Creating a painting or drawing is a good vehicle for slowing down and reflecting on the rapid pace at which we now experience images in our world. In an era of instant access, analogue processes such as painting seem well situated for new intersections to develop within contemporary visual expression. 

“Using a collage like sensibility to layout this work, with its fluidity and maneuverability, I seek to represent how both internal and external forces shape relationships between idea and form. I use an interplay of universal shapes on simple grounds to evoke palpable experiences of the horizon, language, and architectural spaces.”

These, in turn, become metaphorical agents of possibility and surprise, as well as depictions of openness (and closedness) in the visual and social worlds alike. In this way, painting acts a bridge to the concerns of everyday life.

Bryce Speed has taught Painting at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and is currently Associate Professor of Art in Painting at the University of Alabama.

Bryce’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions over the past several years. 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 2022, his work was curated into the exhibition A Plot, Hatched by Two at the Warbling Collective in London.