhibit because, as Speed relates with a combination of amusement and bewilderment, the "owners arranged their living room around it and hired a calligrapher to paint the poem on the wall. "Which simply made Speed realize that "Queen of My Room" was a concept rather than an individual effort; Queen of My Room II and Queen of My Room III are prominently displayed at the Austin Museum of Art -- Downtown. "There are only three in the series, but there are so many of my paintings you could title Queen of My Room."

In the most recent version, Queen of My Room III, the crown is made of matchsticks. "I'd like to build a matchstick crown and then watch it burn," she jokes. "And I think the poem 'Queen of My Room' would make a good rap song. I wish Queen Latifah would do it. The first Queen of My Room piece I did was a gouache and collage, and I just sat down and wrote the poem simultaneously. It was at the show at Tarrytown, and I had sort of scrawled the poem on the wall in pencil. It was sort of a joke -- the queen seems together, but really she's writing on the wall."

Speed's translucent complexion gives her a fragile look that is belied by her sharp blue eyes and steely shock of silvering hair. As she sits back in a chair in the middle of her spacious West Austin studio, she is very much the queen of her room or whatever domain she chooses to survey. At the moment, the studio seems to double as both her workspace and an ersatz gallery, as about two dozen works are carefully hung on the walls, allowing the casual visitor an intimate before-and-after look into her world. Or room.

To the Bone

Paintings in progress and unfinished sculpture abound. Displayed in her spare, airy studio is a particularly wonderful piece similar to A Few Small Repairs, in which a harp-like shape emerges from behind a wrench from the pattern of nails within a shadow box. Faint Jacob's Ladders stream in through the studio skylights, drawing attention to the details in the room: dozens of brushes bloom like floral arrangements, piles of art books, stacks of frames, and a small stereo and TV dot the surfaces of her desk and worktables.

Besides the obvious, some of Speed's sources are in evidence. Two large wasps' nests are tucked by some art supplies and a coffee cup; wasps' nests are used in the four corners of a mixed media piece called The Zealot, on display at and owned by the Austin Museum of Art. Some New York Times photos of Kosovo refugees are pinned to the walls ("I like the way her head and neck are bent. I don't have models, so I like the way the woman's hand is on her face."). At a postcard of an elephant stepping over a chick, she pauses. "See the elephant and the chick? That's my ideal, my perfect. About half the people that look at it go, 'Oh God, look -- the elephant's gonna step on the chick!' and the other half just say 'Awww, isn't that nice!' That would be the best thing you could get from a painting. Is the glass half-empty or half-full? I like the ambiguity."

Ambiguity is the key to Speed's work, and it comes in many forms. A partially finished piece sits on an easel as Speed is in the process of meticulously designing the material with random dots on the human figure. One of her recurring images, a monkey, is in the frame. "He's going to be holding a fly," she explains. "See in his hand what he is looking at? But I have to paint the pattern in the robes first. I'm going to put a dot of green in it and then purple."

It comes in the contrast of colors she uses, provocatively muted jewel and earth tones -- carmine reds, mossy greens, smoky golds -- reminiscent of the Renaissance-era painters she admires, such as Jan van Eyck. It also comes in the surreal composition: disembodied hands, bloody fingerprints, and the ever-present third eyes. She revels in the ambiguity of detail work, speaking effusively of how she loves to paint grass. "I like doing repetitive work, like grass. It makes me really happy when I have a couple of days to just do grass. It's really relaxing, especially if I'm upset about something. If I'm uncomfortable or someplace I don't want to be, I'll close my eyes and do grass in my mind."

The Two-Tailed Monkey

Forty of Julie Speed's paintings and mixed media works are on display at the Austin Museum of Art -- Downtown through August 22. For the Chicago native who's lived here since 1978, this show has been not just a dream come true but a joint effort shared by many, particularly AMOA director Elizabeth Ferrer, whom Speed praises effusively. Besides curating the exhibit, Ferrer had to deal with a nerve-wracked Speed, who described herself as so hypersensitive that "if you touched me I started crying."

Speed wrung her hands a little as she recalled the days before the exhibit opened: "It was as if I had made an appointment to have my thumb amputated." She gives credit to Ferrer not just for her art sensibility but her tenacity in overseeing AMOA and the people who work with her. "It's about time Austin had a real museum. We're the capital of Texas, and Beaumont had a better museum. I've been having shows for 31 years, and no one ever does what they say they'll do. They say they'll do this and that, but stuff gets misspelled or misprinted or not mailed out on time. It's not rock & roll, but it's not as bad as rock & roll. But every single person who has worked on this show has done more than they said they would do, more meticulously -- an amazing group of people. Even the color of the walls matches the floors -- it's like Nowhere Land.'"

At 48, Speed talks with schoolgirl enthusiasm. She shares her West Austin house and studio with husband Fran Christina, best known for his years as drummer for the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and with their charming but occasionally bloodthirsty parrot Vito. As Speed ruminates on her work, Christina is in the studio next door learning to make art prints, which just goes to show old Thunderbirds can learn new tricks. The satisfaction of her bohemian life is not lost on Speed.

