30″ x 22″ flashe black, mineral pigments, wash on arches paper $2800
available to view in CHARLOTTE
INQUIRE ABOUT THIS PIECE
BRYCE SPEED BIOGRAPHY
Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1978, Bryce Speed completed his B.F.A. in painting and drawing from the University of Mississippi in 1999 and continued his studies to eventually receive his M.F.A. in painting from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 2005. After finishing his education Speed completed a six-week artist in residency program at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. From then on Speed’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions over the past decade.
In 2006 and 2011 his work was selected for publication in New American Paintings Southeastern and Western editions. In 2014, he was part of a three-person exhibition at HERE Art Center in New York, NY, titled Suburbia: Is Anyone There? In 2015-16 he exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy Open Exhibition in Edinburgh, Scotland and at the Visual Art Exchange’s Contemporary South Exhibition in Raleigh, NC. In 2017, he held a solo exhibition at the North Wall Arts Center in Oxford, UK. In 2022 his work was curated into the exhibition A Plot, Hatched by Two at the Warbling Collective in London and his work was curated in to Art of the South 2022 at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville. He is currently represented by The George Gallery, Charleston SC and Charlotte NC, and the Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, LA.
Speed resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where he has been an Associate Professor of Art in Painting at the University of Alabama since 2014. The Mississippi native previously taught at University of Nebraska at Omaha and Central Community College in Columbus, Nebraska.
Bryce Speed is a multi-medium painter whose work focuses on speaking the unspoken language of visual art through his abstract images. In a recent statement Speed said, “I create paintings that are simultaneously both abstract and representational. These works are occupied with a larger idea of structure and parts, creating an image of containment and movement. Each piece uses a personal pictogram language that is steeped in the intersectionality of nostalgia, identity, and early twentieth century abstraction. Through this visual language, I seek to classify and organize the memories and experiences that pervade the everyday.”
BACK TO ARTIST
GEORGE READ BIOGRAPHY
George Read arrived at Harvard as a pre-med freshman. Biology and chemistry were his first love, so it was unusual when, to fulfill a humanities requirement, he encountered famed Dutch old master paintings scholar Seymour Slive, one of the university’s most celebrated lecturers. Three years later, he graduated with a degree in the History of Art.
The Fogg Museum curriculum was strictly old-school then but it included, for those who chose it, studio work. A sober exploration of the techniques of painting, sculpture, and printmaking was encouraged. Then in residence at the Le Corbusier studios were famed masters Eduardo Chillida, Afro Basaldella, and Robert Neuman. That was a beginning.
Along the way, he got a summer job as a gardener for renowned art critic Harold Rosenberg in the Hamptons. The Rosenbergs lived in a hamlet called The Springs, close by Jackson Pollack’s former farmhouse and studio, at the center of a community of celebrity artists and writers. George describes those days as “something of a blur- a sort of BUDS training in the fine arts. I was technically just his gardener, but Mr. Rosenberg thought I needed serious artistic toughening up. Well, he took the job very seriously. The easy days were when he’d lend me out to friends, the artists Adolph Gottleib and Willem de Kooning among them. I’d go to their places and do chores.”
Later, in France, in the fall of 1977, he had his first show, a two-man exhibition with a young Japanese sculptor, Tetsuo Harada. There, Read’s paintings and assemblages attracted the attention of well-known French art critic Michel Tapie, who invited him to share studio space with a group of emerging artists at the newly-opened Centre Pompidou, in Paris. The plan was interrupted. Before he could move into the new space, he was offered a position at Sotheby’s, New York. He took the job and moved to the United States.
This next evolution, as specialist, auctioneer, lecturer, and consultant engaged him, in some function or other, with “nearly every category of art and antiquity known, the collectors of those objects, and the markets where they trade, both real and fraudulent.” A glimpse at those times: on a steep and unrelenting learning curve, the constant search for properties, long hours of appraising and cataloguing, work with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Barbra Streisand in New York, and Claus von Bulow in Newport. A trip to Los Angeles with Oprah to find furnishings for her place in Chicago. He appeared on her show twice. On the second, he auctioned off a Michael Jordan game jersey to an audience of millions. And always, more cataloguing.
Now he is back in the studio. He describes the break as immensely positive; an opportunity to sharpen and refine-, even if the break was quite a bit longer than anticipated.
His process is just as it was when he left off. Years ago, Eduardo Chillida suggested he work on a piece only until form and definition began to suggest itself. Then, stop- no matter how tempting it was to continue. A day or two later, surrounded by works in varying stages of progress, he could start again. He still works several pieces at once, moving from one to another without a pattern or plan. In theory, the eyes stay fresher this way, and the mind stays more open.
BACK TO ARTIST
