Local Palette

Recent Works Julie Speed
at Tarrytown Gallery

Showing through December 2

I am the Queen of my room.

I’m the only one home.

It’s easy to be Queen

if one is all alone.

There’s more to Julie Speed’s poem (above) scribbled next to a mixed-media
drawing by the same name on the wall at Tarrytown Gallery, but that was all I
copied. I could hardly tear my eyes away from the pictures, my two eyes away
from the three-eyed, two-nosed, yet somehow perfectly plausible figures that
define Speed’s visual universe.

An artist who is always adding extra body parts to figures can easily become
predictable, tiresome. But not Speed. She chooses wisely when to assign
additional eyes and noses. Besides, she paints so well that you don’t notice
until it’s too late. There you are, lost in the slick, detailed, subtle surface
of a painting such as “Wild Horses,” before you even think to count equine
eyes. The rider in “Renouncing Satan” wears a nearly Cubist face — or is it a
mask? — but instead of worrying which it is, you wander into the undulating
field behind her horse, inspect the patterned, white fabric of her dress.

Speed’s oil paintings on artboard, gouache, and watercolor paintings on paper
(sometimes over 19th-century steel engravings), and an assortment of
mixed-media pieces combine for a homogeneous, highly intriguing show that
proves the artist’s talent and ability to build on past achievement. It is hard
to keep in mind that Speed is self-taught. It is impossible not to wonder what
goes on in the mind of the “Queen” of her own room.

Signifying Nothing Margaret Simpson, Tom Druecker
at Flatbed Press Gallery

Showing through December 1

While Speed is a loner, in an aesthetic sense at least, Margaret Simpson and
Tom Druecker represent a married couple’s approach to art-making as community
project. If only the rest of us could find as much harmony in the marriage of
styles, the coupling of images and ideas. Their current exhibition at Flatbed
Press contains individual and collaborative prints by the two accomplished
artist/printmakers.

Simpson, who is currently a fine arts adjunct professor at St. Edward’s
University, presents monoprints depicting mysterious naked figures. Druecker, a
1993 MFA graduate from the University of Texas, offers lithographs of boyscouts
and sign language (using old-fashioned, two-handed configurations), Morse Code,
and mathematical codes. It is tempting to assign traditional male and female
adjectives to husband and wife pictures. Simpson creates fluid figures that
elicit an emotional response, while Druecker’s more cerebral work explores
(and challenges) semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. Together, Simpson
and Druecker create images which are “both male and female… a visual marriage
of marks and images.” In this, they are like Iri and Toshi Maruki, the Japanese
couple whose artistic collaborations inspire them.

Druecker and Simpson work together to play with the viewer. Are his signs and
symbols meant to be literally decoded? Do they directly address or somehow
define her work when the two collaborate? Remember, the exhibition title is
Signifying Nothing. Perhaps a look at “Crisis Cube I” will be of
assistance. Perhaps not.

— Rebecca Levy