"In my brief stint in art school, when I figured out I didn't belong there, one of my teachers was really pissed off at me and told me, 'Speed, you belong in the 16th century.' He thought it was an insult; I was like, 'Hmmmm, maybe I do.'

"They thought Andrew Wyeth was Satan and Frank Stella was God. And the correct way to express yourself was in large abstract painting. If you didn't, you were repressed. That's as much of a dogma as any other."

The Holy See

In the variety of comments her work provokes, the subject of religion often arises. The faces and figures of popes, cardinals, priests, nuns, and other Catholic clerics sometimes dominate her work. Speed shrugs off any suggestion of personal religious overtones, prefering to think of the genesis of her interest as visual, such as The Book of the World's Great Religions her parents owned. The panoramic fold-out of Hindu deities profoundly influenced her, but a detail from Michelangelo's The Last Judgment had a different influence.

"The part where the devil is hitting the damned with his oar. The kids in the neighborhood would come over and we would open the book and scream, slamming it shut, and we'd run away only to come back and look again. There was also a 16th-century etching of a guy being burnt at the stake; my dad would come home from work and talk in quiet voices with my mom. Hush-hush, like if someone had been fired. For a couple of years, I lived in terror of my dad being 'fired,' because I thought if you got 'fired,' they burnt you at the stake."

Like the stake burning in Speed's young mind, the images that endure from her art are many. In A Few Small Repairs, the nails define the texture of material of the woman's dress as well as her face; her arms break the fourth wall and appear to come out of the frame. The Grand Dragon Crossing the River Styx on His Way to Hell (1989) has a folk art influence that is anything but naïve. "That's one of my few unambiguous paintings; you can tell just what I was thinking," she says, pausing as she is shown the painting. For 1995's The Holy See, she broaches the subject of the third eye so often present. "Sometimes one will be looking at you and the other two will be looking at what's going on. I like the way it works because your brain assumes there's only supposed to be one eye on either side of your face, so when you put two on one side, that's why you get that headachy feeling."

Please Help Me, My Brain is Burning

The Holy See also features an unusual background subject: sperm. "I was on a sperm kick," she offers. "I think people are scared to have opinions about a painting, to laugh at a painting. Most people will give you an opinion on music -- they hate Celine Dion and love Lyle Lovett. But people are afraid to have an opinion about art, afraid as if they'll have the wrong opinion. And people are afraid to laugh at art. At two o'clock in the morning, I'm sitting here painting, cackling maniacally.

"I would almost rather have kids looking at my paintings. They're always looking at details. The son of a friend said, 'I like looking at your paintings because I know I have to look until I see the wrong thing. And then I know I got it.' Which I thought was wonderful -- 'the wrong thing.'"

Ambiguity in art sometimes causes discomfort, though. In a 1996 painting called To the Bone, a lone figure holds a child's drawing edged in bloody fingerprints. "When I was doing the bloody fingerprints, I was thinking, 'How am I going to do this, get a really little brush and paint them?' Then I went, 'Oh!' and put my hand in the red paint and made the fingerprints my fingerprints. Because of the bloody fingerprints, someone thought the boy in the painting was a child molester. But that's what I wanted from it. If everyone got the same thing from it, it would be a canned business."

As a painter, Speed's work is singularly lonesome, evoking emotion but not saturating it with sentiment. Most paintings feature a solitary subject coupled with or accompanied by an animal. This is another point where Speed's affection for Renaissance painters comes in, and the inherent humor is not missed either. In 1997's The Two Tailed Monkey, a monkey stares out solemnly from the painting, posed atop the aquiline profile of a cleric. The monkey's grave expression shows no sign of humor, but the whimsy lies in the two tails snaking around the cleric's neck. Why two tails?

The Grand Dragon Crossing the River Styx on His Way to Hell

The artist took a puff from a cigarette in her hand and looked at the museum's rendering of it for the exhibit's poster. "He wanted to have another tail there," she said. Monkey stared noncommittally at her from the poster. He did indeed seem to demand two tails.

When "Queen of My Room" leaves AMOA in August, it won't go into hiding. The exhibition will travel on to Dallas, Galveston, and Corpus Christi through the year 2000, much to Speed's delight. She likes the notion of her work being seen so much, as the feedback and time allows and inspires further work.

"It's really hard for me to stop work and then start again, like if I drive out to West Texas for a week, I make sure to leave the painting so I know what to do next. Or if, the last thing at night, if I take five minutes and look at it and say, 'Okay, tomorrow I start here.' So I'm not here in the morning with my cup of coffee going, 'mmm.'"

Those drives provide Julie Speed with inspiration as well as thinking time. "I like it when you don't have a plan, you don't tell anybody you'll be anywhere at any time, and when you come to the fork in the road, you close your eyes and choose a direction. And I really like Motel 6 because they don't have any art on the wall. And they leave the light on for me."

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"Queen of My Room" is on view through August 22 at AMOA --Downtown, 823 Congress. Call 495-9224.

Buying Speed for art's sake

Limited edition prints of Julie Speed's Please Help Me, My Brain Is Burning are on sale at the Austin Museum of Art with proceeds to benefit the museum. For more information, call 495-9224.