FEATURED ARTIST OF THE MONTH

Julie Speed's art often references food—pink cakes, succulent fruits, kitchen knives, eviscerated fish—so we couldn't resist including one of her paintings ("Over Easy") in our Southern Food Issue and asking her a few questions about her work. Speed was born in Chicago but has lived in Texas since the late 1970s. Her recent book, Speed Art: 2003–2009, includes 130 luscious color plates and, an added bonus, a story by A.M. Homes. Speed's art is macabre and merry, savage and serene, like a mischievous blend of Blood Simple and the Garden of Earthly Delights, where humans cavort and make war and feast while the world falls apart. It may be the Middle Ages, it may be next week. To see more of Speed's art, please visit her website.

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: Why did you become an artist?

JULIE SPEED: It wasn't a decision. I knew what I was supposed to do from the time I was a kid...well, I knew it after I figured out I couldn't be a caveman.

THE OA: How would you describe your art to someone who's never seen it?

JS: I made up a word...pararealism. Para as in "by the side of."

Still Life with Suicide Bomber #3

THE OA: There seems to be a lot of food in your art—cakes, cherries, fish, knives—does food (or cooking or eating) have any associations for you? Is the kitchen a dangerous place?

JS: Cooking for me is just like painting. Instead of using a recipe I cook by color. When all the colors in the pan look right then it tastes good.

Happy Fucking Birthday

THE OA: Your art frequently contains both violence and humor—does this reflect your outlook on life?

JS: Look what we do to ourselves and to the earth...the choices we make. We are a ridiculous species. You either laugh or slit your wrists.

Spilt Milk

THE OA: The faces in your paintings are especially distinctive—they're not exactly beautiful, but they're riveting, almost Mona Lisa-like in expression and gaze. Do these "portraits" come from your imagination or are they pulled from various people you have known?

JS: It wouldn't be accurate to say that I make them up exactly, it's more that I draw them and redraw them over and over and then at some point they look back at me and there they are.

Witness

THE OA: How did you end up in Texas and have you seen a lot of changes (good or bad) since you moved there thirty-two years ago?

JS: We landed in Austin because my husband, Fran Christina, is a musician. He was with the Fabulous Thunderbirds for twenty years, most of that on the road...and he also played with Asleep at the Wheel, Doug Sahm, and the Marcia Ball Band.

THE OA: You moved from Austin to Marfa a few years ago. What's it like to live in Marfa?

JS: It's quiet. The light is perfect for painting. The soil is deep and rich and best of all there are no squirrels so it's a great place to garden.

THE OA: For our Southern Food Issue readers, do you have any favorite places to eat in the Texas region?

JS: Yes, but Texas is huge and there are so many great restaurants I don't know where to start..... I guess at home. Both of us enjoy hanging out in the kitchen, drinking wine and cooking. There's a good farmers' market here with local eggs and desert honey, and we also have a garden.

THE OA: In some of your recent works, you incorporate references to geopolitical themes (suicide bombers, torture, war, and viruses). Do you feel as an artist any obligation to occasionally evoke (even subtly, as you do) some of the pressing issues of our time?

JS: There is always someone trying to define the correct purpose and content of art. The Surrealists wrote manifestos. The Abstract Expressionists actually had a club...with rules. If I say that as an artist I feel an obligation to address this issue or that then by extension I would be defining what art "ought" to be and the only thing I think it ought to be is good. The rest of the huffing and puffing is just defense of territory.

THE OA: Do you collect any unusual items?

JS: I used to collect wrenches but soon there were too many of them and they were too heavy to move so I gave them away and now I collect bugs. Not in any kind of scientific way. I just pick them up when I find them and bring them back to the studio.

THE OA: Some of the elements in your art might make viewers uncomfortable or squeamish—eyeballs, beetles, severed body parts, genitals, innards, and gore—do you consciously try to push boundaries?

JS: If I am pushing any boundaries at all it would be in the opposite direction. Until very recently the hall monitors of contemporary art rigorously rejected not only painting itself but even more so the practice of painting people or things, especially images of things like body parts, beetles, eyeballs, innards, and the like, which have deep echoes in literature, art history, and fairytales. 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.

The Anchovy Eaters

THE OA: What is the weirdest comment you've ever heard or read about your work?

JS: There's a whole book's worth of weird comments about my work collected from a public writing project in connection with show I had at the Austin Museum of Art in 1999, and it would be really hard to pick out the oddest one. There were lots of offers to "save" me. One mother and daughter wrote a note wanting to know if I'd been molested by a priest when I was a kid. The strangest part about that was that they didn't seem to think it was a rude question to ask a stranger. Probably my favorite was a letter from a genius Japanese theoretical mathematician who explained why his work and my work were similar—but he explained it in twelve pages of three-dimensional mathematical models that I couldn't understand. But they were absolutely beautiful.

Fruitbowl

THE OA TEN

1. What superstitions do you have?

When someone at the table proposes a toast, I never put my glass back down on the table without drinking. I'm very strict about that.

2. What would you like to change about yourself?

You know people who can compartmentalize? I can't do that. I would like to acquire a compartment in my brain where I can put stuff and shut the door on it.

3. What are you still trying to accomplish in your professional career?

Well, not in my career but in my work the next thing I want to study is rocks. Since around 2005 I've been working on learning water. I was inspired by the water in a book of sixteenth-century Mughal paintings of the adventures of Hamza. Now I want to figure out how to use rocks as a way to set up geometry in the composition. I've been laying rock patio and looking at rock in medieval paintings. I also want to experiment some with colors to play yellow. I've been working on nickel yellow for the last two years and now I want to see where else that will take me. I just sent three years of work off to New York for a show, so my studio is completely empty and I'm not sure which way to jump first.

4. What is your hidden talent?

I used to work on a farm and the other hands would come find me whenever a manure spreader needed to be backed a long distance or a hay wagon backed into the barn. I am a talented manure-spreader backer-upper.

5. What subject causes you to rant?

The recent push by the Vatican to make Pope Pius XII a saint.

6. What is the biggest mistake you ever made in your professional life?

Probably if I had ever thought about how I spend my days as a "professional life," that would have been the mistake.

7. What is one thing that you used to dislike but that you now like?

Brussel sprouts. Pink.

8. What profoundly underrated book, album, or movie would you like to champion for us?

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (the Mira Ginsburg translation) has been my favorite book for most of my life. I re-read it every couple of years. The devil and his gang come to Moscow and harass pompous literary bureaucrats while the master writes a book about Pontius Pilate.

9. What is your favorite line from a song?

"The drugs broke his brain off into angles" —Terry Allen

10. What was your favorite childhood toy?

I had a stuffed brontosaurus that my Mother sewed for me. It had a long curved neck so I could sleep with its neck around my neck.

The cover of Julie Speed's new monograph, from the University of Texas Press.