FROM LEFT: paintby-number self-portrait; Trey Speegle with one of his works; Speegle and Stella McCartney
If you squint, the scarlet barn that artist Trey Speegle escapes to on weekends, with its gleaming black floors and stone chimney soaring through white rafters, could be the subject of a paintby- number painting of a quaint landscape in upstate New York. The aesthetic makes sense considering Speegle happens to own one of the world’s largest collections of paint-by-number pieces, 2,500 strong. He
displayed the collected works at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2001, and he recently began to create works on canvas inspired by vintage paint-by-number designs.
For Paris Fashion Week last fall, Stella McCartney commissioned Speegle to create an 18-by-32-foot painting for her runway show. Over a rendering of the Arc de Triomphe, monolithic block lettering announced YES. At the show Speegle sat behind Gwyneth Paltrow. Afterward McCartney introduced Speegle to her famous father, Paul, who used a silver pen to sign Speegle’s copy of a rare Beatles paint-by-number.
Speegle, who hails from Harligen, Texas, is now creating rugs, pillows and plates for Anthropologie and says that the prejudice against mixing art and commerce that scuttled Peter Max’s art career in the 1960s—when he became more famous for his beach towels than his art—have faded. “It was a different time,” he says. “People no longer make these kind of distinctions. Gagosian has a store.”
Speegle’s art will also travel the gallery circuit with shows at the Jen Bekman Gallery (through January 9) and the Cheryl Hazan Gallery (through January 31), and he appeared at last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, collaborating with Fred Perry on custom shirts for a luxury automat at the Mondrian.
The collection was initiated by Speegle’s friend Michael O’Donoghue, a former head writer at Saturday Night Live. “His blank walls were killing him,” says Speegle, “and he grabbed two paint-by-numbers for 25 cents each at a Rose Bowl swap meet.” After O’Donoghue succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage
in 1994, Speegle inherited his friend’s 200-piece collection.
Speegle then lived in a Clinton Hill townhouse, where paintby- numbers covered the walls. “After having lived with them so long, the images started seeping into everything I did,” he explains. “At one point they merged with my word art.” Speegle claims that paint-by-numbers are Pop Art for a reason. “People are attracted to them,” he says. “A messenger can come in and start talking about the paint-by-number aspect or a collector. It doesn’t feel like you’re trying to make fun of what they don’t know about art.”
Apropos of living in the intertwined New York art world, Speegle offers a quip worthy of one of his canvases: “It’s a small world,” he says, “unless you have to clean it!” Visit treyspeegle.com.
