An Interview with Julie Speed: Part III

Julie Speed’s Reflections on the Creative Process

This is the third and final part of our interview with artist Julie Speed.  In this installment, Speed gives an illuminating look at her creative process.  To review the previous parts of our interview, you can simply check out Parts I and II of our interview.  And if you have any questions or comments, we would be delighted to address them!

While we are on the subject of previous posts…we should let you know that, due to an unfortunate WordPress update error, all of the media once contained on our site was deleted. Our previous posts remain intact but the images that once accompanied them are gone.

With that regrettable news out-of-the-way, here is the third installment of our interview with Julie Speed!

Q.           Can you describe the time you first realized that you needed to have a creative career?

Julie Speed        My first career choice was caveman, my second choice was pirate. Art was my third choice after pirate so I was too young to remember the decision.

Q.           You have previously said that your ideas come to you fully formed (often in the bathtub) and that your works are not the product of design or premeditation.  Would you agree with Francis Bacon that “chance and accident are the most fertile things at any artist’s disposal” or are there times when planning and calculation do enter into the creative process?  Can creativity be directed?

Julie Speed        Well, “fully formed” was probably a very bad choice of words.  The time between when I finish the last piece and start a new piece is difficult. I’m cranky and out of sorts.

Then – and it’s usually when I’m doing something relaxing like taking a bath or walking to town to get the mail – a “way in” will present itself. It’s hard to describe it. Sometimes it’s just a couple of shapes, sometimes it’s actual figures but mostly – well, this is very difficult to describe exactly – it’s like – not literally but inside my brain – there’s  a blank wall with no door and then suddenly there’s a door where there wasn’t one before.

As I’ve gotten older and better it’s much easier for me to find the way in because I’ve trampled that path so many times before. Also living out here in the big empty quiet gives me long stretches of uninterrupted thought. Makes connecting the dots much less difficult.

Yes, chance and accident definitely play a part.  Rather than the usual trip and splash kind of accident, however, mine are mostly accidents of the eye. I’ll catch sight of a smashed bug on the wall or a news photograph or bit of paper or discarded shingle or light hitting a door a certain way and go from there.

The starting point for Snug Harbor  (2012 oil) was this Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph, Cycle Michael which was in an ancient print catalog that happened to be on the floor of the bathroom several years ago.   I found this image again to send you because I thought it would explain something…. but now that I’m looking at the two images together I’m not so sure.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, “Cycle Michael,” lithograph, 1896

Julie Speed, “Snug Harbor”

Q.           Do you ever abandon inspirations in the process of translating them into art?  Do you revise or edit your inspirations as you work?

Julie Speed        Yes, continuously. It is the essential nature of how I work. Each element that I add or take away changes the color and spatial relationships between all the other elements so the solution is a constantly moving target.  That’s why it’s never boring.

Otherwise I could just think a thought and then hire someone else to paint a picture of it and with all that spare time I would probably drink myself to death.

Q.           What creative patterns, routines or rituals do you have?

Julie Speed        The oil paintings take a very long time. I can only do about 6 or 7 a year even though I work constantly so I can’t wait around to be in the mood.  I keep a pretty strict schedule that only varies with the seasonal needs of the garden and the light. I occasionally take road trips to find collage material but I’d always rather be in my studio than anywhere else.

Because of the drying time involved between layers I’ll usually work on two, or sometimes three

Oils at a time so many months will go by and by the time I’m through I need a mental/visual perspective shakeup so I’ll move over to the collage room and cut and paste there for a month or two or maybe go on a drawing or printmaking jag. Sometimes I’ll combine the three.  Gouache also.  It mostly depends on what I need to learn. When I’m not in the studio almost everything else I like to  do (gardening, rock-work, cooking, drawing building plans)  relates to what I’m doing in the studio anyway so my thoughts aren’t so much interrupted as moved over a notch.

Q.           You have been described as being in “the vanguard of a return to figurative painting in contemporary art.” Would you like to see figurative painting regain some of its former preeminence?  What do you think was lost when figurative painting fell out of vogue?  What do you think figurative work, specifically, contributes to art?

Julie Speed        There are certainly just as many badly done figurative paintings as works done badly in any other style or media so I’m not looking to be the poster child for a return to figurative painting if it’s the same old thing, “which kind of art is better, _________or __________?”  It’s the wrong question and it’s always been the wrong question.

I think what the practice of figuration contributes to art is that if you learn to draw then if you want to draw something realistically you are able.  The same is true for abstract drawing. There’s a mathematical precision to composition.   If you take a handful of shapes and arrange and rearrange them on a closed plane it will be wrong a thousand times until it’s right.

Q.           How would you like to see the art world change in the near future?  You once said that, currently, “The accepted endeavor of ‘cutting edge’ art was to address/rebuke/engage the other ‘cutting edge’ art immediately preceding it. Popular culture reflecting popular culture reflecting popular culture and to properly surf the art world’s cutting edge if you really just had to paint a thing you had to paint it ironically.”  Aside from wanting to see the postmodern aesthetic lose some of its hegemony, how do you want to see art and art creation evolve in the coming years?

Julie Speed        I’d like artists to aspire to something less shallow than fame. I’d like museums to be able to afford to stop pandering.  I’d like all the commodity traders to leave art alone and go collect stamps.

Julie Speed, “Woman with Head in her Hands,” oil on panel, 2006

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